Those Arrogant Morning TV Hosts

I used to enjoy watching Chris Cuomo on CNN's morning show. But when he interviewed Dennis Rodman, he was so verbally abusive and disrespectful to his interviewee that I lost all respect for Cuomo, and I have not been able to watch him since.

A sad offshoot of this is that when I went to the CNN website to register my disgust with Cuomo's pathetic performance (and with the praise everyone else at CNN was mistakenly giving him for his performance), I was astounded to find that 99% of the comments were anti-Rodman, not anti-Cuomo. In fact, most distressing of all, many anti-Rodman comments were downright racist, when race was not an issue at all.

Rodman had gone to North Korea out of friendship with the North Korean leader. This should be considered a good thing, not a thing to condemn him for, as Cuomo did. Yet, Cuomo was relentless in his castigation of Rodman, and he therefore belongs in the Hall of Shame.

Then we have MSNBC's Joe Scarborough. Joe's rants have become increasingly obnoxious in recent months, but there are two specific examples of his arrogance and presumptuousness which pertain to the topic of this post.

After Hoboken mayor Dawn Zimmer told about her encounter with Chris Christie's office, pressuring her to approve a particular development project, Scarborough trashed her, saying that if someone tried this with him he would tell them that "you have 30 seconds to take that back, or I'm calling the United States Attorney. This is presumptuous and arrogant on so many levels one hardly knows where to start. First, none of us knows exactly what we would do in a given situation. It is sheer bluster for Scarborough to pretend otherwise. Second, why would anybody carry around the number of the U.S. Attorney with them? Third, how do you expect a lowly mayor to pick a political fight with a very popular sitting governor? And finally, why does Scarborough assume there is a criminal violation here? CNN's legal expert, Jeffrey Toobin, has pointed out that there is no criminal violation at all here. Rather, it is politics as usual. It is a political issue, not a legal issue.

More recently Scarborough did it again, saying that when Bowe Bergdahl called his father saying he was having doubts about the mission in Afghanistan, the father should have called the unit commander and insisted his son be put into a hospital for evaluation. Again, ridiculously presumptuous. Joe says that's what he would have done had his own son called him with that sort of message. The fact is, the unit commander was already aware of the problems due to Bowe's having walked away on prior occasions, and obviously he didn't feel it merited hospitalization.

This kind of arrogance and presumptuousness I can live without. Joe and Chris, bye-bye.