There is no bigger political sellout in the liberal media than Joe Scarborough. Yet, on today’s segment of Morning Joe, Scarborough had the gall to claim that Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham "sold his political soul" to win re-election in 2020.
The segment started with the panel discussing a video of Senator Amy Klobuchar over the weekend talking about sitting next to the late Senator John McCain during Trump’s inauguration: "I sat on that stage between Bernie Sanders and John McCain, and John McCain kept reciting to me names of dictators during that speech because he knew more than any of us what we were facing as a nation. He understood it. He knew because he knew this man more than any of us did."
The conversation quickly turned into a discussion of the “moral clarity” of John McCain in comparison to his lifelong friend Lindsey Graham, with analyst John Heilemann ranting:
And just look at those pictures, it does raise the question, once again, the question has that persistently bedeviled people at this table and other tables, which is what has happened to Lindsey Graham? Someone who, on almost everything else, he and John McCain were side-by-side throughout their careers. They saw the world almost entirely the same, saw people almost entirely the same, they saw Donald Trump exactly the same up until the moment that Donald Trump took -- assumed the Oval Office and all of a sudden Lindsey Graham became a different person. You see so many of those file photos have pictures of McCain and Lindsey Graham together. And again, I mean, Senator McCain has departed this moral coil but Lindsey Graham is still with us. And the mystery, when you have these moments, you are reminded of McCain’s clarity. It just raises the question of what the hell happened to Lindsey?
That is when Scarborough piled on:
Sadly, it's not, Willie, a mystery. Lindsey Graham has a Republican Primary in 2020, he was having trouble in the state of South Carolina and recent polls show that, among Republican Senators, he has one of the better approval ratings with the rank and file in the Republican Party in the state of South Carolina. He basically sold his soul, political soul, sold his political soul for, you know, 20 percentage points inside his own Republican Party. I guess, unlike John McCain, Lindsey Graham didn't have the confidence and the assurance in his voters that he could speak truth to power and still get re-elected in his state.
So, according to Scarborough, Lindsey Graham standing up for the rule of law in the Kavanaugh hearing and Russia investigation is “selling his political soul” but not himself going against all of the principles he spent his career in Congress advocating for out of personal animus with President Trump.
As a member of Congress in the 1990s, Scarborough's voting record was to the right of Newt Gingrich, earning himself a 96% rating from the American Conservative Union. As the host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Scarborough and co-host/paramour Mika Brzezinski did more than anyone in the media, including Fox News, to give Donald Trump an open and friendly platform to advance his presidential campaign during the 2016 GOP primary. Scarborough even bragged about how he would visit Trump to offer debate advice and once penned a Washington Post op-ed, claiming that conservatives who opposed Trump sounded like the “arrogant and unmoored left-wing pundits let loose on MSNBC during the Bush years.”
Scarborough went from saying that an assault weapon was “anything the government would deny the people from protecting themselves against the government” in 1994 to saying that "those suggesting the AR-15 was NOT developed as a weapon of war should read up on history” after the recent Christchurch, New Zealand terrorist attack. Nobody has sold out their conservative views out of opposition to Trump more than the MSNBC host. His hypocrisy is astounding.
The full transcript is below. Click “expand” to read more.
Morning Joe
5/28/19
6:32 a.m. Eastern
ELISE JORDAN: Well, it goes with everything that we know of John McCain's history and legacy and of his strong opposition to any autocrat and his belief in the importance of human freedom. And so, to hear those comments it's not surprising at all. What's still surprising to me is that so many other Republicans and Democrats have learned the same lessons and yet, you know, I'm not blaming Democrats here, but you look at Republicans who previously were so supportive of, say, the Bush Administration's freedom agenda and now they will just blindly accept whatever "dear leader" tells them to go down.
WILLIE GEIST: It’s an interesting story from Senator Klobuchar but not a surprising one, perhaps, given that we know John McCain was critical of the President from the very moment he got in the race and years before that, in fact, and a critical moment in the political rise of Donald Trump came in 2015 when he first attacked John McCain as saying he was not a war hero because he got captured and surviving that, which was a huge canary, perhaps, that told us Donald Trump could survive a lot.
JOHN HEILEMANN: Not only survived it but rose. I think more people were -- it was the first moment when people thought something is going on with Donald Trump because the entire political class from left to right thought you can't attack John McCain, there is no way that's survivable and in fact, not only does Trump survive, but rises. I think the reality is that McCain had Trump's number all along and saw him with clarity, certainly there was personal animus there between the two of them, but he also saw him with clarity throughout the entire time he ran for President. And just look at those pictures, it does raise the question, once again, the question has that persistently bedeviled people at this table and other tables, which is what has happened to Lindsey Graham? Someone who on almost everything else, he and John McCain were side-by-side throughout their careers, they saw the world almost entirely the same, saw people almost entirely the same, they saw Donald Trump exactly the same up until the moment that Donald Trump took -- assumed the Oval Office and all of a sudden Lindsey Graham became a different person. You see so many of those file photos have pictures of McCain and Lindsey Graham together. And again, I mean, Senator McCain has departed this moral coil but Lindsey Graham is still with us. And the mystery, when you have these moments you are reminded of McCain’s clarity, it just raises the question of what the hell happened to Lindsey?
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Sadly, it's not, Willie, a mystery. Lindsey Graham has a Republican Primary in 2020, he was having trouble in the state of South Carolina and recent polls show that, among Republican Senators, he has one of the better approval ratings with the rank and file in the Republican Party in the state of South Carolina. He basically sold his soul, political soul, sold his political soul for, you know, 20 percentage points inside his own Republican Party. I guess, unlike John McCain, Lindsey Graham didn't have the confidence and the assurance in his voters that he could speak truth to power and still get re-elected in his state.
