I don’t watch a lot of political TV these days, aside from an occasional episode of Maddow or election night coverage. That sweet isolation allowed me to wonder if the people here who constantly complain about how President Obama is pilloried for every little fucking thing in the so-called MSM are exaggerating. Watching five minutes of “Morning Joe” today disabused me of that notion.
Scarborough was babbling in shocked tones about the effrontery of President Obama taking in a baseball game with Raul Castro when, according to Scarborough and the assembled morons on his panel, PBO should have flown home and set about handling the situation in Belgium. As if Belgium and the EU have no agency. As if we should let some craven trio of wispy-bearded fanatics in Brussels dictate the activities of the President of the United States.
I’m convinced that, deep down, clowns like Scarborough get off on a national crisis. I’m not saying they consciously wish for another 9/11, but they sure do miss the drama and sense of vicarious purpose that accompanied that tragedy. GWB, who was a spectacularly failed president by virtually every metric, milked our great national tragedy like a Dairy-O-Matic gone haywire, and that is the standard Scarborough and his contemptible ilk want PBO to meet. I’m glad he ignores them.
Yesterday after work, the mister and I went to a local pub to catch the tail-end of the Tampa Bay Rays vs. Cuban National Baseball Team on TV. Maybe because we live in Florida, we felt the need to experience it as a community event. A woman who was seated adjacent to us watched the game with tears in her eyes. She said she wasn’t even really a big baseball fan, but she never thought she’d see the presidents of the USA and Cuba watching a game together. She also said she never thought she’d have the opportunity to travel to that island not far to our south.
We told her we felt the same way. We reminisced about the Mariel boatlift so long ago, the Elian Gonzalez incident in the 90s and how those events roiled the community. We marveled at the change now. And we were grateful for the steady, thoughtful man who sat watching the game next to Raul Castro. What a vast contrast to the hysterical Republican nitwits who aspire to his job and the one who preceded him in it. What a colossal fuckup it will be if we choose to go backward instead of forward.