Joe Scarborough doesn't just take his Obama-landslide talk to NBC. He also spewed some of it on the Tavis Smiley show on PBS on Monday night. "This past month has been – and I was saying it this morning on the [MSNBC] show – this has been the worst month for the Republican Party since August of 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned, and I mean that."
To which Smiley replied: "Wow, wow, wow, wow." Then Scarborough delighted his NBC overlords by ripping into Rick Santorum:
We have allowed ourselves to be defined as a party of contraception. We’re debating something that should have actually been closed in 1965. You have Rick Santorum saying – and he was the frontrunner when he started saying these things – that contraception is bad and he’s going to use his presidential platform to speak out about it.
You had the frontrunner talking about how JFK make him want to “throw up on his sweater vest,” because John Kennedy was talking about the separation of church and state. You had the frontrunner talking about how President Obama was, quote, “a snob” because he believed that children should end up going to college if that was a possibility. It was aspirational, and it’s what the American dream is, in part, about.
So this has been a very, very bad month. You add, of course, the Rush Limbaugh dust-up over the past week, and you even have people like my wife, a pro-life, conservative Republican who has never voted for a Democrat before in any national election. I hear her talking to her friends on the phone, saying, “What’s up with our party? Fix the economy. Leave us alone. We will take whatever birth control pills or whatever that we want to take.”
It is astounding to Republican women, to conservative Republican women. I would, I would suggest my wife’s more conservative than me.
That's not a very high bar. Smiley started by asserting that the "social issues" are killing Republicans, and Scarborough said he agreed "100 percent." Then Smiley brought up the "war on women" lingo, and Scarborough, Mr. "No Labels," the man who supposedly hates excessive metaphors, agreed with that, too:
SMILEY: You’ve just listed a few people who got caught up in this over the last week or so. Is there a war on women right now, given what you’re seeing?
SCARBOROUGH: Well, I think there are parts of the Republican Party that don’t understand that talk about contraception, insults, not only
pushes away Democratic women and Independent women, but also Republican women as well, and to be blunt, there are a lot of people
in the Democratic Party that don’t understand there’s very conservative, pro-life women out there as well, who sometimes don’t feel like they’re as represented by the Democratic Party as they would like to be.
That said, you actually have right now, unfortunately, again, and most of the people in the Republican Party that I’ve spoken to in Washington, D.C. don’t like this fact. You have a small segment of the party that seem to aggressively be going after the rights of women. And -- (laughs) we’re not even talking about abortion rights. Again, we’re talking about contraception rights, an issue that was settled in the mid-’60s with Griswold vs. Connecticut. It is astounding to a lot of – a Pew poll shows 99 percent of women have taken birth control, some sort of birth control in their life. [That's not a Pew poll. It's a mangled Guttmacher Institute poll.]
The fact that the frontrunner of the Republican Party is saying, quote, “It is wrong,” and promising to use his presidential campaign to right that wrong, that’s very disturbing. You look at the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls that just came out today. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that President Obama has a 50 percent approval rating right now. That he’s got a 6 percent lead against Mitt Romney, and even higher against Rick Santorum, when just a couple of weeks ago the president was tied or behind both of those candidates in nationwide Gallup polls.
The president is ahead by double digits in Virginia. He’s ahead by double digits in Ohio. Uh, it’s not up to me to decide tonight on this show whether the Republican Party looks like it’s conducting a war against women. You can look at those poll numbers and you can see that
swing voters, independents and women especially feel that way.
If Scarborough didn't sound liberal enough to conservatives, he also stumped for "campaign finance reform," and expressed his hope that if Obama wins (as he predicts), he needs to pass a law that "drains the swamp of this super PAC money." Smiley didn't ask Scarborough about how NBC-owning Comcast and its executives and employees are huge donors to Obama's re-election and whether they should set a corporate example and drain its own alleged swamp.
