For practically everyone, the written word is noticeably more coherent than the spoken word. Undoubtedly this general rule is due to the fact that when writing, there is sufficient time to develop cogent arguments and weave them into a logical narrative. However, this steaming pile of bovine excrement is irrefutable evidence that the above rule of thumb doesn’t apply to the cartoonish Joe Scarborough. His written words are no more coherent (or accurate) than the unhinged rantings with which he regularly regales his fellow travelers at MSNBC.

To be sure, Slow Joe’s case of PDS is well-documented and his disturbing obsession with Governor Palin is nothing new. However, his latest screed, posted at Democrat political tabloid Politico, has set a new standard for baseless and imbecilic tripe. The piece, which is utterly lacking in anything approaching a rational, fact-based argument, is nothing more than a laughably jumbled rehash of thoroughly debunked liberal talking points combined with Slow Joe’s rapidly slipping grip on reality.

Scarborough begins his harangue by making the conveniently unsubstantiated claim that all Republicans (secretly, of course) think Governor Palin will “devastate” the GOP in 2012, a claim he later repeated on his sparsely watched MSNBC show:

SCARBOROUGH: All of them say it off-set. All of your talk radio hosts that will defend Sarah Palin for three hours every day, all off-set quietly say this. All of your leading conservative figures, all, when off the record, will say all of this about Sarah Palin. But, they want ratings, they want book sales, so they don’t want to upset the 18% of Americans who like Sarah Palin.

So there you have it. In Slow Joe’s imaginary world, all talk radio hosts that praise Governor Palin on their shows clandestinely seek her demise when alone with Scarborough. I wonder if prominent talk radio host Mark Levin, for example, agrees with Scarborough about this or anything else, for that matter.

Joe Scarborough has become a rash on conservatism’s inner thigh. He poses as the last, great conservative thinker, but he truly is buffoonish.

[...]

Go Sarah. Get lost Joe.

Er, I guess not. Nor, I suspect, do Rush Limbaugh or any of the other conservative talk show hosts who are consequential. But that doesn’t matter to Scarborough. You see he knows what these conservatives are really thinking since, doubtlessly, he has imaginary friends who impart this information to him when nobody else is around. Scarborough next attacks Bristol Palin, then Sarah Palin’s Alaska and her America By Heart book tour before uncorking this risible gem:

What man or mouse with a fully functioning human brain and a résumé as thin as Palin’s would flirt with a presidential run? It makes the political biography of Barack Obama look more like Winston Churchill’s…

While I humbly defer to Scarborough’s personal experience with mouse-sized brains (his immense melon being largely hollow), this is nutty even for him. Obama’s political biography? The guy never held an executive position in the public or the private sector. He’s not qualified to run a Kool-Aid stand. Indeed his only qualifications for the most difficult executive position in the country consisted of his “experience” as a community agitator, writing a couple books, reading off a teleprompter, and the actual act of running for president. Nobody can point to any significant legislative accomplishments by Obama, even in the Illinois state senate. Washington pundits continue to make the absurd claim that Obama is brilliant yet there is nothing in his history to suggest any brilliance. Much is made of his impressive academic background yet access to his transcripts is at least as restricted as the nuclear launch codes. In a piece in September, Victor Davis Hanson brilliantly punctured the utter myth that is Obama’s résumé.

And yet Slow Joe thinks it compares favorably to Governor Palin’s. Really? How? Governor Palin has a long history of concrete political achievement, far surpassing anything Obama (or Slow Joe, for that matter) ever accomplished. We have documented Governor Palin’s impressive political résumé many times. For example, see here and here. Scarborough is correct in his implication that there really is no comparison between the two. In sharp contrast to Obama, Governor Palin has accomplished much in her 20-year political career, and she did it largely be taking on the establishment, single-handedly in most cases. That Slow Joe would look at these two résumés and judge Obama’s superior is not surprising given he also thinks Howard Dean, who has been wrong on, well, everything, to be a really bright guy.

Scarborough next makes one of the most idiotic claims in his entire piece (I hesitate to say the most idiotic due to the wealth of competition in this category). Slow Joe amazingly claims that Governor Palin mocked Ronald Reagan, despite the fact that she regularly invokes Reagan in her speeches and writings. Indeed she holds Reagan in the highest regard, and credits him as the inspiration for her political philosophy. Nobody with, um, a brain larger than the size of a mouse could make the claim that she “dismissed” him as ‘an actor’, “mocked” his biography, and “ridiculed” him. But that excludes Joe, doesn’t it? He points to her recent interview with “Sean Hannity” to make his case:

When Sean Hannity asked Palin whether being in a reality show diminished her standing to be president, the former half-term governor mocked Reagan’s biography, dismissing him as “an actor.”

Really? Let’s go to the video tape. The relevant part begins at about the 10:35 mark:

I can’t quite put my finger on it but something isn’t quite right. Sean Hannity looks a lot like…Chris Wallace. Maybe someone slipped me the same meds Slow Joe is obviously imbibing? Or then again, maybe Slow Joe is simply full of sh*t and never saw the interview in the first place. Not only did he totally distort what Governor Palin said, but he couldn’t even name the individual to whom he imagined she said it. This is beyond idiotic, indeed it’s hilarious.  But this is not unexpected when you bloviate on a topic about which you know nothing, an activity for which Scarborough is uniquely qualified given his wealth of experience. Who can forget Scarborough’s bizarre claim that Chris Wallace rolled his eyes at Governor Palin during a previous interview, prompting Wallace to observe that Scarborough “lives out where the trolleys don’t run at night“. It’s difficult to argue with Wallace’s observation.

Scarborough also brings up the half-term governor canard. The fact that she served two-thirds of her term which, incidentally, is the identical proportion Obama served of his term, eludes him entirely. And for Obama to have served two-thirds of his term, we have to include his last two years in the Senate during which he was a full-time candidate for President. Moreover, Obama resigned from the Senate for the narcissistic purpose of assuming a higher paying job for which he was (and is) woefully unqualified. Governor Palin, on the other hand, resigned to save the state of Alaska millions of dollars defending frivolous lawsuits filed by her political enemies, a point we’ve made many times, most recently here. I find it amazing that Scarborough would even bring up the quitter meme. It’s not like he didn’t announce he was quitting under bizarre circumstances a mere five months into his last term in Congress, making him a quarter-term Congressman. Hypocrisy anyone?

Scarborough next cites fellow faux conservative Peggy Noonan as an authoritative source on Reagan, presumably due to her brief tenure as a white house speechwriter a quarter century ago. (As an aside, I wonder if Reagan would have flirted with voting for Obama as Noonan did. I’m skeptical.) But I digress. Noonan, the aging has-been who struggles to stay in the news by childishly denigrating Governor Palin to the diminishing number of people who still take her seriously, is a kindred spirit for Slow Joe. She also got it totally wrong, although I believe it was intentional, an aggressive missing of the point to suit her petty need to trash Governor Palin.

This undoubtedly is why Scarborough used Noonan’s silly piece as cover for his. Both Noonan and Scarborough, for reasons entirely their own, have an obsession with Governor Palin. The is not the first time the two have together strained the boundaries of credulity. Noonan recently found time to make the laughable claim, echoed by Slow Joe, that Governor Palin is responsible for the GOP’s failure to capture the senate. The fact that this is ridiculous doesn’t matter to either of these hapless morons.

Scarborough next takes issue with Governor Palin’s characterization of the Bush family as “blue-bloods”:

Borrowing again from old left-wing attacks that Democrats used against GOP presidents, Palin channeled Ann Richards by bashing Bush and his wife as “blue bloods” who had wrecked America.

Palin was perturbed that a former president and his wife would dare to answer a question about whom they preferred for president in 2012.

By anyone’s definition of the term “blue-bloods”, the Bush dynasty certainly qualifies. Does Slow Joe really want to make the case they don’t simply because the characterization was made by Ann Richards? That’s his argument. There is, to be sure, nothing wrong with being born to wealth, but wealth in and of itself is not sufficient to qualify one as a blue blood. It’s also an attitude, a sense of superiority simply because of one’s pedigree. Barbara Bush is free to endorse anyone she wants (my guess is that she, understandably, hopes Jeb eventually goes for it). But that she wants Governor Palin to “stay in Alaska” and not even compete smacks of classism, and that’s what Governor Palin quite correctly referred to, a point I made in a post last week. Governor Palin wasn’t “bashing” anyone, just stating a fact that is obvious to everyone except, apparently, Slow Joe, who is outraged. This manufactured outrage is as nonsensical as Scarborough’s “outrage” that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell wants to do all he can to ensure Obama is a one-term President.That political parties exist for the singular purpose of winning elections is, evidently, over Joe’s head.

Quarter-termer Joe Scarborough next interprets Governor Palin’s answer to Ingraham’s question as, astonishingly, a “harsh dismissal” of George H.W. Bush’s military service. He then takes two full paragraphs to chronicle Bush’s heroism in WWII. This, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the interview, but Slow Joe is undeterred and hilariously, if unsuccessfully, tries to tie it in to Governor Palin’s blue blood characterization of Barbara Bush’s ill-conceived comment. It’s quite clear that, as was the case with Scarborough’s imaginary “Hannity interview“, he didn’t listen to the Ingraham interview. If he had, he wouldn’t make such a stupid claim. But then again, it is Slow Joe we’re talking about. Scarborough next attempts to attack Governor Palin by contrasting Bush’s war record with Governor Palin’s post-high school years and her efforts to raise money for a college education. One gets the sense that Scarborough is upset that America wasn’t at war in the ’80s and that Governor Palin didn’t enlist and get shot.

I suppose Palin’s harsh dismissal of this great man is more understandable after one reads her biography and realizes that, like Bush, she accomplished a great deal in her early 20s. Who wouldn’t agree that finishing third in the Miss Alaska beauty contest is every bit as treacherous as risking your life in military combat?

This brings up several questions: What did quarter-termer Scarborough do in the 1980s? How did he pay for college? Did he ever serve in combat? How can someone this dumb question anyone else’s qualifications for, well, anything at all? Did he know that he would some day quit one quarter of the way into his term to become rich trumpeting left-wing talking points and kissing liberal a*ses on MSNBC? Just asking.

Scarborough concludes by rehashing most of the idiocy he already wrote: Palin mocked Reagan, trashed Bush’s war record, is a “gaudy circus sideshow”, doesn’t deserve to take up space and breath air on the planet Earth, blah, blah, blah. This is all part of Scarborough’s schtick, of course. He’s on MSPDS, after all. The way one get’s noticed by the DC punditocracy is to call yourself a conservative and attack actual conservatives. See Kathleen Parker, David Brooks, and David Frum, for example.

In Joe’s defense, actually promoting conservatism and conservatives is not healthy for one’s career at MSNBC. It conflicts with their mission. That’s why they hire clowns like Joe Scarborough to be their token conservative. It’s not like quarter-termer Scarborough has anything to fall back on. Nobody wants to spend money on his book. No conservative takes him seriously because he’s a demonstrably unserious person. He’s nothing more than a cartoon, a caricature for conservatives to mock. But hey, he does have his conservative friends. You know, all those imaginary talk show hosts who praise Governor Palin in public for three hours a day but secretly confide their disdain to Slow Joe where the trolleys don’t run. I hope Joe’s imaginary friends are enough for him. They’ll have to be.

Related: Tammy Bruce discussed Scarborough’s rant on her radio show yesterday. She also had an interesting theory on the Bush’s love for Mittens:

(h/t multiple C4P contributors)

Update: This is hilarious. On the same day he wrote the invective-filled diatribe discussed above, Slow Joe announces a plan to “restore civility” to the political dialogue. Seriously, Joe?

Update II by Doug: Mark Levin responds to the baseless charges made by Scarborough and other liberals and elitists:

The article by John Lott to which Levin refers can be found here. Money quote from Levin: (h/t Zooropa) “Sarah Palin is not stupid because if she were the liberals would embrace her like they do Joe Scarborough”.