MSNBC's Scarborough Goes Extreme on Ferguson

December 1, 2014

This morning, after watching 5 St. Louis Rams football players raise their arms in support of Michael Brown, Joe Scarborough exposed the more extremist side of his right-wing conservatism.  Usually, Scarborough is able to contain his extremism with a veneer of humor, good fellow-ship, and above all even-handedness.


Last week, for example, when the Grand Jury announced its decision not to indict Office Darren Wilson, Scarborough exercised his legal training and concurred with several of his guests who noted that grand juries are charged with determining whether a person who may have committed a crime should face a trial to determine guilt.  Scarborough even went so far as to agree that grand juries are not the best forum for weighing conflicted evidence and arriving at transparent truth. 

This morning, however, Scarborough conflated the 3 separate parts of the Officer Wilson shooting and accepted a whole host of dubious facts.  In part one of the story of this shooting, shown in a video of dubious legal relevance (Officer Wilson may have been unaware of what the video purported to show at the time of the shooting), Michael Brown is shown taking cigars from a convenience store and physically threatening the clerk who attempted to stop him.  In part 2 of the story, Officer Wilson, cruising down a sparsely used street, saw two young African-American men walking in the middle of a street and ordered them to move to the sidewalk.  (We still do not know the nature of the threat to these 2 men or to traffic that so concerned Officer Wilson he felt it necessary to intervene.)  Although the sequence of events in Wilson’s account differs from another witness’s account of the altercation, there is little doubt that Brown had his torso and arms inside the car.  According to Officer Wilson, Brown was reaching for his gun. Few observers argue that Wilson could not have legitimately killed Brown at this point.  (In fact, Wilson or the clerk may have been able to legitimately kill Brown in the store.)  

In part 3 of the story, the only part in which Office Wilson faces legal jeopardy, Brown had extricated himself from the police car and began to run away from Wilson.  Wilson then left his car and began to shoot at Brown.  According to Wilson and some of the witnesses, at some point approximately 150 feet from Wilson, Brown stopped, turned and either raised or began to raise his arms.  In Wilson’s account, Brown after stopping and turning, assumed a threatening stance, and started to charge him.  A significant number of witnesses disagree with Wilson and testified that Brown had stopped and raised his arms when Wilson killed him.  The question is was Brown charging Wilson, who at the time had a gun in his hand.  If Brown had his hands in the air and was not charging Officer Wilson, then the shooting was not justified.

According to the Grand Jury, the shooting was justified.  But there was no cross examination of any witness.  The prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, did not want Officer Wilson indicted nor an unbiased examination of the conflicting evidence by a jury.  Witness accounts of what happened varied widely; those witnesses who disagreed with Officer Wilson’s account were examined more robustly than those who agreed.  And above all there was apparently no one speaking for Brown although that should have been the Prosecutor McCulloch's job and would have been the prosecutor’s job in a trial.  

In addition, Scarborough threw in a straw man by saying that Michael Brown is not a hero and should not be celebrated as one. No one, however, is saying that Brown is a hero.  Instead, Michael Brown is an icon of the injustice and, in some cases, official criminality that African-Americans face.  One of Scarborough’s guests was Captain Wes Moore (Ret.), an African-American Iraq veteran who was asked to comment on what Scarborough had said and self-identified liberal generally recognized sycophant Donny Deutsch had said.  Captain Moore was pathetic as he timidly made weak points about the need for a trial, but framed each point with overall agreement of the enraged Scarborough, who was ranting about why cops should be angry today. It is unbelievable that he has been celebrated as an example of the heroism of combat veterans in Iraq.  Fortunately, Thomas Roberts pointed out that the problem was the circumstances surrounding the shooting that has aroused the black community (e.g., Brown's body lying in the street for 4 hours and a prosecutor who acted as Officer Wilson’s defense attorney rather than the voice of Michael Brown). 

Why Scarborough should drop his façade as a reasonable Republican at this time is unclear.  Perhaps Scarborough was playing to his base to keep his bona fides as MSNBC’s in-house conservative and paean to fairness and balance.  Or, perhaps Scarborough was attempting to boost his audience share by slicing off some Fox and CNN viewers.  (See our article on MSNBC Spirals Down.)

In either event, here is the big tell.  Scarborough ended his screed by saying 95 per cent of the American people agreed with him that Officer Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown was justifiable.  If we only count white people as Americans, then Scarborough may be right.  More than 5 percent of the U.S. population is black, Latino, Asian, and progressive.  If we include this segment of the U.S. population, even though Scarborough apparently does not,  then there is no way that 95 per cent of Americans agree with him.  Thank God!