Today the Morning Joe crew was making a big deal about this video of co-host Willie Geist pretending (?) to be a McCain-Palin supporter on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. They were shocked (shocked, I tell you!) about the responses Geist got from passerbys. You'll see at the end of it Mike Barnicle says it proves "why so many people are so right, no pun intented, to really loathe so many on the left." Mika Brzezinski was playing the full-on drama queen after it aired (she was "troubled"!) and everyman's everyman Joe "Gumby Head" Scarborough wanted people on the Upper West Side to "take a closer look at themselves" because they're "really, really hostile people." Sounds pretty bad, right? Take a look:
Yep, that's it.
And since I've been documenting the "polite" way McCain-Palin supporters "disagree" with people who are backing Obama, I felt the need to bang out a quick email to them...
Are you guys kidding me about the upper west side? That footage with Willie was "eye-opening"? For the most part, everyone seemed pretty cordial. Send Willie to a small southern town with Obama t-shirts and then get back to me.
And if Joe and Mika thought that was eye-opening, tell them to watch these videos from outside of McCain and Palin rallies. There's plenty more than what I'm providing in this email. These are only some of the more recent ones that have surfaced:
http://www.youtube.com/...
http://www.youtube.com/...
http://www.youtube.com/...
And then there's this report from Nate Silver's blog FiveThirtyEight.com:
Tony Garcia, 63, and Raul Sorando, 31, were suddenly surrounded by an angry mob. There is a moment in a crowd when something goes from mere yelling to a feeling of danger, and that’s what we witnessed. As photographers and police raced to the scene, the crowd elevated from stable to fast-moving scrum, and the two men were surrounded on all sides as we raced to the circle.
The event maybe lasted a minute, two at the most, before police competently managed to hustle the two away from the scene and out of the danger zone. Only FiveThirtyEight tracked the two men down for comment, a quarter mile down the street.
"People were screaming 'Terrorist!' 'Communist!' 'Socialist!'" Sorando said when we caught up with him. "I had a guy tell me he was gonna kill me."
Asked what had precipitated the event, "We were just chanting 'Obama!' and holding our signs. That was it. And the crowd suddenly got crazy."
***
Now that's what you call eye-opening...
Best,
K
November 4th can't get here soon enough...
[cross-posted at Rumproast]
UPDATE: People are asking for their email. There's an email form on the bottom right of this page. I also believe the email address is morningjoe@msnbc.com.
UPDATE: Replaced MSNBC video with YouTube video since MSNBC embed wasn't working.