On Thursday’s episode of Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough went way over the line when discussing the situation surrounding the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, an american POW who was finally brought home after nearly five years in captivity. Apparently, Scarborough was off at the beginning of the week and this was his first opportunity to talk about the growing controversy, created solely by conservatives in the media and Republicans in Washington, over Bergdahl. What we were presented with was a disgusting display that actually put Joe’s recent over-the-top demonstrations to shame.
Below is video of the segment, courtesy of MSNBC:
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After starting off the show tossing out spurious arguments and berating the President for his decision to release the “five most important members of the Taliban,” Joe then ended the segment with a hateful rant where he called Bergdahl a deserter and someone who was not worth saving. In fact, he said that Bergdahl should be the last person we should concern ourselves with freeing and that he deserved to be held in captivity due to his own actions.
Scarborough’s hate-filled, vitriolic rant was precipitated by comments made by panel guests Steve Rattner and Eugene Robinson. Joe told Robinson that he wasn’t going to allow him to say that the detainees released may not even be a legitimate threat to the US in the future. Basically, in Joe’s mind, it is an absolute certainty that they are going to mastermind a 9/11-style attack on the US in the future and they should have never been released (even though they were going to have to be released, per international law, within the next year.)
This then started a discussion revolving around Bergdahl’s service and the possibility that he might have gone AWOL prior to being captured in 2009. Robinson wondered if anyone would have a problem with a prisoner exchange for Bergdahl if he was a war hero, rather than someone whose service record is under question. This led to Rattner saying that he’d only release these detainees in exchange for someone truly important, like a Senator or Joe Scarborough (good grief!) This lit the fire under Joe to go off on Bergdahl’s alleged desertion.
Essentially, Scarborough said that Bergdahl is a worthless human being who didn’t deserve to have his country make a deal to secure his release and bring him home. Answering the question about whether his service record mattered, Joe yelled, “Damn straight it matters!” He then went on a tirade of embarrassing proportions, as he claimed that Bergdahl hates America, that he is responsible for six American soldiers dying because they were looking for him (a claim that has since been refuted) and that he is a deserter who should be the last person we think of getting out of that area.
There are few things harder to sit through than a chickenhawk wrapping himself in the flag and calling out a soldier who volunteered to serve his country during a war and just spent five years in captivity. It is especially disgusting when that same chickenhawk is contemptuously flinging out vitriol towards that soldier and his family from the confines of a comfy television studio. Joe Scarborough knows nothing about the horrors of war. He knows nothing of the impact that can have on the psyche of a young man, perhaps leading him to wonder about the effect of war on a foreign country. Scarborough doesn’t know, and frankly, doesn’t care about any of this.
Instead, all he wants to do is push the latest conservative meme, maybe prove to his Republican friends that he’s on board with them. At the same time, he wants to out-outrage the other outrage masters like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. I feel it is about time MSNBC cuts its losses regarding Joe Scarborough once and for all. After this latest stunt, it is time for him to receive his walking papers. Let him sell crazy on Fox News or AM talk radio.
Justin Baragona is the Managing Editor at Politicus Sports as well as Senior Editor at PoliticusUSA. He was a political writer for 411Mania.com before joining PoliticusUSA. Politically, Justin considers himself a liberal but also a realist and pragmatist. Currently, Justin lives in St. Louis, MO and is married. Besides writing, he also runs his own business after spending a number of years in the corporate world. You can follow Justin on Twitter either with his personal handle (@justinbaragona) or the Sports site’s (@PoliticusSports).
