On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough forcefully sought to refute the notion that Chris Christie's takedown of Marco Rubio in the last GOP debate was an unprovoked attack. Scarborough painted a very different picture, one in which by dint of his town hall work, Christie had been steadily climbing in the New Hampshire polls--until Rubio unleashed a wave of negative advertising on Christie that drove his numbers back down. It was only then that Christie counter-attacked, suggested Joe.
Scarborough said pundits were either "ignorant" or "lying" to their readers if they portrayed Christie as "mean" for having exposed Rubio as he did, or that Christie's poor performance in New Hampshire was the result of a backlash against his attack. Noteworthy was Scarborough's statement that the funding for Rubio's attack ads against Christie was "dark" money. At one point, Scarborough called it "dirty" money, before correcting himself and repeating "dark" money.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: So there was a lot of -- there's a lot of talk about Chris Christie yesterday: oh, he's mean, he went after poor Marco, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What people didn't get -- and I know you probably know the back story -- Christie actually was having a great run, he was doing well in town hall meetings, his numbers were going up and then Marco's team started trashing him in ads and they just started running non-stop ads and then the dark money came in and they started trashing Chris Christie with dark money ads and so all of the positive he was doing one town hall meeting at a time just got completely obliterated and he jumped up, he was up at 7%, 8%, 9%, going higher, then, boom, back down to 4%.
And so it's -- I would hope that the people commenting on Christie leaving the race saying he was mean to Marco and that's why he lost, I would hope that they were ignorant and not actually lying to their readers and viewers because if you're too ignorant to know that's what happened in New Hampshire, that it was Marco's dirty money -- dark money, Marco's dark money, and then it was his [inaudible as someone coughed] money that got Chris Christie down to the 4% where he started attacking Marco, then you shouldn't be covering politics, you're lying to your people.
