Joe Scarborough Uses Up His Question Mark Quota For The Decade

Mr. Joe Scarborough (R-but-really-I-but-really-really-R, Comcast) is one of that very small and very loud chorus of life-long professional media Republican persons who now makes a living by loudly protesting their utter shock that their Republican party is...full of Republicans!

If only someone had told them!

Their almost universal response to this completely unexpected revelation which no one could have seen coming has been to use their huge and undeserved media platforms to shout rhetorical questions at no one in particular.

Well not strictly "rhetorical" questions in the sense of questions "asked in order to produce an effect or to make a statement rather than to elicit information" because it turns out that all of Mr. Scarborough's questions actually have answers.

Observe.

From Mr. Scarborough in a column in the Washington Post yesterday -- 

Republicans should be repulsed

...
For if it is true that only 40 percent of Republicans believe the United States should remain in NATO, as recent polling indicates, then who exactly are the other 60 percent?

Were they sleepwalking through history while our North Atlantic allies ... ?

Have they forgotten ... ?

Or that American presidents from Harry S. Truman to George H.W. Bush ... ?

Are today’s Republicans now so tribal as to blindly ... ?

Exactly who are these people, and what have they done with my party? And how could any American support Trump’s tragically weak performance at Helsinki?

What loyal American would embrace a “Putin First” foreign policy ... ?

How can any red-blooded Republican ... ?

If he were still alive, my rock-ribbed Republican father would be asking who these 71 percent were, and why they were selling out America’s national security in the name of a hapless reality TV host. But there is no good answer to that question.

-- from which he spent half of his teevee show this morning reading aloud, over and over again, in an exaggerated, aggrieved voice just to make sure you know how sincere he is (h/t Susie Madrak at Crooks & Liars):

Morning Joe Holds A Wake For Their Imaginary Republican Party

...
Scarborough moans about 75% of Republican voters saying they "liked what he said in Helsinki."

"Who are these people that I grew up with...?"

See what I mean about these not actually being rhetorical questions?  Because there definitely are good answers to those questions, but -- sad! -- they also happen to be answers which Mr. Scarborough definitely does not want to hear.

You see, for decades the prime directive of the political and media machine which operates Mr. Scarborough's party has been to create a political base of pliable morons who are relentlessly condition to believe anything any Conservative con man who flatters their ego and stokes their racism tells them to believe and to ignore anything that Conservative con men tells them to ignore.  (See also, "reprogrammable meatbags")

This is really pretty easy to understand once you disenthrall yourself of the delusion that Republicanism/ Conservatism has anything whatsoever to do with specific policies or principles.

It doesn't.

Republicanism/ Conservatism is nothing more than a huge, mindless, heavily armed recreational vehicle designed to flatten any obstacle standing between Republican party leaders and donors and where they want to picnic on any given day.

This is why it does not matter if every fucking day the party base is told to believe some new, giant, ridiculous lie.  Or something which directly contradicts the received wisdom of William Buckley and Edmund Burke.  Or which directly contradicts things they themselves swore they believed just last week.   The infinite reprogrammability of the party base was the whole point in creating this army of Orwellian stooges in the first place:

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink.

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them… To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

Mr. Scarborough's Republican party spent decades and billions of dollars engineering their base to be perfect chumps.  And up until a minute ago,  Mr. Scarborough was perfectly OK with that because those mindless chumps were being told by O'Reilly and Hannity and Limbaugh and Rove to repeat bumper stickers with which Mr. Scarborough generally agreed. 

Remember these are the same Republicans who rallied to Dubya's defense and trashed anyone as a traitor who criticized his Iraqi Debacle and then immediately reversed their "Respect the President No Matter What Because We're At War Damn It" principles the minute Obama was elected.  The same Republicans who never gave a damn about deficits while Reagan was running them up, then immediately reversed themselves the minute Bill Clinton was elected, then immediately re-reversed themselves the minute George W. Bush was appointed by the Republican supreme court and who never said a mumbling word as Dubya pissed away the Clinton surplus and began running up bigger deficits than Reagan ever did, then immediately re-re-reversed themselves the minute Barack Obama was elected.

Then along came Mr. Scarborough's very good friend, Donald Trump -- a racist con man who spent his entire life specializing in separating rubes from their cash by flattering their egos and stoking their fears.  And lo and behold, guess who immediately re-re-re-reversed themselves on every fucking thing including deficits the minute Vladimir Putin boosted Donald Trump into the White House?

Fun fact: here is a picture of Mr. Scarborough glad-handing his good friend Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago just last year!

OMG #MorningJoe What happened to your political party? What happened to your CHRISTMAS PLANS? No more Mar-A-Lago for you? @Mr_Electrico (this from 2017, not 2005.) pic.twitter.com/XOK5ifmM3v

— Frances Langum (@bluegal) July 20, 2018

So the short answer to all of your questions, Joe, is this.

Your party ignored decades of dire warnings from people like me and went ahead and built a political Doomsday machine to fuck over people like me.

And in November of 2016, your good friend Donald Trump and his Russian handler Vladimir Putin took it away from you and are currently using it to blow shit up that you actually care about.

Behold, a Tip Jar!