Stories like this are almost too perfect:
Speaking this morning on Morning Joe, Scarborough didn’t mention having represented Griffin. Rather, he said he was asked by Griffin’s family, who knew his own family, to find a lawyer for Griffin. (“The family hired me and they wanted me to find him a lawyer, to make sure he didn’t use the Bible as his self-defense in court,” he said) He implied that a number of people expressed interest in taking on the case in order because of its political implications (“for all the wrong reasons”) and that he was wary of such people. Eventually, he said, he found a “progressive, pro-choice” lawyer who nonetheless understood that everyone has the right to counsel. Scarborough went on to talk about the need to return to civility in American politics.
But when the Village Voice dug into the episode for a cover story on Scarborough last year, it found evidence suggesting Scarborough had sought to play a large role in the case.
[….]Of course, Scarborough would go on to win the House seat the following year, with crucial backing from anti-abortion activists. His biggest single donor, according to the Voice, was the National Right to Life Committee, which gave him $15,210, and his second was the Eagle Forum, founded by anti-abortion hardliner Phyllis Schlafly.
But it makes us wonder: Did Scarborough, planning a run for Congress from a deeply socially conservative Florida panhandle district, sought to get involved in the Griffin case as a way to associate himself with, and build support among, the anti-abortion movement? In other words, was Scarborough’s political career launched in part by exploiting the dangerous strain of right-wing extremism that views the defense of an accused killer of an abortion provider as a cause celebre?
Joe Scar is DC royalty now, of course:
Washington kept “Morning Joe’s” Joe Scarborough up past his bedtime last night, as The Week magazine’s Margaret Carlson hosted a book party in her Georgetown home for the MSNBC host and his new book, “The Last Best Hope.”
Attendees included: Alan Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell, Dana Milbank, Chris Licht, Betsy Fischer, Tammy Haddad, Chris Matthews, Adam Verdugo, James Bennet, Ana Marie Cox, Norah O’Donnell, Steve McMahon, Frank Foer, Juleanna Glover, Jayne Sandman, Evan Thomas, Michael Isikoff, Gordon Peterson, Sally Quinn, Luke Russert, Rick Klein, Marc Adelman, Bill Press, Jonathan Capehart, Karen Finney, John Coale, Mark Whittaker, Ashley Parker, Frank Coleman and Mark Ein.
Good Lord, the Beltway media-industrial complex is a swamp.
SGEW
Ike, updated.
gbear
Was that the first stop of his apology tour?
Jim-Bob
I know there are a million other reasons to be pissed off about this list of villagers feteing Scabbagger , but of them all, fucking Ana Marie Cox makes me most ill. Talentless, self-promoting, cloyingly self-consciously hip, and utterly without principles. She’s the archetype of all the bad things old media types think about bloggers.
Robertdsc-iphone
I trust no interns turned up dead in awkward circumstances in the production of this post.
neill
if you laid them out end to end around the equator… it would be a good start …
Laura W
@Robertdsc-iphone: Nice.
@Jim-Bob: cloyingly self-consciously hip
Gad. See: “Too cute by half” in Webster’s, huh? I just hate that Rachel has her on so very often. Makes me think far less of Rachel.
JD Rhoades
@Jim-Bob:
Scarborough was fucking Ana Marie Cox? Euuuuuw.
geg6
Yes, Scarface is a hero to the Village. They seem to like their interns dead more than sexually adventurous. See, if Clenis had just murdered Monica, he, too, would be invited to such star studded event in his honor.
burnspbesq
Gawd. That sounds like a joint Sig Ep/TriDelt party. You know, the one you’d like to be invited to just so you could tell them in no uncertain terms why you would never be caught dead at one of their parties. Just so Skippy would challenge you to a fight he has no chance of winning and Mandy’s eye makeup would get all over her face.
GDIs rule!
Yutsano
And here I thought she and Rachel were having some torrid affair.
burnspbesq
@Yutsano:
Rachel’s spoken for. And in the parallel universe where she has a straight twin sister, I’ve got dibs.
JL
Days start so much better without MSNBC on.
J. Michael Neal
Scarborough dissembling is kind of bad, but I really don’t want to make much of this. Everyone, and I mean *everyone*, really does deserve a defense attorney. I am not going to start chucking insults based upon who a lawyer represents.
SGEW
fixt
/elitist area resident
Yutsano
Hence why I said affair. Though of course that sort of thing tends to not occur with lesbyterians.
KidA
Don’t you mean cesspool?
Jim
ll, fucking Ana Marie Cox makes me most ill. Talentless, self-promoting, cloyingly self-consciously hip, and utterly without principles. She’s the archetype of all the bad things old media types think about bloggers.
AND she works for Air America!! so they’re all convinced she’s a raging leftie, I’m sure.
I had to laugh out loud when I saw Margaret Carlson was hosting the party, another one who’s allegedly on our side. And… Luke Russert? he’s about twenty-five and probably has a trust fund that would choke a Bush. Would you be at a book party for Joe Scarborough, at Margaret Carlson’s house, if you was he?
Funkhauser
Who the f–k are half those people?
Andrew
The world be be a better place if that room was teleported to the far side of the moon. The could have their insider book salons in peace, with no oxygen.
Violet
@Jim:
Yeah, no kidding. He’s twenty-three going on fifty. Way to impress the ladies, Luke. “Wanna go with me to Joe Scarborough’s book party? It’s at Margaret Carlson’s townhome! It’s gonna be wild! Par-tay!”
I don’t see this sort of thing as all that different to what anyone else would do. If a doctor or a teacher wrote a book and had a book party, they’d invite their friends and co-workers, especially if the book was related to the industry in which they worked. The problem is that the business in this case is the press. And it’s all so inbred that we end up with group-think and the pressbots not wanting to rock the boat.
I think we’d all be better off as a country if members of the press weren’t allowed to congregate together unless actually working. Their schmoozing hurts America.
Cain
You never know.. it could end up a two way with andrea mitchell with greenspan watching behind a two way mirror.
I think I threw up a little in my mouth. bleah.
cain
Morbo
Damn. Now that would’ve been a predator drone strike that I could have gotten behind.
wilfred
John Coale? Is there some kind of conjugation involved here – Juan Cole, John Cole, John Coale…
It could be an SAT question –
Question 8,304: The next logical step in this sequence is…Jan Kohl, An Kul, Giancarlo Koala, Gian Ko.
El Cid
@wilfred: There really is a John Coale, unfortunately, but I think the world needs a Giancarlo Koala.
JK
Joe Scarborough is a smarmy, sleazy, obnoxious, knuckle dragging neanderthal and a malignant cancer within the MSM. Morning Joe is a super-sized, putrid, steaming pile of excrement.
JK
Ana Marie Cox is a clueless, pathetic tool.
calipygian
Margaret Carlson? The same Margaret Carlson who was fucking the animate corpse Fred Thompson?
Anne Laurie
I’d settle for a country where ‘members of the press’ went back to being middle-class employees, like teachers or firefighters. Turning the lowly occupation of reporting into the career of journalism, complete with degree requirements, did more to geld the pursuit of The Truth than even the NSA’s criminal abuse of the Patriot Act. In a healthy democracy, reporters see the robber barons who own the politicians (including those robber barons who employ said reporters) as the Enemy, not as their role models or would-be colleagues.
Fulcanelli
Hmmm. I didn’t see Mika on that list, which is interesting. Keith or Rachel either, but that’s no surprise.
Between the Wall St. Bankers and the Lobbyists and the Press, does anybody else get the feeling that the only way this shit will ever stop is if certain people start getting hurt en masse?
What did Kennedy say? When peaceful revolution is impossible, violent revolution is inevitable. Or something.
The next seven and a half years is going to be interesting. By then the wife and I should be looking at putting a down payment on our retirement digs in the BWI.
FTW.
pseudonymous in nc
One reason, I think, why the British political press tend not to hang around much with pols or other political hacks is that there’s a fuckload more interesting stuff to do in London. Same, I think, in Paris and Berlin and Dublin and other big cities that aren’t dedicated political capitals. (My guess is that Ottawa and Canberra are more like DC in that regard.)
Just for comparison’s sake: Michael Portillo, a former Tory MP, now does all sorts of stuff for the BBC; he was in a science programme about the relationship between brain chemistry and science last month. He’s also done documentaries on Wagner, Spanish wildlife, living on welfare, as well as a long-running series of “conversations over dinner”. Oh, and he was a theatre critic for a while.
DC really is a village.
pseudonymous in nc
@Fulcanelli:
Oh, she was there; the piece has some crappy video where she looks somewhat uncomfortable.
Anne Laurie
Yes, but the Founding Fathers — meaning, mostly, the Virginian contingent, thank you Tom J. — couldn’t be leaving our new nation’s capital in New York City, that godless capitalist sinkhole of urban vice, where the professional classes would be liable to ignore the Bible-blessed agrarian simplicity of humble farmers like Mr. Jefferson. I agree that half of America’s perennial political problems go back to this original “red state, blue state” divide, especially since too many states followed the DC pattern and set up their capitals in cities other than the obvious ‘biggest & most successful’ population aggregations. Washington DC has all the worst traits of any company town; everyone’s a booster, everyone’s got multiple long-standing ties to every other actor, every new idea or policy is examined *not* as it will help or hurt the nation it supposedly serves, but as it will help or hurt the Permanent Bureaucracy of Foggy Bottom. If it weren’t for the museums and the monuments, a meteor strike that destroyed everything within the Beltway (given sufficient notice to allow all the residents to flee) would probably increase the sum of every American’s happiness.
Chuck Butcher
Jeeze Louise, sometimes people are friends whatever their politics. When I ran in the Democratic Primary one of my good friends who also happens to be a quite conservative Republican offered to help me on the basis of something other than politics. He knew me to be honest and straight forward and would take my politics to have that. I told him to wait until the General which I wasn’t part of as it turned out.
I actually know shit about Scarborough other than disliking his politics. I know about the various hmmms that are there, but factually not much. It is possible to like people personally and think their politics suck eggs. In a smaller conservative community like this my politics are pretty well known, if I were cut dead for them I’d lose friends. The community DougJ is talking about isn’t all that large either.
This is something other than being shills for pols to get access.
The Grand Panjandrum
The Village Voice isn’t exactly a beacon of well sourced reporting either. They are well known for thinly sourced reporting with frequent leaps in logic to get to the point the reporter is trying to make.
As far as Scarborough goes I think he’s an arsehole, and a self serving one at that. However, EVERYONE deserves good counsel when accused by the government of a crime. I don’t hold it against Scarborough. Of course I do question the judgment of anyone wanting to use that half-bright atavist as an attorney. Jesus! You’d probably would be better off with a public defender.