By Frank Miele for RealClearPolitics
What a difference a day makes — especially when it’s Election Day!
Before Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected governor of Virginia on Nov. 2, the comfortably smug left was … well … comfortably smug.
Even when polls started to show the election swinging in Youngkin’s direction, Democrat talking heads like MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Scarborough were enthusiastically dismissive of the “Trump Republicans” as racist cult members who were lying about critical race theory, spewing anti-Semitic tropes, and saluting “insurrectionist” flags.
It was all too much for me, so I documented some of the worst offenses in a column two weeks ago. There, in case you missed it, you can read about Scarborough and “Morning Joe” co-host Willie Geist providing cover for Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe as he tried to paint Youngkin as an extremist.
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The supposed “news people” on MSNBC seemed intent on outdoing McAuliffe in advocating the worst of the Democratic Party line.
So you can imagine my surprise on Nov. 3, the day after the victory of Youngkin and his fellow Republican candidates for lieutenant governor and attorney general, when Scarborough seemed to be an entirely different person — oh-so-enlightened about the foolishness of Democrats and their race-baiting strategy of wokeness and tiki torches.
It was almost as though Scarborough had seen the light, or to use a more appropriate metaphor in his case, had woken up and smelled the coffee.
Enlightened Joe no longer thought that Virginia moms and dads were racists just because they didn’t want their children taught that being white makes you an oppressor and being black makes you a victim.
After all, Joe explained, “this is a state that voted for Barack Obama overwhelmingly. This is a state that voted for Kamala Harris overwhelmingly a year ago. This state did not turn [from] an enlightened blue state to a racist state overnight. … That’s how losers think. The morning after the election, you call voters racist even though they voted for Barack Obama and Kamala Harris?”
Not Joe. He calls them racist before the election when he still might be able to switch some votes by intimidating viewers. But after it’s clear that his race-baiting tactic didn’t prevail, he’s oh so ready to pander to his former sworn enemy — the everyday American.
All of a sudden, the guy who two weeks ago suggested that Glenn Youngkin was “nefarious” for saying that critical race theory was being taught in Virginia was himself all set to promote the concerns of parents whose children are taught that they are oppressors.
“There’s a problem with wokism, there’s a problem with critical race theory, there’s a problem with parents hearing from their kids when they come home from school, and people for some reason don’t feel like they can talk about it because they’re gonna be called racist if they talk about it.”
Of course, they’re going to be called racist! “Morning Joe” and the rest of the MSNBC wrecking crew specializes in that practice, and spreading slanders about imaginary “racist dog whistles” that reduce white people to the lowest common Pavlovian denominator.
Scarborough probably knows he doesn’t have any credibility lecturing other people about the impropriety of trying to win an argument by playing the race card, so the day after Democrats suffered their ignominious defeat, “Morning Joe” name-checked the man who had to deal with his own election “shellacking” in 2010.
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“The idea that white people can’t say certain things … or else they’re racist because they’re white, you know who disagrees with that? Barack Obama,” Joe informed us.
He went on to quote Obama in 2019 saying, “I do get a sense sometimes now among certain people. … There is this sense sometimes of the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and that’s enough. Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right, or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself ’cause, man, you see how woke I was!”
To the casual observer, it would seem like “Morning Joe” was acknowledging what was already obvious to most Americans long before Nov. 2. Reducing other people to stereotypes to advance your own supposedly pure agenda is the strategy of — as Joe himself said — losers.
But what are we to make of the fact that Scarborough quoted the wit and wisdom of Barack Obama immediately after having insulted the very voters he says Democrats need to attract in the midterms in order to avoid a bloodbath:
“I kind of like Western-style democracy. I’m kind of attached to it, so I’m sort of invested [in] Democrats not turning Washington over to Trump Republicans.”
Whoa! So much for avoiding lazy stereotypes. Turns out Enlightened Joe is the same old Joe after all. Smelling the coffee didn’t help a bit. So far as he knows, Republicans can’t be trusted with Western-style democracy. They’re just not “woke” enough. But at least “Morning Joe” can sit back and feel pretty good about himself as he serves his bitter brew.
Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.