How Mika didn’t pull a Tagg Romney is beyond me. This morning Mika brought up the fact that Mitt Romney lied about the binders. Here’s the lie:
ROMNEY: And I — and I went to my staff, and I said, “How come all the people for these jobs are — are all men.” They said, “Well, these are the people that have the qualifications.” And I said, “Well, gosh, can’t we — can’t we find some — some women that are also qualified?”
And — and so we — we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.
I went to a number of women’s groups and said, “Can you help us find folks,” and they brought us whole binders full of women.
Mika pointed out that this was a lie.
Whoa! That was simply too much for the men of Morning Joe. How dare she bring up something that the men declared unimportant; how dare she point out that Mitt lied again. Joe Scarborough declared the women in binders topic ridiculous and desperate – which tells me that he’s afraid of it. Mark Halperin stated that “that’s not what this election should be about” and how they “shouldn’t be parsing individual statements said live during a debate” and asked, wistfully, if we could just talk policy for the next three weeks. I intend to hold him to that. Let’s start with his policy filled twitter feed and move onto his policy filled blog.
But the comment that actually had me stopping in my tracks was this bit of mansplaining by Joe Scarborough. Joe was scolding Mika, telling her how abortion wasn’t a big issue outside of Los Angelos and Manhattan, that most women are concerned about the economy. Here’s who Joe cited to show how unimportant abortion is in this election:
“I talk about the waitresses. I could talk about the single mom who’s a school teacher in Des Moines who’s raising three kids on her own.”
Take a good look at that example and ask yourself if maybe, just maybe, controlling whether or not she has a fourth child will effect her economy. Right there – there’s the disconnect. Access to birth control and abortion are economic issues to women.
The men of Morning Joe are a clueless embarrassment. All of them have cited things like gas prices, the cost of college, electric bills, etc. as economic issues facing the middle class, but they suddenly refuse to put having/raising a child and the cost of contraception into their economic cost analysis? Are they really this stupid?
Keep talking about Mitt’s “women in binders” comment because, judging by their outraged reaction and over-the-top rudeness this morning, it’s resonating.