We documented how the Media Research Center pounced on a text scandal involving a (Democratic, of course) Virginia attorney general candidate — but offered nothing but whataboutism when a group of Young Republicans got caught spewing racist and anti-Semitic messages in a group chat. Intern Isaac White kept up that spin in an Oct. 21 post:
The extremely poor choices made by a few bad apples gave MSNBC what it had been waiting for: a feeble excuse to lament the entire right. Tuesday’s Morning Joe brought on a few guests who were more than willing to censure Republican leadership for somehow allowing the inexcusable behavior to occur, and in the process suggest it was the future of the party.
This came the morning after Politico reported on racially-charged text messages written by special counsel nominee Paul Ingrassia, which included a comment from him about holding a “Nazi streak.” Senate Republicans subsequently disapproved of Ingrassia’s nomination.
[…]The GOP must be associated with jerks even after they’ve disassociated themselves. Meanwhile, Democrats refuse to back away from Jay “Two Bullets to the Republican” Jones in Virginia.
As if White and the rest of his MRC buddies aren’t trying to associate Democrats with Jones. He then complained that right-wing whataboutism was called out:
Unlike his fellow guests, Axios CEO Jim Vandehei was not willing to demonize the Republican Party as a whole. But he was willing minimize death-wishing by equating it with racism:
And you can’t just say, “Oh, look at that Democratic Attorney General over there. He said something even crazier.” He did say something that was crazy, and it probably makes him unelectable. But what was said in that text chain is equally crazy, equally wrong.
This was in reference to Virginia Attorney General candidate Jay Jones, a Democrat who recently came under a firestorm for fantasizing about murdering a Republican and his kids. If it was “equally wrong,” why can’t Democrats denounce him and force him out of the race?
We don’t recall White or anyone else at the MRC demanding that Ingrassia’s nomination be pulled.
Alas, all that pouncing didn’t have the desired partisan effect. In a Nov. 5 rant sliming MSNBC’s election-night coverage as ” equal parts liberal brain rot and, on a night where the left made significant gains, a twinge of smug insufferability,” Jorge Bonilla was annoyed that Jones won the election: “MSNBC completely glossed over the murderous text messages sent to a House colleague by the now Attorney General Elect, Jay Jones. In so doing, they essentially created a permission structure for further political violence.”
Mark Finkelstein was similarly bitter:
Morning Joe proceeded to give the shortest, most misleading, of shrifts to the victory of Democrat Jay Jones in the Virginia attorney general race.
The show devoted all of seven seconds to it. Here’s the totality of what the show, via Mika Brzezinski, had to say:
[…]An unsuspecting viewer might have imagined that Jones had sent some racy texts. The reality, of course, is that he sent texts saying a Republican lawmaker deserved “two bullets to the head,” followed by a wish that the Republican lawmaker’s children “die in their mother’s arms.”
What, Joe? No condemnation of Jones, or friendly-consultant warnings to Democrats not to support abhorrent candidates like him as Attorney General?
Says the guy who blindly supports a president who is a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist.
Nicholas Fondacaro had his own rant in his Nov. 5 hate-watch of “The View”:
Among the avalanche of Democratic Party wins on Election Night was Jay Jones, who ran for attorney general of Virginia. During Wednesday’s edition of ABC News’s The View, the leftist ladies marveled and touted Jones’s win despite the revelations that he sent multiple text messages calling for the death of his Republican opposition and for their children to die in their mothers’ arms. The View cheered Jones overcoming the scandal as “a resounding rejection” of President Trump and Republicans.
Amid their gushing about how great the Democratic pool of candidates were, fake Republican Ana Navarro was the one to bring up Jones and how he was able to win by six points despite the scandal:
Fondacaro did not ask how Republicans could have chosen an attorney general candidate who couldn’t beat an opponent with a scandal record like that.
Tim Graham groused in his Nov. 7 podcast:
But the most demoralizing result was Jay Jones winning in Virginia after these nasty texts about killing a Republican and his children. We counted about nine minutes on the networks, and that mostly came because Politico dug up a nasty Young Republicans group chat, as if to say “two can play that game.”
More demoralizing than Graham and his fellow right-wingers supporting a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist for president? Really?