And you thought President Trump was sick? To see real sickness on display, check out today's Morning Joe, where Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski were in total meltdown mode. Triggering them was the brief ride President Trump took yesterday outside Walter Reed hospital to greet and thank well-wishers.
That sent Joe and Mika into hyperbolic paroxysms, with Brzezinski actually claiming to see the potential "implosion of the presidency of the United States." And Scarborough seeing nothing less than a rejection of the Age of Enlightenment!
These people aren't having any of the fun they had over conservative Rep. Louis Gohmert contracting the coronavirus. Scarborough said "It really shocks the conscience!"
Joe and Mika's fever-brained reaction was largely based on the lamentations of a Walter Reed doctor, James P. Phillips, who condemned Trump's ride, saying it unnecessarily put at risk the accompanying Secret Service agents.
But in relying on Phillips, Morning Joe ignored two things:
- As its own NBC parent network reported, "the movement was cleared by the medical team as safe to do."
- Phillips is a "CNN medical analyst." And apparently a highly-politicized one, making pronouncements of a political nature outside his area of medical expertise, as when he tweeted that the Secret Agents "may die for political theater commanded by Trump. This is insanity."
Morning Joe's meltdown over President Trump's ride was sponsored in part by Chewy, SleepNumber, and Home Advisor.
Here's the transcript.
MSNBC
Morning Joe
10-5-20
6:09 am EDTJOE SCARBOROUGH: You look at those pictures, and it really shocks the conscience. And as a Walter Reed doctor said, it was absolutely staggering that this was allowed: "Every single person in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary presidential 'drive-by' just now," the doctor goes on, "has to be quarantined for 14 days. They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for political theater. This is insanity."
. . .
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: And this is not surprising. And at the same time, it's an implosion, potentially, of the presidency of the United States.
. . .
SCARBOROUGH: All because of the rejection of things we learned 300 years ago in the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the trusting of medicine, the trusting of science, the trusting of carefully-gathered facts through hundreds of years of, again, medicine and science and learning. And instead, denialism.
. . .
This drive, this one drive, really neatly encapsulates the recklessness, and the denialism, and the anti-medicine position, that this president and his party have embraced as 200,000-plus people have died.
