Revenge of the Greed Heads, Film at 11

Former Congressman Joe Scarborough (a.k.a., The Mayor of Simpleton)
MSNBC TV
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, N.Y. 10112

Big Joe,

Things are not going well down here in Palm Springs, dude. I limped into the hotel lobby Friday afternoon after a spine-numbing drive, and later that evening discovered to my horror that the preznut was getting stranger by the moment and all the money men were descending upon Washington with enough greenbacks in hand to bribe the creator. For this reason I am contemplating a life in the foreign service or as a gubment spook - as long as I fall into the right kind of crowd.

Aside from that dilemma, I am "beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men." One, I know it's a direct reference to Jules from Pulp Fiction and I sense that many of us want to "strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers." And two, watching the coronation proceedings over the last couple of days could make a toughened soul sick with disgust. The next time that either Dubya or Larry Kudlow appears on the TV screen I have no responsibility for any damages, because you have been warned. And it won't be a pretty sight, so make sure you keep me away from the new flatscreen you financed for the Super Bowl. I swear it's toast.

Beyond that, you must be out of your freaking mind - on the teetering edge of rabid insanity - to believe that Dubya has a mandate to do anything beyond dry-humping his narco-enriched First Lady, because the rest of the free-thinking world saw this Inauguration as sufficient proof to a personal delusion more than it did as a "true celebration of democracy." So quit being a traitorous jabbering pimp for the administration. There is nothing to be learned or gained by hitching your wagon to the hallucinatory happy train that is Dubya Incorporated. I personally know operatives back East who would grab you by the starched shirt collar and Zenga belt and inject you with enough truth serum that you would be begging to have your nails painted pink and your piehole with fiery red lipstick, then would leave you on the steps of The New York Times with your fly wide open, your hair trimmed into a greased-up mohawk and your ankles tied together with clothesline.

There's just something about [The Chimperor] that divides America into camps of reds and blues, lovers and haters, friends and enemies ... Later in the show, Janeane Garofalo and Larry Kudlow almost came to blows over Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Bush economic plan. Garofalo, whose feelings for me range from seething contempt to outright hatred, spent her hour in Scarborough Country mad as hell ... Besides, I think Janeane's outburst last night had more to do with the fact that George Bush brings out the worst in blue state progressives than anything I said— that, or the fact that Janeane is secretly hot for me and is working through some very complicated emotions right now.

Must-See-TV, indeed. You're more treacherous than a Judas swine. Why don't you phone Mehlman and tell him you want to hang out with Dubya for a few days on the links for some mulligans - his, not yours, of course - while you exchange some bitching rock n' roll stories from your perverted youth and your affinity for wearing flight suits on national TV? But what you really want to do with the preznut is invite him back to some seedy S&M swankhouse on the outskirts of Jacksonville, where only you know the place for sure, until his people beat the skank out of you for its name. But don't worry much. Open bar, fly-over state dialects, crusty work boots and John Deere caps, and come alone ... does it ring a bell?

In some peculiar Midnight-Cowboy-on-halcion sort of way, I thought it would. So for the moment let's let by-gones be just that, because the best part about punditry is the fights - while the rest is merely so - and I think you've finally seen the light on this divisive Dubya slant in your most recent telecasts. But it goes a great deal deeper than that, too. Even your bad back tells you this. Rather than be cowed by Rove and his army of neo-religious thugs, MSNBC had decided to meet them at the clearing in the forest of the sublime, reaching out with both hands and a hearty belly laugh all at once - explaining your sudden appearance on the nightly broadcast schedule, among other things - and after the bloody dust settled on the remains of the truth, just a few weeks after the passenger jets slammed into the World Trade Center, with both the American Dream and its supreme power of possibility having resigned in disgrace, the network to whom you devote countless hours of righteous dominion had become a papier-mache Mr. Potato Head statue of FOX News ... now dangling on the edge of sanity and serving the same masters who sold us Iraq, WMD, Karzai, Chalabi, duct tape, color-coded alert warnings and democracy-laced nation-building at the barrel of a gun.

The blue states will give God the margin of eternity to justify himself - and what can be gained from these last four years of stupidity. As it turned out, however, those facist bastards had to be given so much rope that they will come close to hanging the rest of us along with themselves, before the so-called liberal media finally fills the power vacuum created by "bloggers in pajamas" while Dubya and his fixers were constructing diabolical plans like lifelong internment in Gitmo and secret CIA interrogation salons in Uzbekistan - otherwise known as the clandestine transport of enemy combatants to undisclosed foreign locations under an "unofficial" policy termed Extraordinary Rendition by internal memoranda - and the John Ashcroft "Patriot Act" which has amounted to nothing less than the birth of an Oval Office Gestapo when you get right down to it.

Maybe that explains the "infuriated 48 percent of Americans," as you put it - and why the decision to use a Reaganomics Greed Head like Larry Kudlow to justify the administration's Middle East suaree was an abject disgrace that seemed as if your network was fine with throwing gasoline on a match. It was like having Scott Peterson sit in for Dr. Phil during "Save Your Marriage" week, bracketed by an endless string of golf club commercials. The world has indeed had enough, while the child preznut - a pseudo-educated dimwit who personifies the notion that the smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness - will probably emerge not so much from the day-to-day events of the Iraqi Crisis, or even from its traumatic electoral conclusion, but more from what its survivors will eventually understand as how we failed to achieve a lasting peace, both in the region and here at home.

It's amazing - as a strangely reminiscent consequence - how the History Channel was showing the Fall of Saigon just as your show went of the air last night. If Dubya ever regains the popularity ratings that followed him in the days after September 11, it will not be through any "revisionist red state psychobabble" or by realigning the facts, which Condi Rice tried to do before the Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee found their collective spine and worked her over like a pack of homicidal New York wiseguys looking for an overdue payment on sharked cash. It will probably be that coming events will force an exhaustive re-evaluation of his deception upon the nation and it will crystallize a heavy awareness of the misfortune cast upon those willing to buy into the delusion in these critical times. And thanks to the propaganda ushered by rethug and AEI refugees on pundit TV, such as yourself, many asleep-at-the-wheel Americans will come to feel like the consumer who had no sooner been swindled into buying a used Ford Pinto that they discovered the entire family had been burned beyond recognition a week later, because nobody warned any of them that a rear-end impact would turn the chassis into molten lava.

Sampai nanti - See you later.