Arianna Huffington stuck her foot in her mouth during Tuesday's "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, and ended up being totally humiliated by host Joe Scarborough and guests Rudy Giuliani and Mort Zuckerman.
As the subject of Florida's Senate race was broached, Huffington decided to attack the former Mayor of New York City rather than address the qualifications of Republican candidates Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio.
"Your judgment in people has not been stellar -- Bernard Kerik, anybody, so the fact that you're supporting Rubio now, I don't know exactly how seriously we should take it," irrelevantly spouted the liberal publisher.
Marvelously, some of the gentlemen on the panel didn't appreciate the cheap shot including Giuliani himself who finally said, "I come on here just to talk about Marco Rubio, you're attacking me on Bernie Kerik, you're attacking me on how I ran my presidential race. I imagine you're going to attack me on what I did in the Little League when I was a child" (video follows with partial transcript, h/t NB reader Pam):
RUDY GIULIANI: Arianna, I'm also, I'm also responsible largely for the turnaround of New York City. I took over, I took over a city that had 2,000 murders a year, I left a city with four or 500 hundred murders a year. I took over a city with 1.1 million people on welfare, I left a city with 500,000 people on welfare. I took over a city with a $2.3 million deficit, I left a city with a $3 million surplus. I hired a lot of good people to do that...It's just a cheap shot.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: That's a cheap shot!...I want to stop. I want to stop right now. I want to talk also about Bernie Kerik for a second. I know no one else will agree with me. This is just me talking and nobody else. Bernie Kerik did a hell of a job also keeping New York City safe. Two, it's an unpopular thing to say, Bernie Kerik made mistakes, a lot of people make mistakes. I was glad Bernie Kerik was standing behind Rudy Giuliani September 11. And the bottom line is Arianna, if Rudy Giuliani did not run for President of the United States, Bernie Kerik would be walking the streets today, because the second Rudy Giuliani started running for President of the United States, the long knifes came out and they started searching everybody's record and they found somebody who had made some bad mistakes. [...]
MORT ZUCKERMAN: If there is one thing that the mayor deserves a lot of credit for is that he turned around the living conditions of New York by really reinforcing law and order, and particularly backing the police, and doing what he, a fundamental transformation of life in this city.
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: That's not either, or. You are not judging the mayor's entire history. We're talking about something very important, something very specific. And we're talking also about this knee-jerk attempt to criticize the administration on everything, especially the position of the president on terrorism from a man who said you don't know if waterboarding is torture. I don't know if you still hold that position.
GIULIANI: Well, first of all, we have a perfect right to talk all about that, but you're comment about Bernie Kerik was totally irrelevant to it and just a cheap shot. [...]
SCARBOROUGH: Can I ask also how we got from Marco Rubio to waterboarding, Arianna? That is a wild (?), you have taken this conversation and hijacked it.
Exactly, and that's what liberal media elites like Huffington do in these situations. The discussion was Crist versus Rubio, and Huffington instead wanted to just tar the record of someone backing one of the candidates:
HUFFINGTON: It's all about what the mayor stands for. What the man stands for means that we can look at who he supports from that perspective. This is a man...
SCARBOROUGH: Do you want to take waterboarding as the issue you embrace, because I know a guy sitting in the United States Senate now that said it polled pretty damn well in Massachusetts.
HUFFINGTON: What does this have to do with anything?
SCARBOROUGH: It has everything to do with everything. You're saying that his position on waterboarding disqualifies him to endorse a guy in Florida, and I'm telling you if waterboarding is popular in Massachusetts, it's probably pretty popular in my home state of Florida.
HUFFINGTON: So what? So it doesn't disqualify him from supporting anybody he wants. It means that I don't have to take his support particularly seriously. That's all I'm saying.
SCARBOROUGH: I don't think he gives a damn whether you support his candidate or not because you're not going to support him anyway, right?
HUFFINGTON: I'm not saying whether I'm going to support his candidate. I'm saying we're having a conversation about whether who he supports makes a difference.
SCARBOROUGH: It does in Florida.
HUFFINGTON: I mean, this is a man who also spent $50 million in the presidential race and got one delegate.
SCARBOROUGH: Hold on a second. Arianna, I've got to say this. Just stop. If we're going to do this, Arianna, I, understand, we're going to talk about your race in California.
HUFFINGTON: I never, I mean, my...
SCARBOROUGH: You ran for governor of California, and it was a complete flop. I still want to hear your ideas, and I don't always go back to your failures here or your failures there. But for some reason, you're doing it with Giuliani. And I, by the way, I would be defending somebody on the Left if someone on the Right was doing the same thing to them.
GIULIANI: The reality is you criticized the Tea Party movement and the right-wingers for getting terribly personal and terribly irrelevant and racist, and you're the worst offender. I mean, I come on here just to talk about Marco Rubio, you're attacking me on Bernie Kerik, you're attacking me on how I ran my presidential race. I imagine you're going to attack me on what I did in the Little League when I was a child. I mean, this is an over the top, emotional reaction as opposed to an intellectual discussion of whether Rubio or Crist would be the better senator.
Exactly, and this is what Huffington and her ilk do whenever they're on the same set as someone on the Right.
Fortunately, much as what occurred when she tried to take on Fox News's Roger Ailes in January, she ended up being soundly humiliated.
Nice job, gentlemen. Bravo!
*****Update: Allahpundit points out that this isn't the first time Huffington ended up humiliating herself going after Giuliani.
