GOP political consultant Mike Murphy is a veteran defender of Old Media (he once praised Dan Rather to his face as unbiased on CNN), so it wasn’t surprising on Sunday’s Meet the Press when he accused Fox News and MSNBC of being dueling "freak shows...amplifying the shrillest voices" as "one-party cable networks." What was amusing was Rachel Maddow pushing around Joe Scarborough as proof of MSNBC’s bipartisanship.
MADDOW: Wait, is, is Joe Scarborough, which network is he on? Which one-party network?
MURPHY: He's on your liberal network.
MADDOW: So he's the--how is that a one-party network?
MURPHY: I would take your prime time and Fox prime time and say it is kind of a--the same dance toward the dumbing of debate.
This is where Murphy should have pulled out Scarborough’s Washington Monthly piece rooting for the Republicans to get "their brains beaten in" in 2006:
When The Washington Monthly reached me at my office recently, a voice on the other side of the line meekly asked if I would ever consider writing an article supporting the radical proposition that Republicans should get their brains beaten in this fall.
"Count me in!" was my chipper response. I also seem to remember muttering something about preferring an assortment of Bourbon Street hookers running the Southern Baptist Convention to having this lot of Republicans controlling America’s checkbook for the next two years.
Scarborough played a rhetorical game of posing himself to the right of the Republican establishment against "record-breaking debts," quickly broken in the Obama era: "After six years of Republican recklessness at home and abroad, I seriously doubt Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or the aforementioned Bourbon Street hookers could spend this country any deeper into debt than my Republican Party."
How does that claim look now?
