Just as it’s Nicholas Fondacaro’s duty at the Media Research Center to hate-watch “The View” (and lie about the hosts), it’s Mark Finkelstein’s duty to hate-watch “Morning Joe” and spew hate at host Joe Scarborough. Thus, we get this fit of rage in a Jan. 9 post:
We have often zinged Joe Scarborough’s false-modesty shtick of describing himself as a “simple country lawyer.” The egotistical Morning Joe host clearly hopes people will react by thinking–or better yet, exclaiming–“No, Joe. You are one of America’s most brilliant legal minds!”
On today’s show, Scarborough decided to defy the mockery and double-down on his shtick. Three times in one segment, as he reran audio of Trump pleading to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,780 votes, he pointedly described himself as, yes, a “simple country lawyer.”
For good measure, Joe upped the false-modesty ante by adding, “I fell off a turnip truck and landed in front of Congress.” Watch Mika make that “here he goes again” face.
MSNBC analyst and Washington Post editor Eugene Robinson obligingly ran with Scarborough’s line. The South Carolina native described himself as coming from an area where there were also turnip trucks–although Robinson had the good grace not to claim he’d fallen off of one.
Scarborough proceeded to run his braggadocious hobby horse into the ground. Introducing Chuck Rosenberg, an MSNBC contributor and former US Attorney, Scarborough described Rosenberg, in contrast with Joe’s supposedly humble past, as “a man who, trust me, did not just fall off a turnip truck.”
Finkelstein seems not to understand that the “simple country lawyer” thing is a trope and that Scarborough appears to be joking.
Finkelstein raged further in a post the next day:
Just yesterday, we called out Joe Scarborough’s false-modesty shtick of describing himself as “a simple country lawyer.”
Today, Scarborough exposed just what a sham that shtick is, as he revealed himself as a typical elitist snob.
The show devoted a segment to Donald Trump’s case before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in which he argues that he is immune from criminal prosecution for acts performed while president.
After Scarborough noted that Trump is arguing in the “D.C. Circuit” and not “some random Circuit out in flyover space,” Finkelstein huffed: “Scarborough stopped there. But as [guest George] Conway chuckled at Joe’s ‘flyover space’ gibe and began to answer, Joe—presumably realizing just how condescendingly elitist he had sounded—sought to cover his tracks by interjecting, ‘As the justices would call it, where I’m from.'”
Finkelstein seems to have forgotten that his fellow conservatives did something similar when it felt the need to demonize a court for being insufficiently right-wing. The 9th Circuit was a frequent target; a 2005 NewsBusters post, for example, carries the headline “9th Circuit Court – Gone Mad!” and dismissed it as a “liberal” court “known for it’s legislating from the bench.” A 2010 post complained that a reporter “watered down the court’s infamous history of liberal rulings” and ranted that “The Ninth Circuit has a long history of being stacked with liberal judges since the days of President Carter.”
What those writers did was the reverse of what Finkelstein is accusing Scarborough of doing — and he would likely have done the same thing himself.