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When your petulance, mugging for the cameras and obstruction get so bad that it's even too much for bully Joe Scarborough, you've got problems. Morning Joe Crew Rips Republicans For Hagel Obstruction: ‘It’s A Colossal Mistake’:

Republican Joe Scarborough is tired of his party’s mistreatment of Defense Secretary-nominee Chuck Hagel and its continuing, all-consuming focus on Benghazi.

The focus of Scarborough’s ire this morning on his MSNBC show Morning Joe was Sen. Lindsey Graham’s announcement on Sunday that he will place a hold not only on Hagel, but also on CIA Director-nominee John Brennan -- until he gets further action from the White House on Benghazi.

Scarborough lashed out at Graham and his neoconservative cohorts, unable to believe how misguided their attacks on the Obama administration have been:

SCARBOROUGH: If you’ve got a working class guy who has voted Republican every four years and he turns on the Sunday shows and he’s flipping around the channels and he sees Republicans in February still talking about Benghazi, saying they’re going to hold up the picks for secretary of defense and CIA director for something that happened back in the fall, and they are continuing on this…to hold up this and talk about it on Sunday morning, it’s a colossal mistake.

[...] Graham has been seeking out “the truth” on the attack in Benghazi, Libya that left four Americans dead for months now, despite an ample amount of facts already having been uncovered. A Cabinet nominee has never been filibustered by the Senate, leaving Graham’s threat in a position to make history.

Regular Mike Barnicle wasn't much kinder. After Scarborough said the other members of the Senate basically need to tell Graham to get off of the television, he followed with this:

BARNICLE: Reading the transcripts is pretty disturbing, what Sen. Graham had to say yesterday. He basically said --and I'm paraphrasing here --if the President of the United States had picked up the phone and called someone in Libya, he could have saved the lives of the Americans.

Clearly, evidence means nothing to him. Clearly the timeline of events means nothing to him and someone should give Sen. Graham a Snickers bar and tell him to go sit in the corner until he's happy about something. It's disturbing.

I said before Graham's not going to stop as long as there's no punishment in the media for his behavior. Perhaps this is a start on seeing that happen, but until media outlets quit putting this arrogant, irrational twit on the air, he's going to keep it up.

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If it's Friday, it means PBS viewers are going to be treated to their regular dose of hackery from David Brooks during one of his appearances on The Newshour. This week Brooks is asked to weigh in on the presidential election and Brooks wants us to believe that one, the only voters who might be moved by the fact that Mitt Romney made massive amounts of money shipping jobs overseas are "people who don't pay attention to politics."

I'm not sure what world he's living in, but that is one issue I can tell you those who don't pay attention to politics along with those that do definitely don't like and are not happy about. I don't think it matters if you pay attention to politics or not to decide that you might not want the guy that you would never want to buy the company you work for, ever, because he'll raid your pension, fire you, make you reapply for work for half your previous salary and then maybe have the whole joint close up shortly after while he walks off with millions of dollars. I think there are some votes to be moved if that narrative makes its way into the general electorate's consciences.

Brooks also wants us to believe that "companies that outsource do create more jobs domestically." I don't know what jobs he's talking about, but I've seen no evidence of that. They do create a lot of jobs, just not in the United States. That would be the whole point of outsourcing them David, to get that cheap labor overseas to keep your overhead down, because God knows that CEO's got to make his huge salary for the year or the world will come to an end.

The one thing I've found about Brooks is that he likes to repeat himself a lot and once he's got his talking points for the week, he's going to go out there and repeat them in every venue he gets a chance to. He said pretty much the same thing during his conversation with Gail Collins which was published earlier this week here but elaborated quite a bit more than in the PBS clip above: The Debate We Should Be Having:

David: Obama’s ad is cynicism on stilts. Companies that outsource jobs become more competitive. They grow faster and then end up hiring more people at home. Outsourcing increases employment levels. Outsourcing increases productivity. It also decreases the prices consumers pay for stuff. Obama knows all this. He’s just paying the economic nationalism card for his own gain.

As for Bain leveraging debt on companies, that’s overstated. Companies Bain bought did not have higher default rates than other companies. That’s true for private equity firms as a whole too. I don’t like the way these firms prosper even when the turnarounds fail, but overall, their strongest incentive is to make the turnaround succeed.

Gail: I acknowledge that most of that behavior at Bain seems to have happened after the fatal year of 1999. But here’s the weird part of the argument we’ve been having about when Romney really, truly severed himself from Bain. Whenever it was, he’s never suggested that there’s anything that happened after he left that he disapproves of.

David: Nor should he. Outsourcing jobs is sometimes a good decision. So is firing people. When the government ran G.M. and Chrysler, Obama fired people and he sold Chrysler to a foreign company.

Besides, do people find it immoral when Toyota outsources jobs to America — or Nissan or Airbus or any other foreign company? Somehow outsourcing that comes here is wonderful but outsourcing that goes there is unpatriotic.

It seems lost on Brooks that the "outsourcing" those foreign companies are doing is to sell goods in America. The outsourcing the companies Mittens shipped overseas were to use cheap foreign labor and sell the goods back to America. It's not the same thing. And President Obama didn't "fire" anyone. He bailed out the auto companies to keep our economy from being destroyed. He wasn't running them.

I don't think either party has been protectionist enough with our trade policies and the Democrats need to be fighting harder against outsourcing and hitting the Republicans for refusing to fix our tax laws which reward companies for shipping jobs overseas. That said, Brooks' remarks, as usual, are ridiculous and full of false equivalencies making excuses for Romney's behavior and pretending that no one is going to care he profited personally from being a corporate raider who went after pension funds, busted unions and shipped jobs overseas to line his own pocket. I sincerely hope he's wrong about who's paying attention or who starts to as the election gets closer. It seems to me to be typical Villager fare where if an argument is hitting home and working too well, he's going to trash it to try to discourage them from continuing the line of attack. Thankfully it appears the Obama campaign isn't paying much attention to Brooks and his ilk of late.

Transcript from PBS below the fold.

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