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MSGOP
They'd rather be "Right" than be ratings leaders
by Tamara Baker

June 17, 2004 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (apj.us) -- Remember Lori Klausutis?

Michael Moore sure does.

As Mimir points out over at DailyKos, Moore has been sparring with former congresscritter (R-FL) and current MSNBC talk-show host Joe Scarborough -- and Moore isn't shy about bringing up the tragic fate of Ms. Klausutis, who worked for Scarborough when he was still a congresscritter, and whose dead body had several severe skull fractures when it was found in his office one summer morning almost three years ago.

July 21, 2001, was smack-dab in the midst of the media frenzy over another congressman and another young woman: Gary Condit and the then-missing Chandra Levy. Ms. Levy's body had yet to be found, and there was absolutely no evidence that Condit had anything to do with her disappearance and death, but that didn't stop the "liberal" media from hounding both him and his son out of politics forever.

No such media frenzy ever occurred over Joe Scarborough and Lori Klausutis -- even though Lori's death happened under highly suspicious circumstances, and even though Scarborough and his minions went out of their way to lie about it, as they did to a Florida TV station when they falsely claimed that Lori had suffered from a whole host of ailments, as a way to try to support a "natural causes" explanation for her death.

(Oh, and Scarborough, like Condit, was cheating on his wife. Condit's adultery was presented as evidence that he killed Chandra, but media pundits shied away from mentioning Scarborough's own catting around in connection with Lori Klausutis.)

Why? Why the widely disparate treatment of two congressmen with dead young women in their lives?

There's only one thing that would account for it: Scarborough is a Republican, and Condit is a Democrat.

Fast-forward three years. Condit is still trying to get his shattered life together, and was recently given a bit of a boost in his defamation lawsuit against Dominick Dunne, one of his chief tormentors, when Dunne's key source for the Condit story, Martha Jane Shelton, came forward to say that Dunne had paid her to lie about Gary Condit!

Joe Scarborough, on the other hand, has several cushy gigs, including the one with MSNBC -- or as I call it, MSGOP.

Why?

Because MSNBC cancelled their highest-rated show -- and the only one hosted by a liberal -- while it allows low-rated neo-Confederates and proto-Nazis to stay on the air indefinitely. They zapped Phil Donahue's comeback in February 2003 after six months, despite his fast-growing ratings. The excuse: he wasn't doing well enough against O'Reilly.

Well, guess what?

His replacements are doing worse!

I just went and looked up MSNBC's ratings -- and Donahue's show, which pulled a 0.5, is still MSNBC's ratings champ over a year after it went off the air. The best Scar can do is a 0.4.

And Dennis Miller over at CNBC? He's pulling a whopping 0.1.

Check it out for yourself.

Like I said: MSGOP.