Last week the brewing White House scandal finally reached such a high fever pitch that even Scarborough Country could not ignore the story. Normally insulated for international and national current events - at least those that don't involve the search for a corpse or a killer - Scarborough Country finally took notice of the story that everyone was talking about. For the first time in over a month a topic other than the murder or disappearance a few individuals became the number one topic of discussion, but not by much.

Imminent indictments, rumors that senior White House staff were facing charges of outing a covert CIA agent, perjury and obstruction of justice, and the possibility that the architect of president Bush's election successes was in jeopardy, Karl Rove himself, barely edged out the time dedicated to two missing women (missing for weeks, if not months), and one murdered wife. Last week Scarborough Country dedicated about 27% of the show to Holloway, Wilson and Vitale (the murdered/missing persons) and almost 30% of the show to the scandal that was rocking Washington. But there was a lot more big news last week, and Joe Scarborough, in the midst of staying on top of these three obviously important cases, somehow found a way to fit it all into his show's busy line-up.

After nearly a month of staying completely silent on the controversy surrounding the war in Iraq, Joe Scarborough finally chimed in. With the death toll of American soldiers surpassing the two thousand mark, Joe had some thoughtful and insightful words at this tragic juncture:

"And, by the way, I noticed in the news break that we have now crossed and I have been seeing it all day—we have now crossed the 2,000 plateau, of 2,000 killed in Iraq. Well, you know what? If it‘s a noble cause, those are terrible, terrible sacrifices, but, at the same time, it bears repeating that we lost 2,000 men, 2,000 heroes in the first hours of D-Day back in 1944. You don‘t hear that."

Thanks for noticing Joe. I'm sure all those middle american families that are paying the price feel much better after you put it into perspective for them. All this time I just figured you were too busy talking about the really big, important tragedies like Holloway, but really all along you just hadn't noticed the 2,000 other tragedies that were taking place. A couple of other points that might be worth making:

1. 2,000 plateau? Something tells me we have not hit any plateau. That number will keep on rising.
2. "If it‘s a noble cause". That's a big "IF". There's no doubt spreading freedom and democracy to the world is a noble cause, but if you can pair the words unrealistic, miss-guided, improbable, costly, foolhardy, arogant, and frought with incompetance and failure, to the word noble, is it worth it? There are plenty of noble world causes that America could spend hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives pursuing, but it doesn't mean we should. Doesn't that last sentance summarize what is supposed to be the conservative philosophy on foreign policy? Joe Scarborough is supposed to be a conservative! And that doesn't even touch on the main point that the war was not ever sold to the American people as some grand noble cause. It was sold to us on the pretense that we only took military action because Iraq was an imminent threat that had to be disarmed, not democratized! Something tells me that middle America never would have signed up to spend billions of dollars and thousands of American lives for this "noble" cause.
   

Ok, that was a bit more than two points. So Joe Scarborough breaks his silence and zero-reporting on the Iraq war to spew off thirty seconds of trite Bush administration propaganda. No wonder he manages to fill 30-60% of his show with talking heads psychoanalyzing some teenage "Goth Killer" over and over again. When you put thirty seconds for the month into a story like the Iraq war, what else are you going to talk about? I guess you call up your psychoanalytical, ex-prosecutor, ex-detective talking heads to pour over every little crime scene detail and media outlet footage of some random crime, because that's what middle america really needs to know about. Superb job Joe!

Moving back to the CIA leak coverage again, I just have to point out Joe Scarborough's astute analysis of the issue. In an effort to demystify the details of the plamegate story and break the story down to its simplest why-do-you-care reason for his self-purported middle american audience, Joe Scarborough says this:

"why do you care if you are outside of the Washington Beltway? You care for this reason, because, if you are a Republican, if James Carville had leaked the identity of an undercover CIA operative, Republicans would be screaming at the top of their lungs. "

WTF does that mean? I should care because if a democrat did it, it would be wrong? Oh I get it now, thanks Joe! I guess since we're all admitting to being blinded by partisanship, and incapable of seeing right from wrong unless it's framed in some childishly simple partisan way, then republicans should just file the plamegate story under "who gives a crap", because it wasn't the democrats breaking the law. Talk about insulting the intelligence of your audience; what a dip shit way to explain the story. How about you should care because your politicians lied to you about some pretty important stuff? How about you should care that your government would out a covert CIA agent just to push their agenda? An agenda that involved the invasion of another country, the spending of hundreds of billions of blah, blah, blah,... I've already said this part. Joe Scarborough completely misses the point.

On another news topic from last week, Rosa Parks passed away, and Joe Scarborough took a few minutes out of his week to mention her passing and pay tribute. In a bizarre juxtaposition, Scarborough Country dedicated more than five times more time talking about a neo-nazi girls band. Rather than discussing the legacy of Rosa Parks, Scarborough Country gave a good six minutes of free publicity to a cutesy girls pop band sporting tee shirts of Hitler smiley faces. Meanwhile Rosa Parks, who passed away the night before the Hitler simley face segment, got less than a minute of Joe's time. You have got to wonder who comes up with this stuff and decides what is worthy of making it on to the broadcast for the night.

Anyway, the regular pie chart and table for last weeks stats are shown below. Remember, click on the pie chart to see it bigger. I hope the image is clear, I've been having problems exporting the excel charts to JPEG.

Topic - week starting 10/24/05	M	T	W	Th	F	Total min.
Supreme Court	0	0	0	19	0	19
Iraq War	0	1	0	0	0	1
Katrina/FEMA	0	4	6	0	11	21
CIA Leak/Plamegate	14	6	22	14	4	60
Avian Bird flu	0	0	0	0	0	0
missing person (Holloway, Wilson, Vitale)	15	20	4	6	10	55
Hurricane Wilma	7	0	2	0	0	9
Oil profits/gas prices	0	0	0	0	13	13
Miscellaneous (racist pop-star girls, Rosa Parks)	1	6	0	2	1	10
"CEOs gone wild"	4	5	4	0	13	13
Total minutes	41	42	38	41	39	201