‘Pulling Morning Joe off the air is an admission.’ ‘An admission of what?’ remains the only question.
I don’t know if you heard, but a psychopath came within a hairsbreadth of assassinating Donald Trump on Saturday night at a Pennsylvania rally. And by the way, not hearing about such things is more common than you might expect, particularly among a certain kind of consciously “healthy living” sort impossible to avoid in white-collar urban environments these days. I had a friend finally text me this morning at 3:30 a.m. saying “wtf dude they shot trump?!” So spare a moment’s pity for the horrified confusion of all the coastal elites only now emerging from weekend-long “phone-free” meditations and chakra adjustments and returning to the real world, without their North Star to guide them. They want to know what the hell it was that just happened. “How could a madman have come so close to murdering the former (and potentially future) president? And, oh dear Lord no, did Donald Trump actually look inspiringly cool surviving it? Am I required to feel patriotic now?” Each and every one of these confused, goggle-eyed liberals stumbling squintingly out of Plato’s Cave into the light after a weekend of madness is naturally turning to the place all such well-informed participants in our societal elite do to be told what to think: MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
Only Morning Joe is nowhere to be found. Folks, it is off the air today, for the first time in its history, and this is neither an accident nor a minor event in the media world. The flagship broadcast of America’s political establishment, Joe Biden’s “favorite show” — the one he possibly watches more religiously than he attends Mass — is missing in action on this most important Monday in recent living political times. (I imagine Joe Biden now lost, without his magnetic lodestone to center him, lacking any idea of what to say even to his chef today, and for the first time I genuinely fear for the nation.)
Morning Joe has long been the embodiment of the most insular and elite of respectable Beltway Consensus. The premise was always both simple and smugly implied — its inside-media nuances are properly the province of a different, devoted piece — but this is where you go to hear the News of the Day, Properly Interpreted: a mixture of opinion interrupted by serious news coverage, with a panel of guests ranging from the left to the center-right(-ish). In other words, they are “the Blob” incarnate, that forever-agglutinating congeries of policy wonks, lobbyists, the permanent “Washington class,” media strivers, and the occasional ex-pol expressing the safe conventional wisdom of the “sane left.”
And apparently, we must now all Beware of the Blob, for it cannot be trusted to be let loose on this Monday morning to explain how America ought to properly regard the attempted assassination of the former president of the United States. Could that possibly be because the attempt came after years of Morning Joe’s various guests spending their waking hours depicting that same man as an incubatory proto-Hitler? Here’s the funny thing: Honestly, I doubt it.
Read that again carefully: I do not think that was the reason at all. Because I don’t think shame motivated MSNBC at all. I instead wonder whether it was well-placed fear. Surely there are private communications — texts, emails, perhaps deeply unfortunate drunken half-punctuated rants CC’d to far more people than a sober person would send — that made today impossible. Why else would MSNBC do the utterly unprecedented, and simply axe its flagship brand-name show on one of the most consequential news days of the last decade? And if it was impossible for Mika and Joe to be up to the challenge of discussing events without the sort of rhetoric that would shame an entire nation, to say nothing of a network, then how on earth would it be any less so tomorrow? To quote one of RedState’s sharpest observers: “Pulling Morning Joe off the air is an admission.” “An admission of what?” remains the only question.