If you’ll permit me, I’d like to add a brief follow-up note on the ongoing mess brewing over at MSNBC’s Morning Joe. As I noted yesterday, the flagship news/opinion broadcast of the Beltway consensus was summarily yanked from the air on the Monday after the world was reeling from the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, leaving all to speculate wildly about what on earth must have been uttered intemperately by people behind the scenes to raise such alarm bells. Where were Joe and Mika? How could official Washington even hope to function or make sense of the news without their steady, guiding presence?

Well, Scarborough and Brzezinski are back today, and they’re not taking this insult to their honor lying down. If you have three minutes to spare for some amusing schadenfreude, I recommend that you watch Scarborough’s agonizingly huffy “official response” to yesterday’s benching. Your attention to detail will be well rewarded. (For example, there’s a hilarious moment right at the start where Willie Geist, not thinking’s he’s on camera yet, visibly gulps as he realizes Joe’s about to launch into a rant.)

We were told, in no uncertain terms on Sunday evening that there was going to be one news feed across all NBC news channels yesterday. That did not happen. We were very surprised. We were very disappointed. And if we had known that there wasn’t going to be the one news feed, from NBC news across all NBC news channels, Willie, we obviously would have been in yesterday morning.

It continues on like that for quite a while, as Joe reveals to the world that the suits at MSNBC basically lied only to them about a nonexistent plan to go with a “national feed” covering both NBC and MSNBC, when in fact all they really wanted to do was ensure that Morning Joe and its stable of apparently explosive guests didn’t dynamite the network with conspiratorial rhetoric yesterday morning. (You really need to see Geist in this moment on the split screen to appreciate the comedy of it all; he is so tightly rictus-frozen in professionally expressionless awkwardness that he might just turn into a pillar of salt.)

The funniest thing about Scarborough’s rant is that — although he tries to dress it defensively as a story of corporate deceit — what comes through is in fact a much different spin on things: Yes, NBC felt the need to quickly make up a phony excuse — one that would easily be found out soon, too! — just to buy enough time to prevent Mika and Joe from going on that air. Understand the amazing implications of that! In a desperate rush, the network told them an obvious, hashed-out lie that wouldn’t have fooled a particularly alert teenager because it has that little confidence in them.

Scarborough ended his rant this morning by saying, with feigned bravado, “Next time we’re told there’s going to be a news feed replacing us, we will be in our chairs. . . . The news feed will be us, or they can get somebody else to host the show.” It is the empty threat of a man who seems to be in denial about how the show has genuinely sacrificed its preexisting (and largely unearned) intellectual credibility owing to its slavish whitewashing, for months and even years, of Biden’s decline. Scarborough and Brzezinski were ranting to their viewers as recently as March of this year that not only was Joe Biden perfectly “with it,” he was in fact better than ever, reaching sublime peak powers before which only a mindless partisan could not fail to bow.

So if Joe and Mika want to get defensive and act as if their NBC overlords’ loss of confidence in them is an insult, then perhaps they should feel insulted. Maybe there’s a lesson here for them. After all, think about what it must require for the progressive bosses of a progressive-themed media network to call a sudden grounding to their most respectable “mainstream” television news brand. Then think about the path Morning Joe has been on for years now, how it has gone increasingly on tilt as Scarborough reckons with the grim (and yet utterly hilarious) truth: that history will judge him as the man who did more than any other figure in all of Western media to elect Donald Trump president twice — first by building him up in 2016 as a harmless “ratings stunt,” then in 2024 by conspiring with the White House to conceal Joe Biden’s collapsing health until it was too late.

As for me, I know only this: Were I a card-carrying Establishment liberal married into card-carrying Establishment liberal royalty, I wouldn’t sleep well at night with that on my conscience — not even if my equally guilty partner were sleeping beside me. And perhaps that explains the show’s downward progression better than anything else.