Friday, December 12, 2008

I hate Joe Scarborough

I don't know why I do it to myself, but for some reason I have this habit of watching MSNBC's "Morning Joe" during breakfast. Probably just habit from when Don Imus was on. Imus, at least, could be entertaining at times, when he wasn't non-challantly tossing racial pejoratives around. Scarborough, on the other hand, is little more than a GOP hack with a penchant for naked dishonesty.

This morning, for instance, Scarborough took Paul Krugman to task for believing that the current economic crisis is an indictment of capitalism. Problem is, Paul Krugman has never claimed that the current crisis is an indictment of Capitalism, nor did Scarbourgh provide any citation or reference any writings in which Krugman is supposed to have levelled such a charge. Indeed, Scarbrourgh's claim is absurd on the face of it, considering that Krugman is Nobel prizewinning theorist of capitalism whose work has contributed tremendously to his fellow economists' understanding of the mechanisms by which international capitalist markets operate. But never mind all that. Krugman is a Democrat and an academic, and so he simply must be a Marxist.

When that glowing bit of dishonestly was done, Scarborough went on to blame the current economic crisis on regulations that forced banks to make mortgage loans to people who could not afford them. This is fast becoming the favorite Right-wing canard meant to absolve both the Bush administration, greedy lenders and unwise de-regulation for their just responsibility for creating this mess and it doesn't take a PhD to understand why: it allows them to blame liberals and blacks for the mortgage crisis. But it's also a piece of dishonesty so craven and so absurd you wonder why they even bother with it. Might as well blame Haitian Vooodoo priests for the crisis. After all, the Community Reinvestment Act to which Republicans like Scarborough are alluding was a piece of legislation passed during the Carter administration 30 years ago. The bad mortgages that caused the collapse of the housing sector were mostly written in the past eight years, many of them in the past five and at least half of them were made by entities that were not subject to the Community Reinvestment Act in the first place.

The mortgage crisis was a bubble, fueled by the absurd boosterism of people like Allan Greenspan, who should have known better, and by speculators who derived huge profits from exploiting unsustainable market conditions, the true nature of which had been obscured by the securitization of all that problem debt and the criminal negligence of co-conspirator bond rating agencies that seem to have granted AAA status to said securities by tossing chicken bones up in the air and seeing how they arranged themselves when they fell. There's nothing in the CRA that demanded the Fed Chairman extol the virtues of variable rate, reverse amortization, pick and pay, balooon rate mortgages. There's nothing in the CRA that demanded investment firms turn those mortgages into investment vehicles. There's nothing in the CRA that demanded mortgage lending agencies offer loans to un-creditworthy buyers that featured low teaser rates, which in some cases actually added to the principal, and which inevitably adjusted to unsustainable levels some five years down the line.

What the CRA does, however, is offer a convenient scapegoat to Republican politicians who have never given up on the "Southern" strategy of race-baiting and the stoking of white resentment that has served them so well in the past. Blame the negroes and the bleeding heart Yankees who love them. Hey, it's worked so far.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Joe Scarborough didpleases me too. He is a bait and switch master. He'll prauise Pres. Obama on one side of his mouth (dishonestly, to show his faux independence from the birthers, Tea Party fanatics and right wing Republican base in Congress)and them slams him as this elitist, non-businessman, right wing Marxist minutes later!
He touts the Republican line and promotes Conservatism to a sickening level of partisanship politics. Then, suddenly, he slams the Dems and GOP for being too partisan! Oh, boy. My favorite is when he slams Pres. Obama for being thin skinned to criticism and the moment Mika, Mike or another invited guest disagrees with his blather, he screams and cuts them off, unwilling to heed to any reasonable position that legitimately challenges his views. He uses phrases that begin with "When I was in Congress...when the peeople voted for me....when I challenged the Republicans...when I received over 67% of the vote from FL"...etc. Yet, he rails against Obama when he uses the "I" word. How hypocryphal of Mr. Scarborough.
He's an ass.

Anonymous said...

Ugh. I absolutely despise Morning Joe. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah ad nauseum. My roommate listens to that garbage, mostly as background noise while he does other things and it drives me absolutely bonkers. I've never heard people so enchanted by the sound of their own annoying voices. I want to seriously paintball his monitor sometimes.

Patriot's Quill said...

Since I wrote this post 3 years ago I've fond the perfect soution to my problem: I now go to work at 5:20 AM... taaaa daaaa! No Morning Joe! LOL!

Anonymous said...

Sometimes I just want to scream "it's not ALL ABOUT YOU, JOE. HIs incessant use of "I", "ME" "MY" is further evidence of his arrogance. He is disrespectful, annoying and obnoxious.

Anonymous said...

i can't stand that guy, or his friend Willy. Mika's eye-rolling and snide, offended demeanor when she doesn't like a guest not paying homage to The Theme of the day is obtuse. Did anyone catch her covering the british wedding? Low-lifey! Are we jealous Mikka, of classier, more informed women with lesser incomes who can speak their own minds without glancing at a man?