Update [Ken Shepherd, managing editor]: Scarborough responds via Twitter, insisting he was joking [see more at bottom of post]. Video embedded to the right.
Joe Biden is the "greatest Vice President of our time."
No, dear reader, I have not lost my marbles. I'm merely citing MSNBC's token quasi-conservative Joe Scarborough, who said on this morning's edition of "Morning Joe":
We understand that Joe Biden's numbers are going down, which I think is just stupid because all he has done is – I mean, he's become, in a couple of short months, the greatest vice president of our time.
Not content to allow his credibility to go down in flames alone, Joe took the rest of the Brew Crew with him:
WILLIE GEIST: Yes.
SCARBOROUGH: I think everybody around the table would admit that.
MIKE BARNICLE: No doubt. No doubt.
Oh, the humanity.
You see, immediately preceding this story was a discussion of this AP story, released at midnight last night, which says that the job-creation numbers are greatly over-inflated. And who's in charge of implementing that wonderful bill?
None other than Vice President Gaffe.
This brings us to our next point of inanity, that Joe Biden hasn't had any big mistakes [emphasis mine] :
ALLEN: That's a great point about the advice. [unintelligible] don't do this, do this, this is how it will play. You're right about that. We're told the President has a good relationship with him. Going into this, people wondered, were his verbal tics going to become a story? No, the Vice President has had no big mistakes, no bad stories. That's why pollsters, even Frank Newport from Gallup, are a little puzzled when they look at these numbers. The main explanation seems to be just the stratospheric numbers the President had going in, have now come down to earth.
Well I guess he hasn't had too many gaffes, other than telling people they could die of swine flu if they used an airplane or train, outing the location of the secret bunker designed to keep him safe in the event of a catastrophe, saying we're in a depression despite leading up to that statement with weeks of statements about how the stimulus package was totally working, and kicking off his Vice Presidency with this gem:
"If we do everything right, if we do it with absolute certainty, there's still a 30 percent chance we'll get it wrong,"
Those probably have nothing to do with his plummeting numbers. It's probably just that the AP figured out that the recovery.gov Web site was not an accurate representation of Ol' Joe's success – or failure.
But to be fair, Biden pulled off that Beer Summit without a hitch. Joe Scarborough said it best at the end of the segment:
SCARBOROUGH: Mika, all I can say is Gallup didn't call me up. I would say Joe Biden is doing a heck of a job. I'm deadly serious about that.
Joey, you're doing a heck of a job.
The full transcript is below.
MIKE ALLEN: The White House was very aggressive with this. The AP released this article at midnight. It had been out during the day. It's a new thing the AP does of letting people have stories so there will be something fresh in the morning. And at 12:10AM, the White House put out this very detailed response. Now here's what the AP found when it dug into recovery.gov, the website where job contracts based on stimulus spending are focused. They found that three, four jobs were sometimes counted when only one was real. They found a lot of errors in the data. And they found the totals overstated. Now, the White House says we're talking here about a program that has already created a million jobs and that Friday we'll see a very big number coming out. Now, the AP looks at the other side of the telescope and says more jobs being reported Friday? That just means the mistakes that we found in this first data set are going to be magnified on Friday.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Yeah, a million jobs or maybe 24. Who knows? The person in charge of this, Mike, is a man that we all love and respect, I'm talking making sure the stimulus money is well spent, Joe Biden. We understand that Joe Biden's numbers are going down, which I think is just stupid because all he has done is – I mean, he's become, in a couple of short months, the greatest vice president of our time.
WILLIE GEIST: Yes.
SCARBOROUGH: I think everybody around the table would admit that.
MIKE BARNICLE: No doubt. No doubt.
SCARBOROUGH: These numbers – I swear. I'm dead serious here. I have no idea why these numbers are going down other than the vice presidency is – what did Sam Rayburn say, not worth a warm bucket of spit? It is a thankless job.
ALLEN: No, it is. And I think you're right about your analysis of the numbers. They seem to be driven largely by the decline in President Obama's numbers. And it's not unusual. We looked back at President George H. W. Bush when he was Vice President, at Dick Cheney and Al Gore, and we found that often their numbers were about ten points below the President's. It's this sort of diminution of the office. Now the Vice President's office says he's been put in charge of big jobs, the recovery, where they say you're going to expect some problems with the data just like Google Maps wasn't perfect on the first day, they data aren't perfect either. And they say that he's working on Iraq. Talk about another thankless job.
SCARBOROUGH: But you know, Mike, the thing about Joe Biden, his most important jobs to America, and this isn't a Joe Biden commercial, but the most important things that Joe Biden does we never see. He does them behind the scenes. It's when he's alone with the President. It's when he explains what military briefers are going to come in to say, you know, he knows. He's been there. He's heard the briefings. He's been around Washington, D.C., since he was 29 years old. You can't go out and hold a press conference and tell people all the great things you're doing behind the scenes.
ALLEN: That's a great point about the advice. [unintelligible] don't do this, do this, this is how it will play. You're right about that. We're told the President has a good relationship with him. Going into this, people wondered, were his verbal tics going to become a story? No, the Vice President has had no big mistakes, no bad stories. That's why pollsters, even Frank Newport from Gallup, are a little puzzled when they look at these numbers. The main explanation seems to be just the stratospheric numbers the President had going in, have now come down to earth.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Mike Allen, thank you very much. It was great having you in the studio yesterday. Come back.
SCARBOROUGH: Mika, all I can say is Gallup didn't call me up. I would say Joe Biden is doing a heck of a job. I'm deadly serious about that.
TINA BROWN: Don't use that phrase, Joe.
Update continued [Ken Shepherd, Managing Editor]: Scarborough has responded, via his Twitter account (@joeNBC). Here are the relevant Tweets in chronological order from top to bottom:
- @KenShepherd Newsbuster's blogger here proving that he either never watches our show or has no sense of humor. It's an ongoing joke.
- @NewsBusters To my humorless Newsbusters friends, get a life. We've been joking about being suckups to Biden for a year.
- @NewsBusters Since you're not stupid, I can only assume in this case that you're being intellectually dishonest. A little context please.
- @NewsBusters Do you tools really believe that the same guy who said on air repeatedly that he "thanked God everyday that Cheney was VP...
- @NewsBusters ....in the years after 9/11 would really think Joe was the best VP ever? Good Lord.
