Between another week of the coronavirus pandemic, Attorney General Bill Barr’s Hillsdale speech, the release of Bob Woodward’s book, and town halls for both candidates, it was a week ripe for things to the perpetually-unhappy ReidOut host Joy Reid to bemoan and whine about President Trump, his supporters, and anyone who disagrees with Reid’s far-left worldview in the worst possible terms.
And, not to be overshadowed, Reid had plenty of help with nutty guests such as Paul Butler, Jelani Cobb, the permanently-shouting Steve Schmidt (a real-life Brick Tamland), and former Obama U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance.
Below is a Notable Quotables-style wrap-up of Reid’s Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday shows, presented in no particular order.
‘Trump Doesn’t Care About...Human Life,’ Including ‘White Citizens’
“Now, we know that Donald Trump doesn’t care about people of color or women or poor people or immigrants or their children that he puts in cages, but even Trump has been able to extend the myth that he does care about white people....He holds indoor, super-spreader rallies, shows contempt for mask wearing, and stay-at-home orders. He put his own cabinet at risk by hosting the RNC at the White House, putting even rich white people at risk. He doesn’t care about white America. Those who are sick or poor or out of work or facing evictions, he literally doesn’t care, which is why Jamil Smith of Rolling Stone describes him as the 'no lives matter' president, a president with an utter disregard for both the truth and for human life, a president who, from the day he announced his candidacy, promised to make America a safe haven for white citizens, and now he can’t even claim to do that.”
— Reid, September 15, 7:01 p.m. Eastern.
Trump’s America Is Just Like....Stalin’s Soviet Union?
New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb: So, we’ve seen this pattern before. I think it’s most egregious and most noticeable when it happens to people in science because science is rooted in cold, rigid empiricism....So if you can call him and then he changes his mind and we get a different kind of report, well, we’ve just kind of stepped into what the Soviet Union was doing with its scientists where, if you had findings that didn’t jibe with Comrade Stalin’s understanding of the world, you were sent out to revise those findings until you had something that he could agree with.
Reid: Yeah. You know, there is that sort of Soviet quality to it, Dr. Roy, because, I mean, last night, President Trump literally tried to blame Joe Biden for there not being a national mask mandate when, number one, he opposed the national mask mandate, and Joe Biden is just a regular guy. He’s just a civilian. He has no power.
— September 16, 7:07 p.m. Eastern.
Americans Can’t Go Outside Because Trump Hasn’t Given Everyone an N95 Mask
“[A]cknowledging reality in this case would be tantamount to admitting failure and we know this White House doesn’t say the words, we were wrong. They’re just not willing to do that and level with the American people....I’m getting questions across — from patients, from family members, from teachers across the country wondering, hey, Doc, if you get an N95 mask caring for your patients in the ICU, why not me? Because they can’t go into the grocery store right now because they’re suffocating in smog. They’re still vulnerable to COVID-19....Air purifiers have limited utility, yes, sure, get one, but you know what, everyone needs a well-fitting N95 mask or something like it. And the reality, Joy, is because we didn’t have the right leadership at the right time[.]”
— MSNBC contributor and Biden supporter Dr. Vin Gupta, September 15, 7:04 p.m. Eastern.
Reid Dismisses CHOP Deaths, Excuses Prosecuting Rioters as Distraction
“[O]ne of the things that people are doing when they get up every morning, according to FBI Director Christopher Wray, they’re working on violent extremism cases, white nationalist violent extremism. That’s, at least according to Director Wray, what most of the work is right now and yet you have Barr out here telling federal prosecutors they ought to be charging rioters with sedition...[H]e want to explore whether he could bring charges against the mayor of Seattle for allowing a police-free protest zone. He’s pushing U.S. attorneys to bring federal charges against protesters....in terms of a crackdown that has led to already 300 arrests on federal crimes in the George Floyd protest. So, he’s not focused on violent white nationalist extremism at all. He wants to jail protesters and the mayor of Seattle.”
– Reid, September 17, 7:10 p.m. Eastern.
Move Over, Civil War and Slavery! Schmidt Calls COVID Response ‘Greatest Tragedy’ in U.S. History
“Donald Trump has confessed on tape to the greatest and most deadly lie in all the long history of the United States, bar none. It is a failure of leadership at a profound level. It is a failure of moral leadership that is unequalled in the country’s history. He knew how deadly this was. Every United States senator in the Republican Party who heard Trump week by week, day by day, saying that this was a hoax, that it was a Democratic hoax, that it would magically go away, not one of those people took to the floor of the Senate and said, 'what the hell are you doing?' Not one of them went to the Oval Office and said 'stop it, Mr. President, you are killing people.' We have a President of the United States that is fundamentally indifferent to the lives of the American people and this is the greatest tragedy in the history of the United States for no other reason than it’s a completely preventable tragedy. It did not have to be like this. The United States did not have to be the epicenter of coronavirus death and suffering in the world. Our economy did not have to be shattered. The education of every American kid did not have to be disrupted.”
— Schmidt, September 15, 7:07 p.m. Eastern.
MSNBC Contributor: Trump Holding Rallies ‘Is Just Nothing Short of Criminal’
“[T]his is not the first time the scientific and certainly the medical community has questioned the mental state of the President. I mean, he’s seeing things that just make no sense. They’re nonsensical, they’re delusional, not only are they just blatantly incorrect....And the fact that this President has known what he has known back in February, that this is a virus that’s a killer, he compared it to the plague, and it’s airborne, and to then not only not mandate masks and physical distancing, but instead hold large, indoor gatherings is just nothing short of criminal, Joy. We in the scientific community and in the media have to work together to educate the public and protect them, Joy.
— MSNBC contributor Dr. Lipi Roy, September 16, 7:09 p.m. Eastern.
Butler: Barr Is Peddling ‘White Supremacist, History-Denying’ Narrative on Lockdowns
“The purpose of the lockdown was to save lives and according to the scientific journal Nature, the lockdown prevented 60 million actual infections and saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the United States. Slavery was not about saving lives. Slavery was about rape and torture and tearing families apart. So, Barr is not just making a false equivalence, he is making a white supremacist, history-denying false equivalence. To compare slavery to having to stay home for a few months demonstrates a stunning ignorance of both history and science.”
— MSNBC legal analyst Paul Butler, September 17, 7:04 p.m. Eastern.
Reid Laments States Not Closing Their Borders After Trump Rallies
“[H]ow do you close off the border of California to people from Nevada who went to that rally? How do you close off the borders of neighboring states of the people who went to that motorcycle rally? Inside the United States, you have people who have been convinced by Donald Trump that this is no big deal, that it’s no more than the flu, that it’s a minor illness, that they can have herd immunity and everyone will be fine. They’ve been — did you see the people running, running like they were at a K-pop concert to go see Donald Trump with no masks on because they couldn’t wait to get in front of him? So the question is how do you unwind a situation where Trump lied to them and these people are still, even though now they know it, they’re not acting as if they understand what coronavirus is?”
— Reid, September 15, 7:10 p.m. Eastern.
Reid: What Can We Do to Convince Dumb White People to Turn on Trump?
“Donald Trump is not fooling black America, okay? The young lady who asked the question, she knows what’s going on. The vast majority of the Latino community, the AAPI community, are not listening to him anymore. It’s white America that’s listening to him. Let’s just be blunt. He’s still going to win a majority of white American votes. He is still getting positive reviews even for his handling of COVID from white America. Is there something — is there somebody that’s got the gravitas or that’s trusted enough that isn’t Donald Trump who...could talk the majority of white America into believing these truths? Because, honestly, if we still have large numbers of people who don’t believe COVID is real and who reject mask-wearing and reject the science, I don’t know how we back out of this crisis.”
— Reid, September 15, 7:12 p.m. Eastern.
Butler Frets Barr Is ‘Going After Protesters,’ Hopes He Gets Disbarred
“I have never seen an attorney general as explicitly political as William Barr...[H]e is specifically going after protesters connected with the movement for black lives. He is doing that because that’s the President’s political interest. As you said, he’s the president’s fixer. He’s the president’s Roy Cohn. Always have to remember, Roy Cohn got disbarred. What will be the sanction for William Barr?”
— Butler, September 17, 7:07 p.m. Eastern.
Barr Doesn’t Know How the Criminal Justice System Works, Couldn’t Win Court Case
Reid: “[Barr] is basically putting down people who did these prosecutions against people like Michael Flynn, who displeases Donald Trump, so it displeases William Barr, so they’re Montessori students. Do you get a sense that this will ultimately start to drive people to resign? Like, I don’t know how people react to something like that. How would you?”
Former Obama U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance: “So this makes me incredibly angry on behalf of all my former colleagues and prosecutors in the 94 officers nationwide. William Barr has never tried a case in his life in a courtroom, and I’m not sure that he would know how to. He doesn’t look to me that he would be good at it[.]”
— September 17, 7:09 p.m. Eastern.
This week's vile nonsense from Joy Reid and friends were made possible advertisers such as (but not limited to) Allstate, Chevrolet, E-Trade, and Farmer's Insurance. Follow the links to the MRC's Conservatives Fight Back page.
