I just have to wonder: What kind of world does Joe Scarborough live in, how small is the bubble? And how wilfully blind do you have to be to not see the racism that isn't just an isolated strain, but the foundation of your party? And how do you confuse Ronald Reagan's shining rhetoric for the reality of his war on the working class, in this country and in others? Is it upholding democracy to fund illegal wars and lie about it to Congress? I'm scratching my head.
Watch as Scarborough and his guests struggle with the reality that was right in front of their faces for a long time. And if they were in such deep denial they couldn't see it, Hillary Clinton spelled it out for us! Your reaction? To attack her for talking about deplorables!
"It's like we can't be shocked by Donald Trump because we know who he is. We know what's in his DNA. But the way people react, turn the lens to those crowds after this horrific shooting, this tragedy," Charlie Sykes said. "They're talking CNN sucks, chanting lock her up. The moral test to the Republican party that they have failed over and over again, the president has been a man who has stoked our divisions, has stoked the fear and the hostility, has created this toxic stew. and we're being reminded the number of people out there who take him both literally and seriously.
"So at one level you have people who are willing to rationalize and defend his behavior, but also you have the folks out there, the haters who draw oxygen from what this president has done, from the whistles that he has sent. That's what makes this such a dangerous time. the fact is the president of the United States is the arsonist in chief."
"Rick Wilson, I'm naive," Scarborough said.
"I never believed what liberals said about us all along. I never believed there was this undercurrent in the Republican party of racism, nativism, anti-semitism. (Editor's note: You grew up in Georgia, went to school in Alabama and moved to Pensacola, and this never occurred to you?) We spent our entire lives telling people it wasn't true. I'll be damned, I'm 55 years old. Bingo, they had us exactly right. They had the party exactly right. What are we to do now?"
Gee, Joe. Maybe have some real liberals on your show and listen to them? Just a thought!
"Joe, this is emblematic of the entire problem of the Republican party being bought out by Trumpism. It revealed a segment of our demographic, a part of our party we wanted to pretend was in the closet, we kept them in the basement and hosed them off once a year on Election Day, and unfortunately we now have to face the fact that that element feels empowered and emboldened," Rick Wilson said.
"They read tweets like today -- I'm sure that tweet sounded better in the original German --and they're not taking it as some sort of joking Trumpism. They take it as marching orders. And maybe it's only a tiny fraction, but it only takes a tiny fraction to march into a synagogue and kill 11 people. It only takes a tiny fraction to send out 14 bombs It's not a dog whistle, it's an air raid siren.
"But Rick, the problem is, 90% of Republicans support him. You have people chanting in the crowd. I would have never, ever, ever over five decades predicted this would happen. After people were targets of bombs, that you actually still have the president of the United States still attacking those people and people in the crowd more disturbingly chanting attacks at CNN and Hillary Clinton 'lock her up!' Where were they raised? Not in my neighborhood."
(Well, Joe, they were raised in the same neighborhoods most white people live in, the same ones that wouldn't allow black people to move in. Am I wrong in guessing you didn't have any black neighbors? Because that's how the hatred starts, and that's how it grows.)
"They were raised in the post-2010 era. They repeated over and over again conspiracy theories and stoked the sense of inferiority," Wilson said.
"The victim complex, 'I'm a victim, Hollywood doesn't like me, the media doesn't like me,' but hold on, I own the Supreme Court, I own the United States House of Representatives, I own the United States Senate, I open the United States presidency, I own the Justice Department, I own the DHS, I own everything but i'm still a little snowflake who gets their feelings hurt when Hollywood does a movie I don't like. Please explain that to me. They own the world and they're still victims?" Scarborough said.
"This is a sign of how fundamentally weak Donald Trump is. The guy is a quivering blob of man-baby goo," Wilson said. "He's a tantrum-throwing infant all the time, He knows his base loves that sense of alienation. They love being reminded that certain people can read and they don't read so good. And they love that sense of somebody who's going to be their champion and stoke their anger and tell them all their resentments are justified. That's part of what you and I fought against and Charlie fought against and Peggy fought against for so long, is the acknowledgment that there are people who want to have their fears stoked."
(So Peggy Noonan never heard of Lee Atwater, or the Southern strategy? Odd.)
"Donald Trump is an arsonist, as Charlie said, and in a whole spectrum of areas that we have to acknowledge that his unique social media power makes that arsonist incredibly dangerous for this country and this republic."
Yes, the arsonist in chief is happy to burn it all down. And the dirty hippies were right again.
