Morning Joe 2/1/2012 -- Scarborough promotes heroin use

I couldn't watch but an hour and a half of Morning Joe today. I knew they were going to run with the Romney "gaffe". So, over and over they expressed their amazement at Romney's insensitivity and tone-deaf-ness. They also brought on the usual suspects from the Left to pile on, and they even showed examples of those on the Right who are critizing Romney's propensity for gaffes.

Let me say that I understood exactly what Romney said and I didn't have to do any intellectual gymnastics to understand. The very poor in America have a safety net, and they always will have a safety net unless our statist system collapses totally and we can't recover. Whether the safety net is in the private sector or government, Americans will help the very poor, and as Romney said, if we find holes, we fix them, or try to. The very poor are a fact of life and they've always been in existent -- less so today than in past times. Now, though, we have people in the middle class falling into poverty. The rich are doing fine. It's what's been considered the middle class that's the problem, because progressive/statist policies have killed jobs and caused a stagnant economy. Romney wants to concentrate on the economic means to recovery, and if we concentrate on economic means, many who are in poverty now, who are in poverty because of government policies harming the economy, can escape poverty and return to the middle class or enter the middle class for the first time. There was no need for Romney, in this short interview, to go into all that -- I understood exactly what he was saying. The problem is that there are media/political types who follow Romney's every words and purposefully twist anything they can find to twist.

Romney doesn't need to be handled more, polished more, dulled more, politicized more -- no, we, the American people, need to reject political games and condemn the twisting and spinning. I can follow anyone around all day and find something they say to twist and spin, not matter how much political experience and polish they possess.

An example is Joe Scarborough. Joe was in congress and has been around politics for a long time. Joe prides himself on his political knowledge and skills. Some even think he has designs on being a possible pick in a brokered convention, and Joe is certainly hitting the talk show circuit lately. Joe said this morning that he could never let the words "I'm not concerned with the poor" escape his lips regardless of any context. Well, Joe certainly let a lot more than that slip this morning. In response to Mika's reporting on a new study showing the addictive qualities of sugar, Joe talked about moderation and said that heroin is good in moderation. Sure, in context, Joe might have been joking, but it wasn't clear that he was joking to a causal observer. Joe then opened what looked like a sugar packet and made a line on the desk which resembled a line of cocaine. Recently Morning Joe made a commercial of the show in which it shows Joe waking up, after someone using paddles to shock him awake, and then immediately grabbing a bottle of liquor and a cigarette -- then the commercial shows the Morning Joe producer getting Joe away from a circle of people on the street gambling with dice, with a cigarette dangling from Joe's mouth.

This total insensitivity to the problem of addiction in America, and especially among the poor, is revolting. Alcoholism, heroin addiction, crack addiction, nicotine addiction, gambling addiction -- many of these addictions hit the poor the hardest, creating a downward spiral that ends in prison, institutionalization or death -- not to mention an impressionable 15 year old who's already under peer pressure who passed the tv this morning and heard Joe say Heroin is okay in moderation. The context doesn't matter. Or, how about some poor African-American crack addict who is in his second day of recovery trying to stay away from this terribly addictive drug who sees Joe make the line of powdery substance on his desk -- this is what they call a relapse trigger in drug treatment circles, and relapse triggers are powerful -- they can send a person in early recovery into a compulsion to use the drug. Nothing to take lightly, and certainly nothing to glamorize.

What Romney said pales in comparison to what Joe said and did this morning and in the past regarding addictive behavior which hurts the poor more than any other group.

Then, in response to Romney's failed attempts to identify with the poor, Joe talked about his parents growing up in the Great Depression and how in desperation they looked to FDR as a king and savior. Joe approved of FDR's inability to relate to the poor and his arrogant assumption that he, FDR, knew what was best for the poor. Lately, well respected economists have shown how FDR's lack of understanding of economics, his economic experimentation, and his royal-like disconnection from those in the private sector who were struggling to overcome the many government interventions, caused the Depression to last way longer than it should have lasted. FDR caused the misery of poverty to last day in and day out for years past what was necessary. Joe praised FDR's actions and disconnectedness from average people. The context doesn't matter -- it's what Joe said and implied. How can anyone consider someone this insenstive as a Presidential candidate? Yet, many of the guests on Morning Joe have urged Joe to run. What is wrong with this guy?