Joe Scarborough wants Walter Sobchak for president

Joe Scarborough's dream candidate says, "You want a toe?"

It truly blows my mind that, after the debacle that was the 2004 elections and the widespread acknowledgment that the media f**ked up an entire election by going all lizard brain on John Kerry, that a "serious" pundit with his own MSNBC show would say something this alpha-moronic:

You know, Willie, the thing is, Americans want their president, if it's a man, to be a real man. They -- 1984, I remember Ronald Reagan goes to South Boston. He holds up that beer mug --

BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.

SCARBOROUGH: -- in that South Boston pub, and everybody's like, "He's a real man," and I guess Barack Obama's trying to do the same thing, too.

Yeah, Joe, 'cuz you're a real man, what with your bottled water and high-thread-count black sweater. Real salt of the earth.

What do you think are the chances Joe Scarborough can bowl a 200?

Seriously, though, we can take it as a given that, whenever a pundit says "Americans want...," what they actually mean is "I think I'm an average American, and I want..." Joe, then, is telling us he actually believes it when Republicans do their "Man Show" act. Joe Scarborough saw wealthy professional actor Ronald Reagan have a beer in Southie and actually believed that he was a working class beer swillin' man's man at heart, who could have been on Bass Masters or had his own carpentry show had he not opted for politics instead. What do you think are the chances he feels a little safer in his bed when he sees draft-dodging New England aristocrat George W. Bush in jeans and a cowboy hat clearing brush on his livestock-free ranch? Whether a president can bowl a 200 matters to this douchebag, and he thinks it should matter to you, too.

This is a moment where it's useful to remember that the star of "Morning Wood Joe" was a Republican congressman. Tom Tomorrow once wrote a fine cartoon about the kind of candidate Republicans really want. Then again, I'm hearing that this story bubbled up in other parts of the media cesspool as well.

Straight Talk Express

It's a funny aspect of the Clinton/Bush era Republican party that the very things they highlight most about themselves frequently turn out to be the most false. Republicans obsessed with family values turn out to be the most sexually deviant ones, while the warhawks tend overwhelmingly to be the same guys who were ducking the draft 40 years ago. Ronald Reagan, dubbed by modern conservatives the "Great Communicator," would freely tell the most comically absurd and demonstrable lies as long as he thought they would have a powerful effect and that no one would dare call him on it, such as that the Russian language has no word for "freedom," or that he personally liberated Nazi death camps, and that's not even counting the big (read: Iran-Contra) whoppers.

So it's strangely fitting that John McCain, to whom Atrios refers as "the Patron Saint of Maverick Straight Talk," turns out to be a positively Reaganesque liar.

the Reagan coalition

It's a little-known fact that Ronald Reagan was also ten feet tall. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War by challenging Gorbachev to single combat in the famous "Berlin Wall Brawl," throwing the Premier over the wall and breaking his neck with his trademarked "Gipper Flipper." Ronald Reagan is the illegitimate father of over half of white conservatives in the South, and yet it is rumored that Reagan's mother died a virgin. And he had an actual, real-life tax-cutting magic wand, created from the skeletal middle finger of Barry Goldwater and magically bound with the soul of Ayn Rand.

Do the GOP presidential candidates dramatically underestimate southern conservatives in these debates, or are South Carolina Republicans really this succeptible to blatant mythopoiesis? Do southern Republicans watch this tripe and really say, "Well, I would vote for Mike Huckabee, but he doesn't love Ronald Reagan as much as Mitt Romney does?" Do South Carolinians watch these debates and ever think, "Ya know, the way they're all using Reagan's corpse as a ventriloquist dummy is really pretty crass and obnoxious?"

media double-standard

From AP:

A conservative media watchdog organization charged Wednesday that the network morning news shows have spent considerably more time this year on Democrats running for president than on Republicans.

Of course the networks are spending more time on the Democrats. Whoever wins that primary will almost certainly win the White House, so it's much more interesting to hear them than the GOP's clowns.

Also, it's interesting that these guys got an AP article so quickly. I wonder if any of Media Matters' studies on pro-GOP bias in the media have been treated similarly?

Third point: who got rid of the Fairness Doctrine?

Answer: Ronald Reagan.

You made this bed, assholes. Now you've gotta sleep in it.

Fred Thompson: mole for the Nixon Administration

Unbelievable. From The Boston Globe (h/t Digby):

The day before Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel Fred Thompson made the inquiry that launched him into the national spotlight -- asking an aide to President Nixon whether there was a White House taping system -- he telephoned Nixon's lawyer.

Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with "no authority" in divulging the committee's knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon's resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson's actions.

"Thompson was a mole for the White House," Armstrong said in an interview. "Fred was working hammer and tong to defeat the investigation of finding out what happened to authorize Watergate and find out what the role of the president was."

We've been wondered why the anti-Hollywood right swoons every time an actor decides to run for the GOP nod, but I'm now wondering about a different issue: how come these actor-turned-Republican presidential candidates always seem to have some history of being a mole for the bad guys?

Interesting fact: Among the members of HUAC during the period when Reagan provided them with lists of potential communists in the Screen Actors' Guild (of which he was president) was a California congressman named... Richard M. Nixon. And it all comes full circle.