Following up on an earlier item, I probably didn’t need another example of why most television news is unwatchable, but MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough offered one anyway. Within an hour of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination:
This is just bizarre, for so many reasons. To hear Scarborough tell it, Giuliani “talks” about 9/11, so the Bhutto slaying necessarily gives him a boost. Of course, Giuliani doesn’t have any experience in foreign policy, national security, or counter-terrorism, but Scarborough seems to find that irrelevant (and not worth mentioning). He was the mayor of a city attacked by terrorists, so Pakistan moving towards the brink is obviously a political advantage.
For that matter, as Greg Sargent noted, the assumption is more than foolish; it’s debunked by polling data: “The most recent polling on terrorism in the GOP primary that I can find suggests there’s no reason to presume Rudy has an advantage on it…. I don’t have any idea who will benefit politically from Bhutto’s assassination. But the point is, neither does Scarborough…. This is just punditry on auto-pilot, the reflexive serving up of diagnoses based on the same old flawed assumptions that have under-girded establishment punditry for well over a decade now, unchanged by external events or all evidence to the contrary.”
For those of you who can’t watch video clips online, here’s my transcript of Scarborough’s comments:
“You know, in the past, uncertainty on the international stage has usually helped Republicans in general elections, but since we’re talking about primary battles, the question is how this event is going to change these contests. On the Republican side, you’ve got the press release from the person who it’s going to help most. There’s no doubt Rudy Giuliani will be helped by this, this terrible situation. And he’ll be helped because, uh, we’ve seen his poll numbers evaporate over the past few weeks and a lot of people have talked about his personal life, but equally damaging to Giuliani’s standing among Republican voters has been the fact that the National Intelligence Estimate has come out and said that Iran is a less dangerous place than we expected; Iraq has been stabilized, for now, by the surge, and that does not help Rudy Giuliani because, as we’ve been saying every morning for the past six months, he’s talking about 9/11, talking about how we need a tough leader to face down the threat of terrorism, and that’s exactly what we’ve seen come out of the Giuliani camp this morning.
“Expect to hear that, and expect this to have a positive impact — this terrible, terrible situation — to have a positive political impact on Giuliani’s campaign, because when Americans see these images flash across the screen and understand that this just occurred in the most dangerous country on the planet, that has nuclear weapons, the most unstable planet [sic] that has nuclear weapons, suddenly they understand uh, that it is a dangerous situation. And that helps Giuliani. […]
“The Musharraf. The Musharraf question and the test of leadership for the 2008 election, and that question is, who do you want in the White House when the news comes at 2 a.m. in the morning, that Gen. Musharraf has been assassinated and that al Qaeda may be getting their hands on nuclear weapons? Who is ready? And, of course, Rudy has, what is it, ‘Tested, Ready, Now’? You’re going to be hearing a lot from Rudy Giuliani over the next several weeks about how he is that man.”
Does any of this make any sense?