Mika Giggles Like Schoolgirl Over Sex In Woody Guthrie Book—Ignores His Communist Ties
Woody Guthrie was an American original who wrote some enduring music and did a lot to publicize the plight of the people of the Dust Bowl. There's just one little inconvenient truth about Guthrie: he ran in Communist circles. Though it's reported that he never officially joined the party, he's quoted as saying that the "the best thing that I did in 1936 was to sign up with the Communist Party." He also wrote 174 columns for the Communist Party's Daily Worker newspaper.
But nary a mention was made of Woody's Communist connections on Morning Joe today. Instead, Mika Brzezinski giggled like a schoolgirl over the numerous, explicit sex scenes contained in a recently-discovered novel that Guthrie wrote, House of Earth. View the video after the jump.
Historian Douglas Brinkley and Guthrie daughter Nora Guthrie were on to promote the book. While they attempted to conduct a serious discussion with the other panel members, Mika repeatedly interrupted as she perused the book's racy portions. By the end, Brinkley had to tell Joe to "cool her down."
The closest anyone came to mentioning Guthrie's Communist ties was when Brinkley mentioned that Woody had "written for newspapers a lot." But Douglas was of course too diplomatic to mention that the newspaper for which Guthrie most famously wrote was The Daily Worker, house organ of the Communist Party USA.
It's worth viewing the video to see how Mika's childish obsession with the sexy bits intrudes on a serious—if sanitized to remove Communist references—discussion of Guthrie's book.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: So Nora, when you first read this, what did you think? I'm just noticing there's a lot of sex in it. You warned me about that. It's like --
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: He went for it.
BRZEZINSKI: Oh, my gosh!
NORA GUTHRIE: Actually, that's exactly what I did. I went, oh, my God! Dad!
BRZEZINSKI: Dad?
GUTHRIE: Dad!
BRZEZINSKI: I mean, I would read this—except I can't. Out loud.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: You mean on the air, right.
BRZEZINSKI: Oh, my goodness.
MIKE BARNICLE: Your dad wrote "This Land Is Your Land," about six blocks from here.
BRZEZINSKI: He also wrote this.
SCARBOROUGH: Okay, Mika, put it down.
BARNICLE: If you read the book --
GUTHRIE: Oh be still my heart.
BARNICLE [to Mika]: You can mark that page.
BRINKLEY: One of the reasons, Joe, the novel never got published in that climate of the '40s, you could not have published this.
BRZEZINSKI: [squeals, points out portion of book to Scarborough]. Sorry, go ahead.
BRINKLEY: He wrote for newspapers a lot, Woody, and so he'd go see all those camps in California and would write about the horrendous conditions.
BARNICLE: Did you notice she passed out?
BRZEZINSKI: I mean, God.
BRINKLEY : You've got to fan her now and cool her down a little, Joe.
SCARBOROUGH: It's unbelievable.
