Morning Joe: Butts and Rebutts

Ever since the terms “too big to fail” entered the political discourse, the most obvious question has been, if a financial institution is too big, to dangerous to the economy to allow it to fail willy nilly, isn’t it too big to exist? Why aren’t we breaking up these threatening monsters?

Morning Joe gives a pass this ayem to Eric Erickson’s gun-rattling attacks on the census.

Lawrence O’Donnell summing up the flaws in the current plan

Mika Brzezinski explains why substance doesn’t matter when it comes to making decisions about the economy.

Does Joe Scarborough think the best hope for failed public school systems is the possibility of natural disaster?

This morning on Morning Joe, the first three hours of “liberal” MSNBC’s cablefest day, host and former Florida GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough allowed Michael Steele a “victory lap” despite the Republican blowout in NY23 and CA10, the only place where candidates were elected who’ll have a vote on Barack Obama’s health care reform.

David Roberts flagged this exceptionally bad NYT article which attacks Vice President Gore for… putting his money where is mouth is. He summarizes:

Professional Gore haters, who make their living peddling lies, cast an absurd charge against Gore. The charge goes in the headline. It goes in the first paragraphs of the story. Then in paragraph 32 it’s revealed that the charge is baseless. And John Broder wasn’t embarrassed to have this appear under his byline.

Oh, and to state the obvious: even if it were true, nobody but a professional Gore hater could possibly find anything wrong with someone investing in the very solutions they say are necessary to save the world. The non-Gore-demented might even find that a perfectly predictable way for a capitalist to respond.

I wonder how John Broder covered the release of the Pickens Plan, which advocates federal policies designed to drastically increase the amount of natural gas used as transportation fuel. Boone Pickens, of course, is the founder of the Orwellian Clean Energy Fuels Corporation, which is the largest provider of natural gas for transportation in the country. Did Mr. Broder point out this apparent conflict of interest?

On Thursday, August 6, I listened to Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan wax eloquent about the authenticity of the allegedly grassroots protest against health care reform at town hall meetings, which are actually astro-turfing efforts organized by GOP talent and funded by corporations.

Today the news of Walter Cronkite’s death reached me at the same time I heard about an exchange between Glenn Greenwald of Salon and Chuck Todd of NBC on torture investigations. The juxtaposition of these events, in such close proximity, highlighted for me the existential threat to American Democracy that we now face. Not from al Qaeda, or other terrorists, but from our own fears, an increasingly elitist society, and a mainstream press without morals, a clear sense of its mission in a free society, or the courage of its forebears.