Instead of leaping in celebration at the Hillary rollout on Morning Joe on Tax Day (Tax the Rich Day?), MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski lamented the fact she was forced to settle for a pale imitation of the left’s true savior, Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Brzezinski, a devout Warren fan-girl with the shirt to prove it, took issue with Hillary Clinton’s philosophical plagiarism of her hero’s ideas, "I just feel like she's, it's a great message, but she's got to stop...sounding like she talked to Elizabeth Warren on the phone and then repeated everything Elizabeth Warren said."
Josh Green of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine acknowledged Mika’s complaint, but defended Hillary’s cheap pandering to the Harvard-professor “populist” wing of the Democratic Party. "If you’re running for the Democratic nomination, being an economic populist in the mold of Elizabeth Warren is sort of the safest thing you can do."
Brzezinski conceded the point and, as if she were a skeptic on the verge of making a sacred conversion, admitted that "I want to believe it. I guess is my point. I want to believe that that is her message. It's a great message."
Even Joe Scarborough, the closest thing that MSNBC has to a "conservative," applauded the Warren-Clinton class warfare rhetoric, agreeing with an old John Edwards message. "There are two Americas in criminal justice. There are two Americas in education. There are two Americas in economics and the rich do keep getting richer, the poor keep getting poorer. Wages have been flat, are going down since 1973 in real terms. I mean, these are not Democratic or Republican issues."
If Joe did not waste time prattling off tired leftist talking points he might have noticed that the poor in this generation have access to much greater luxuries, like iPods or air conditioning, than the poor in previous generations, who had difficulty simply surviving.
He also might have noticed that he and his posh and powdered co-anchor Mika, would be among the first on Warren’s anti-rich hit-list, as they are hardly representative of the downtrodden.
But the segment’s greatest laugh came not from Joe, Josh, or Mika, but from Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who contended, "the Clintons are really associated with a kind of center right version of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Leadership Council, you know pro-Wall Street. And she's trying to break away from that."
The fact that Ignatius considers the Clintons, who are pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality (back in the 90's no less), and pro-government-run-health-care, to be part of a "center right version of the Democratic Party" speaks volumes to his leftism – or maybe Ignatius is used to ignoring the social issues entirely. That his claim went unchallenged demonstrates the degree to which the media itself is left of center.
In fact, Brzezinski seemed to buy into this narrative and recommended that Hillary "crush some of the very forces that have supported her along the way that don't fit into this message" and make her message "sound like Hillary" rather than Elizabeth Warren.
