In the wake of the media’s failure to get gun control passed, no one has been more amusing to watch than MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough; especially if you remember the former Florida congressman from his “Scarborough Country” days. Minus the British accent but plus Rachel Maddow’s glasses from 2007, Scarborough has now morphed into an American version of Piers Morgan: a sanctimonious, emotional blackmailer bloated by his own self-importance.
The problem for Scarborough, though, is that even as he gets more shrill with the doomsday scenarios he paints for the GOP, polls show that the American people are coming to their senses on the issue of gun control. Tuesday morning, as I listened to Scarborough puff himself up warning the GOP about 2014, I read the results of the latest gun control poll that shows support for the issue is now below 50%.
I get that Scarborough’s ego is bruised, but the con he is playing is so transparently weak, you have to wonder just how thick the bubble he lives in is.
For example, Scarborough relentlessly threatens GOP lawmakers with those ridiculously flawed polls that show 80% to 90% of Americans want tightened background checks. But either Scarborough is unaware of polls that show 96% of the American people do not care about gun control, or Scarborough is foolishly hoping Congress is unaware.
Scarborough took his desperately shrill and laughably lame hustle to even greater heights this morning, acting as though a Senate vote to kill gun control will hurt GOP members of the House. It is hard to see how this even hurts GOP Senate members when four Senate Democrats voted the same way.
With his latest “terrorist” talking point, Scarborough has really started to debase himself. Apparently there is an al-Qaeda tape somewhere that suggests terrorists take advantage of America’s gun laws. From what I’ve read, though, terrorists regularly take advantage of many of America’s freedoms — including the freedom to buy pressure cookers and the instructions on how to turn them into WMDs. Exactly where does Morning Joe draw an intellectual line on this line of argument?
We are more than a year away from the 2014 mid-terms, poll after poll shows that by a wide margin the American people don’t care about gun control and want their lawmakers focused on the economy, and here is Scarborough volunteering to be the cave-dwelling, WWII Japanese soldier fighting a war that ended years ago.
And doing so with polls quickly turning against him and threats so intellectually flawed all you can do is laugh as he hurls them.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.