Michael Eric Dyson

Cast of Morning Joe--Racism, What Racism?

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Behold the cast of Morning Joe in full tizzy mode because Jimmy Carter dared to state the obvious about the not too thinly veiled racism behind the right wingers protesting President Obama at these Tea Bag protests, and with Joe Wilson's disrespectful outburst on the House floor calling him a liar.

From Media Matters who has more on Joe Scarborough and friends from the same show--Conservatives express outrage about charges that their attacks on Obama are racist.

A bit later Michael Eric Dyson joined the show and unlike Jonathan Capehart, actually tried to beat back some of Scarborough's nonsense. Joe apparently doesn't think that Rush Limbaugh has ever made any racist remarks.

Note to Eric Dyson. If Scar and Mika follow through and have you back on the show some time soon to talk about this some more, go get the mile long list of racist crap that's come out of Limbaugh's mouth that Media Matters has documented and have the list in front of you to read off to them the next time they have you on. Facts and actual quotations from Boss Limbaugh are not their friends.

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Part two of the Peggy and Kathleen show on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. This time the topic is health care. After some straight talk from Paul Krugman about the importance of including a public option to control costs and the fact that there is no real competition in the health care markets now, we get another "Oh my goodness" moment from Peggy Noonan. Noonan seems to think she knows what most "normal humans" think and forget all those mushy details those darned economists like Krugman tend to bring up. Let's just talk about taxes. Doing her best to channel a little bit of Sarah Palin here:

Noonan: Oh my goodness. Well let...you know how I feel from my column this week. I think things have become a little bit scattered. Um...Paul...if you just limit this conversation to taxes alone, you have some sense that people, normal humans in America, might be getting a little bit nervous about health care and energy care and all of this stuff. America has a huge deficit. We've never seen anything like it before.

Spending is very big. A Warren Buffet, who people tend to trust on economic matters says look, this energy thing the House just passed is a big tax. Health care, the Congressional Budget Office says is probably $1.8 trillion over the next ten years...

Krugman: No...it's not...

Noonan: Well, without gettin' into the weeds, you gotta' assume it's going to cost money. We've got California going under. We've got New York with I think a $20 billion deficit. They're going to be raising taxes. Income taxes are going to be going on up. At a certain point, you've got to realize, people are going to say "Whoa...this is no good. You've got to stop this." (crosstalk) Yes.

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Listening to Republicans Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker on the panel of This Week practically swooning over Mark Sanford's emails to his mistress and excusing his behavior was truly a sight to behold. They both looked downright giddy this morning while dismissing his actions because he was in love.

Paul Krugman and Michael Eric Dyson do their best to try to point out that the trouble is not so much the cheating since it is human nature which is not reserved for one party, but the hypocrisy of the Republicans being the party of family values and people like Mark Sanford's words coming back to bite him. Of course Noonan and Parker were having none of that.

Noonan: Ooohh...I never think that when politicians, Democrats and Republicans get in these stories, that the story itself, the sin itself if you will, undermines what the politician stands for necessarily. Mark Sanford's Libertarian/traditional views are right or wrong on their own. Um..I must say I've been thinking about Clinton a lot and it seems to me that in the Clinton era, during that famous story, a new devilishness was unleashed, especially in the media where a new meanness took style.

And I feel like in every one of the scandals of the past few months, and we've had so many of them, the political sex scandals, the level of meanness of the response, publicly, and on cable and the newspapers, gets meaner each time. It seems to me that we are coming, we are reacting as almost as a nation, but certainly in the media as kind of Puritans without faith, which is the worst of both worlds. To be Puritanical and not even have faith.

I'm sorry Peggy, but the treatment any of the Republicans of late have gotten in the press pales in comparison to what the media did to Bill Clinton. And the media are not the ones being Puritans. The Republicans are the ones who have held themselves out there as the party of virtue and family values. The press didn't invent that.

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