MSNBC

At the time, the national press was obsessed with Gary Condit, a Democratic Congressmen who was all-but-accused of killing an intern whom he’d been sleeping with. No such attention fell on Scarborough. (Then 9/11 happened.)

Kos was arguing that Scarborough was the beneficiary of a media double standard whereby scandals ginned up by conservative activists receive attention far beyond what they merit. (Kos was also intentionally needling Scarborough.)

Scarborough responded by saying Kos regularly accuses Scarborough of being a murderer, which Kos disputes.

Then, apparently, Kos was told by Phil Griffin, the head of MSNBC, that he is no longer allowed on MSNBC for the foreseeable future.

I’m hoping this will be only temporary and that the situation can be resolved in a mature fashion, but until then I just don’t know how one could reasonably expect to be welcomed onto our network while publicly antagonizing one of our hosts at the same time.

I mean… one could reasonably expect that because your hosts should have control over who they get to book on their own shows, right?

Not to mention the fact that half the conservatives who’ve ever appeared on Morning Joe have “publicly antagonized” Olbermann, or Rachel Maddow, or Ed Schultz. (Like, uh, Andrew Breitbart, who’s been on MSNBC plenty of times this year.) (Oh, and Liz Cheney.)

But Griffin seems to want Morning Joe — the Beltway insider kaffeeklatsch that gets far more media attention than it does viewers — to be MSNBC’s “flagship” show, which means, apparently, making network-wide booking decisions based on whether guests meet the morning show host’s approval.

Of course, there have been stories of a certain other MSNBC host attempting to get people banned from the network. I am sure the toughest part of Griffin’s job is soothing the massive egos and navigating the clashing personalities at that hilarious middle school of a cable network. But if you give in, they will never learn to play well with others, Phil.

All that’s left, really, is to proudly announce his ascension to the throne as worst hack in America.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
Halperin’s worst low of the last year actually happened in 2010, but it occurred after the Hack 30 was finished, and is thus eligible for inclusion here. Immediately after it was announced that Elizabeth Edwards had died, MSNBC had Halperin on to eulogize her. Halperin did not mention his integral role in the national smearing of Edwards as a harridan (“an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazy-woman,” in the eyes of unnamed “insiders,” according to Halperin’s last book).
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

So every morning he and Mika Brzezinski — who either pretends to be a weak-willed flighty moron because she thinks it’s necessary for her continued professional success as Joe’s oft-belittled second banana/screwball love interest or who is actually tragically stupid — perform the world’s most self-satisfied kaffeeklatsch (along with Willie Geist, the former Tucker Carlson sidekick and a man born to play the guy who dies first in a war movie). Their rotating cast of regular guests includes some of the biggest superstars in political hackery, from Jon Meacham to Mark Halperin to Whitey Bulger-defender/plagiarist Mike Barnicle, but what people who are far too easily entertained love most is the “banter,” that nonstop juvenile japery that I guess passes for wit when it’s 6:30 a.m. and you’re a tragically dull Washington, D.C., lifer. Joe can’t stop cracking up at the word “sodomized” during a discussion of … rape charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn! Hysterical stuff.

(Let’s pause here to remember Scarborough’s long history of being a sanctimonious “decency” crusader, demanding tough FCC penalties for fleeting obscenities on television, which seems to have ended after he said “fuck you” on air one morning, at which point his show instituted a somewhat glitchy seven-second delay.)

It’s Mr. Scarborough’s jocular chauvinism that is the most immediately repellent thing about him and his program, but what may be even hackier is his utterly unself-aware devotion to the “civility” myth. The civility crowd consists of a bunch of rich elites who’ve convinced themselves that all of America’s problems (their list of America’s problems basically consists of the federal deficit and “incivility”) would be solved if Republicans and Democrats sat down in a room and all agreed to basically become Rockefeller Republicans. This weird fantasy animates most of Scarborough’s political analysis, which is especially rich coming from an actual former Republican congressman who rode into Congress not based on a nationwide yearning for civility but rather run-of-the-mill right-wing anger, and who eventually voted to impeach a president for nakedly partisan reasons.

As an official political media elite professional, Joe rails against the “media elite” in columns written for Politico, the D.C. newspaper and website that used to publish Scarborough alongside a liberal counterpart until the liberal counterpart left and wasn’t replaced. These columns, amateurishly written and barely edited, show just how easy it is to become an important political power player if you have the requisite Bloombergian opinions and the correctly sized head for television.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
His unconscionably bad 9/11 “tribute song,” an ill-conceived celebrity vanity project that becomes more offensive the more you think of it.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)