Joe Scarborough usually gets extremely testy and aggressive with his guests whenever one of them attempts to correct him, so I'd say Eugene Robinson came out of this round with the Morning Joe host relatively unscathed.
At Tom Kludt at TPM noted, this isn't the first go around between the two when it come so the issue of racism and President Obama. Scarborough was on the attack back in May when he feigned outrage over Sen. Jay Rockefeller pointing out the obvious at a Congressional hearing.
Scarborough Gets Fact-Checked On Holder Quote:
Joe Scarborough doesn't get much pushback on his own turf, but the MSNBC host found himself getting fact-checked Monday morning after he misquoted something Attorney General Eric Holder said over the weekend.
Scarborough didn't have any qualms with Holder's dismissal of Sarah Palin's impeachment talk, saying "no major conservative" backs the fringe proposal. But the "Morning Joe" namesake cried foul at the attorney general's characterization of the Obama administration's fiercest critics.
"He once again went back to race and said the reason Barack Obama's been picked on is because of his race," said Scarborough, who frequently criticizes Obama's defenders for playing the "race card."
"That's very interesting for a man who worked in the Clinton administration and saw the abuse that Bill Clinton faced. And certainly, I don't think he moved to the south of France during the George W. Bush's administration. Bush also, of course, got absolutely smashed and torn to shreds for eight years by Democrats. But of course, Democrats don't realize that because they were the ones doing it."
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson politely told the host that Holder didn't really say that.
"Yeah, but Joe, that's not actually what he said though. He said he thought that race was a factor — not a major factor — but a factor in some of the over-the-top criticism of President Obama," Robinson said. "So, that's different from saying, you know, the only reason people criticize the President is because of race. I thought he was measured, if you read the entire quote."
Which it was. As they discussed in the post, that's not that Holder said. Here's the quote Scarborough was twisting from ABC:
n the wide-ranging interview for “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” Holder spoke at length about race and discrimination in America, saying the country is in “a fundamentally better place than we were 50 years ago.”
“We've made lots of progress,” he said. “I sit here as the first African-American attorney general, serving the first African-American President of the United States. And that has to show that we have made a great deal of progress.
“But there's still more we have to travel along this road so we get to the place that is consistent with our founding ideals,” he said.
Holder said that he and President Obama are treated differently than their predecessors.
“There's a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that's directed at me [and] directed at the president,” Holder said. “You know, people talking about taking their country back. … There's a certain racial component to this for some people. I don’t think this is the thing that is a main driver, but for some there's a racial animus.”
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