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Joe Scarborough came close to calling Donald Trump a fraud when it comes to his late-in-life switch from being strongly pro-choice, including supporting partial-birth abortion, to being pro-life. On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough flatly called Trump's 180-degree flip on the issue, coming when it did, "impossible." Scarborough's comments came in the context of Trump's statement [later amended] to Chris Matthews during a town hall yesterday that he supported some form of punishment for women having abortions. Said Scarborough: "Unless you have some religious experience on the road to Damascus which I haven't seen in Donald, it's just impossible!" Here's the...

MSNBC might have to build a deeper tank . . . so that Cokie Roberts can dive into it for Hillary. On today's Morning Joe, Roberts of NPR complained about the resources the FBI is devoting to the investigation of Hillary Clinton's misuse of email. Carped Cokie: "Don't they have other problems? There's no crime in the country they should be worrying about?" Roberts' timing could hardly have been worse. Just moments before, Joe Scarborough pointed out that last week it was revealed that 22 of the emails on Hillary's server "were so sensitive that the state department said releasing...

Methinks the Goldberg doth protest too much . . . Twice during his appearance on today's Morning Joe, The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg claimed that he wasn't there to "flack" for President Obama on foreign policy . . . but then proceeded to do just that. The Atlantic recently published a long piece by Goldberg on Obama's foreign policy, based on the author's interviews of the president and some of his top national security aides. In his first flack, Goldberg defended Obama's cool-dude shades-wearing, wave-doing attendance at a Cuban baseball game and his tangoing in Argentina in the immediate wake of...

Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had a jolly old time mocking Ted Cruz on today's Morning Joe. After playing a clip of Cruz refusing to say whether he'd support Trump given The Donald's attack on his wife, Joe imagined Cruz rehearsing his words before a mirror. Scarborough went on to approvingly cite David Axelrod, who had said that Cruz seems "staged" even when defending the honor of his wife. [Granted, Axelrod's protege Barack Obama is so much smoother with his prevarications.] View the video here.

The snide comments began to roll in before the Republican frontrunner even finished his speech. "The Donald can read!" one critic snarled. "He just cut and pasted his pandering remarks," another sneered. "Trump went an entire speech without making fart noises and for that he gets kudos," observed yet another. In fact, most of the commentariat were dismissive of Donald Trump's speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee tonight. But just like journalists and pundits who were too contemptuous of Trump to see the strength of his insurgent campaign unfolding before their eyes, those mocking the candidate's teleprompter-aided talk...

In light of Friday night's fracas in Chicago, Joe Scarborough writes, "America faces a deepening divide that is tearing away at the fabric of this great land." Joe continues in The Washington Post: Friday's freak show was as prepackaged as a rerun of "Celebrity Apprentice." The only difference was that Donald Trump delivered his lines on the phone from a hotel room in the Windy City instead of on the set of his made-for-TV boardroom. It was all a scam. Has anyone noticed that Trump's campaign now regularly stages media events designed to eclipse any negative coverage that predictably follows...

Riffing off a clip of Ted Cruz welcoming Marco Rubio followers to his fold, Mika Brzezinski went on an extended critique of Cruz's mannerisms on today's Morning Joe. Steve Schmidt joined in, accusing Cruz of "oozing insincerity." Joe Scarborough pretended not to know what the others were talking about, facetiously wondering "what are you talking about? You didn't think that was from the heart?" View the video here.

Joe Scarborough usually sets the tone on Morning Joe. But today, Mika Brzezinski took the lead, abruptly booting Florida Governor Rick Scott from the show today for his refusal to comment substantively on Donald Trump's statement yesterday that "Islam hates us." As Scott repeated various bland statements about Florida, Mika could be heard muttering "wrap it" and "no, no." After a final try at getting Scott to respond, Mika curtly announced "we will move on now. Thanks." When the show returned after a break, Mika excoriated Scott, calling his performance "weak, sniveling political wavering," saying he was "pathetic" and that...

As Don Imus might say, there was a "tension convention" on the set of today''s Morning Joe. Joe Scarborough and Nicolle Wallace got into it over Marco Rubio's future. Scarborough repeatedly argued that Rubio should get out before the Florida primary, or risk ruining his political future. Wallace made the case that Rubio has the right to remain in as much as Kasich, both their strategies being to survive to a hopefully brokered convention. Scarborough would surely say his was simply the voice of political reason. But watch the clip, and see if there isn't something more at work. As...

On today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough ridiculed his employer, MSNBC, for "bowing and scraping" to then-candidate Barack Obama in 2008. Along the way, he did an hilarious impression of Keith Olbermann's faux-Churchillian tones, seeing racism on the rise whenever Hillary won a primary, and "calling George W. Bush a Nazi every day." Scarborough's comments came in the course of discussing the way that, according to Joe, Fox News has shifted its favor from Marco Rubio to Donald Trump. Scarborough found that shocking, "because, my God, I've never seen a candidate treated better by any network, well, other than MSNBC bowing...

Morning Joe, in the person of Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist, took a victory lap this morning on the occasion of Donald Trump's impressive Super Tuesday victories. The theme of the opening half-hour: we told you so. Their point: from the day he announced his candidacy, the Morning Joe team took Trump seriously and said he could be a real factor. In contrast, the poobahs of politics and media made fools of themselves predicting Trump's imminent demise. In an amusing spike-the-ball display, Morning Joe went to the length of producing a montage of its greatest hits, juxtaposing clips...

Trump at timestamp 1:40

If Joe Scarborough were ever, as some have claimed, in the the tank for Donald Trump, he has officially climbed out as of this morning. On today's Morning Joe, reacting to the clip of Jake Tapper's interview, Scarborough called Trump's refusal to forthrightly reject the support of Klansman David Duke "disqualifying." A bit later, Joe and Mika Brzezinski said that if Trump fails today to clean up the situation, Chris Christie "cannot stay with Donald Trump's campaign." View the video here.

A few days before the South Carolina primary, I appeared on Morning Joe and said Trump was operating out of his lizard brain--which is a common phrase for the ancient knob of reflexive lower-brain structures perched atop our spinal cord--rather than his frontal lobe, which is where thought and reason take place. For this, Joe Scarborough accused me of suffering from "Trump derangement syndrome." The night before, Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had hosted an hour-long town hall with Trump--and no other candidate. It was a classic Trump performance, filled with nastiness and ignorance. He said he would abolish Obamacare but...

We've used the metaphor before: this wasn't softball--it was T-ball. In the course of a lengthy interview that aired on Morning Joe today, a sympathetic Joe Scarborough asked Hillary Clinton: "the question is why doesn't anything stick to [Trump] whereas everything seems to stick to Hillary Clinton? It's got to be frustrating for you to see sort of the double standard." Double-standard. Got to be frustrating. Kleenex: STAT! Mika Brzezinski seconded Scarborough's shoulder-to-cry-on: "if you said something in 1994 someone would hold up a sign and take it out of context in front of a speech you're doing." Aww. View...

Demonstrating once again that Israel remains a favorite whipping boy of the liberal media, there was John Heilemann of New York magazine on today's Morning Joe defending John Kerry's grotesque claim that Israel risked becoming an "apartheid state." According to Heilemann, Kerry's ugly accusation was "not actually an unreasonable statement." To his credit, Joe Scarborough promptly riposted, saying "I couldn't disagree with you more." View the video here.

And we thought Joe Scarborough was the one who had it in for Marco Rubio . . . Turns out, Mika Brzezinski really doesn't dig Rubio. At all. On today's Morning Joe, Mika painted Rubio as an unprincipled pol "sucking up" to Donald Trump in order to be his VP pick. Mika: "he's the only one who will go against everything he believes in and say whatever Trump wants him to. He'll do whatever Trump tells him to do." Ouch. View the video here.

Mark it down, said Joe Scarborough. Okay, done. On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough repeatedly, emphatically, declared that Ted Cruz's campaign is "over." The campaign ended, said Scarborough, when Cruz lost evangelicals in South Carolina to Trump, despite the Donald's praise of Planned Parenthood. Scarborough let it be known that he would have voted for Jeb Bush, and also admires John Kasich. But with Jeb gone, Joe wants to clear the field of both Kasich and Cruz to set up a one-on-one between Rubio and Trump. Given the criticism of Scarborough for what some of us saw as bias against Rubio,...

Newly-leaked audio shows MSNBC hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough chatting with Donald TrumpDonald TrumpObama to visit Florida on Friday Much of the recording, released by comedian Harry Shearer on his weekly radio show, seems typical of off-camera patter at television shows. But it also comes amid criticism, some of it from CNN and other rivals to MSNBC, that the "Morning Joe" team is too supportive or close to Trump, the GOP presidential frontrunner. In one exchange, Brzezinski calls Trump's decision to call two men onstage to a rally last week after they confronted a protester a "wow moment." "You...

If there was one theme on today's Morning Joe, it was Joe Scarborough's relentless, merciless mocking of the notion that Marco Rubio has an electoral "firewall" in Nevada. It began with Mika Brzezinski's citing of a National Review article from December that spoke of such a firewall. Joe, butter not melting in his mouth, turned to Mark Halperin, coyly wondering why he was laughing at the notion. Halperin opined that, in fact, Donald Trump was likely to carry Nevada with his biggest margin yet. Scarborough returned repeatedly to his routine, even working it into a Richard Haass report on the...