Yesterday, Joe Scarborough and Jack Welch ribbed Mika Brzezinski for her reading of White House talking points on the oil spill. But after bloggers including this one reported Mika's admission that she was "working with the White House" on the matter, Scarborough has this morning gone all Sir Galahad.
The Morning Joe host said he wasn't going to "call them names," but then proceeded to mockingly imitate bloggers fulminating through their Cheetos.
Here was the exchange of yesterday:
JOE SCARBOROUGH: You know Mika, you keep reading these, these . . .
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: White House talking points.
SCARBOROUGH: Talking points. You keep reading these talking points.
And a bit later . . .
JACK WELCH: They [the government] have experts on flow rates. So I don't think --
BRZEZINSKI: I've got some interesting news on that.
WELCH: You've got some more points on that? [Laughs]
SCARBOROUGH: You got some more points?
BRZEZINSKI: You want to know why I have a file that I've been working on with the White House? And I'll be very transparent about that. Because of your friend Rudy Giuliani who came here last week spewing out a whole bunch of nothing.
But here was the suddenly chivalrous Scarborough of this morning.
SCARBOROUGH: Mika yesterday, she gets pounded by—you know, I won't even call them names—because then they'll say [imitating] "Scarborough called [inaudible]" eating Cheetos. But bloggers said oh, Mika is just reading White House talking points. Well, it's actually called reporting. We asked. Because Rudy came on here and said [Obama] hasn't talked to any industry people, and so I said, let's call the White House and get a list of all the meetings. And that's exactly what we did. And we got the list. And it said that actually he had been reaching out to industry types from the beginning. And so, we read the list. Now, we read the list differently. Mika interpreted it one way and I another, but that's another - -
I resent Joe's remarks, personally observing a strict no-Cheetos-before-noon rule. At 6 AM, my repast of choice is a box of Hostess Twinkies, washed down with whatever dregs I can drain from the crumpled cans of last night's Keystone Light six-pack.
In any case, bloggers are hereby put on notice: when Joe chides Mika for toeing the White House line, he's just joshing. Report his words at your Cheeto-spewing peril!
