Tuesday’s Morning Joe predictably jumped on the mass shooting at Michigan State to denounce Republicans. Among many such condemnations during the segment, Joe Scarborough said, “there’s no other way to put it. It’s the Republican party that’s allowing this to continue to happen.”
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, who doubles as an MSNBC analyst, put it in raw, political terms, ignoring every particular fact at this crime scene, especially that the shooter was banned from owning guns::
If we’re ever going to do anything about it, either the Republican party is going to change, or we’re going to take power away from the Republican party, back into the hands of sensible people.
Liberal Robinson’s smug definition of “sensible people” is people who agree with MSNBC.
Beyond that, there was a moment of either utter obtuseness, or shameless hypocrisy, on Scarborough’s part when he said:
“It’s this fetishness that’s grown over the past 25 years about all rights, no responsibilities. And I need the most extreme version of whatever right you’re handing out, unless, of course, it has to do with a woman’s body or a woman’s health. And I have no responsibility to act in any responsible way. And that’s what the Republican party has become.”
Fetishness over the most extreme version of rights, Joe? You mean, like the opposition of the Democrat party to any limitations on abortion whatsoever, up to the moment of birth. Or even beyond birth, as in the refusal of Barack Obama, as a state legislator, to support a bill requiring medical aid be given to children surviving an abortion? Or in more recent times, when Ralph Northam, then the sitting governor of Virginia, defended letting infants die after birth?
And as for extremism growing over the last 25 years, as a senator, Joe Biden was pro-life. But the nominally Catholic Biden has since “evolved” into a pro-abortion-with-no-restrictions radical.
Joe Scarborough accusing Republicans of “fetishness” over their support for the Second Amendment, while ignoring Democrat extremism on abortion, was sponsored in part by Liberty Mutual, Sleep Number, and Booking.com.
Here’s the transcript.
MSNBC
Morning Joe
2/14/23
6:00 am ETMIKA BRZEZINSKI: We’ll begin the show with yet another, Willie, mass shooting in America.
WILLIE GEIST: Yeah, this one was at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, last night.
. . .
JOE SCARBOROUGH: And this continues, and again, listen, there’s no way, no other way of putting it: it’s the Republican party that’s allowing this to continue to happen in America.
Let me say, as you look at those haunted faces, it is the Republican party, it is the Republican party, that allows this gun culture to spread. We have mass shootings every, single, day. And all they say is, there is nothing we can do about it. Now, NRA, give us more money.
. . .
EUGENE ROBINSON: There is, there is almost unanimous support for doing something. Yet, you’re right, it’s the Republican party, refuses to budge on guns. Refuses to move on guns. And that is the problem.
. . .
SCARBOROUGH: And, you know, it’s, it’s this fetishness that’s grown over the past 25 years about all rights, no responsibilities. And I need the most extreme version of whatever right you’re handing out, unless, of course, it has to do with a woman’s body or a woman’s health. And I have no responsibility to act in any responsible way. And that’s what the Republican party has become.
. . .
ROBINSON: Look, if we’re ever going to attack this problem, which is just astounding, stupefying, to people in the rest of the world, who cannot understand why we, why we permit this to happen.
If we’re ever going to do anything about it, either the Republican party is going to change, or we’re going to take power away from the Republican party, back into the hands of sensible people, and we’re going to do something about it. That’s kind of where we are.