Say It Ain't So Already

MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle is a Tool

February 3, 2010 at 9:43 PM Leave a comment

I watched a few minutes of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today.  Gabriel Thompson was on, talking about his new book, Working in the Shadows.

Thompson talked about how he spent a year doing manual labor, like ripping raw chicken breasts apart in a plant that slaughtered something like 50,000 chickens a day.  He talked about how he harvested veggies in California, bending and stooping and sweating for eight hours so he would know what it’s like to work “in the shadows.”  The premise of Thompson’s book is that working in the shadows means you probably don’t have any sick leave, break time, overtime and often, no pay.  You’re essentially an indentured servant.

Suddenly, Mike Barnicle butted in, trying to equate Thompson’s to with James O’Keefe’s, the wannabe boy “journalist”  who thought an easy road to fame would be to spend an hour or two trying to bug Democratic Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu’s phones:

Barnicle: You know it’s great for people to get more information about what kinds of jobs are being done by largely an immigrant population but you mentioned, you know, journalism, and it’s important also to note—you didn’t deceive any of your employers did you—in going to work?

Thompson: I totally deceived every employer because at the outset—it was more of a mission of when I told them my work experiences, did I say I’d spent years as a community organizer or years writing about Mexican immigrants—no. Because none of them would have allowed me access.

[…]

Barnicle: Do you view yourself in a similar fashion as, you know, the guy who got grabbed trying to wiretap the phones of Senator—or whatever they were trying to do at Sen. Landrieu’s office?

Thompson: Well… he was trying to commit a felony, right?

Barnicle: Yeah.

Thompson: I don’t think I was trying to commit a felony.

Barnicle: No.

Thompson: What I was trying to—what I wanted to experience and get access to is what it’s like to work in these jobs.

Thompson handled it beautifully but as for Barnicle?  How about attaching to a rock somewhere out in Boston harbor for the next 5, 10 years.

Entry filed under: Financial Crisis, MSNBC, NBC, CNBC / GE (General Electric), The "Liberal Media", Unions, We the People. Tags: .