Scarborough made a sort of out-of-character attack.

There aren’t a lot of polls that ask for public opinion of both Nancy Pelosi  and Dick Cheney, as the former vice president is a has-been who only makes news when launching dishonest attacks about foreign policy. But the June NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll — in other words, the poll produced by the company Scarborough works for — found that only 26 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of Cheney, while 48 percent had a negative opinion of him. The same poll found that 27 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of Pelosi, while 44 percent viewed her negatively.

So: Cheney’s net negative rating is -22, while Pelosi’s is -17. The answer to Scarborough’s question is “Cheney.”

Conservatives attacked the Dixie Chicks for saying much less about President Bush than what Beck said about President Obama.

Scarborough has some credibility here, because he wasn’t always so sanguine about the Dixie Chicks “controversy.”

At a 2003 concert in London, the Chicks’s lead singer/songwriter Natalie Maines said that they were “ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.” That controversy coincided with the opening weeks of the former congressman’s first show, “Scarborough Country,” and Scarborough pounded the country singers relentlessly for having the audacity to attack George W. Bush. From the March 14, 2003 edition of the show:

It appears the Dixie Chicks are short on southern hospitality when it comes to their southern president. They told fans in England they were ashamed of the president and now their fans ashamed of them.

It’s just the latest incident where celebrities are offending their fans by spouting anti-American agendas. And we’ve seen a parade of Hollywood elites take to the airwaves to dis the war.

But tonight, a refreshing change. You know my next guest, actor Eric Braeden, as Victor Newman from the CBS daytime drama, “The Young and The Restless.”

It went on for weeks. From the April 24, 2003 edition of the show, attacking the singers for appearing on the cover of “Entertainment Weekly” in the nude:

Natalie, we ain’t so proud of you. The Chicks’ outrageous squawk sent their No. 1 single “Travelin’ Soldier” traveling right off the charts. And sales of their album dropped like a lead egg. Radio stations boycotted the Chicks’ music. And they began molting under the commercial pressure. First, they released a boilerplate statement acknowledging that they were disrespectful. But they kept after President Bush for his so-called rush to war.

This was a key moment in the early 2000s culture wars, and Scarborough covered it every time he had an excuse to. On a Sept. 12, 2006 episode of “Scarborough Country,” the host plugged one upcoming segment as “The Dixie Chicks’s stunning new attack on George W. Bush, stunning only because it is such bad PR! Shut up and sing, baby! Shut up and sing!” In the segment, about Natalie Maines calling President Bush a “dumb f**k,” Scarborough gloated at their lack of country radio success.

You’re talking about the leader of the free world, who got reelected by the largest vote count ever in our history. And about the same time, the Dixie checks stopped being able to fill arenas in huge cities like Houston, Texas. So who`s the real dumb — did you say puck? Who`s the real dump person here? I have to use that.

So, now Scarborough is saying what Beck said was more offensive than what Maines said. Will we see weeks of coverage of Beck’s comment on Scarborough’s morning show? Will he book people who want to punish Beck, as he booked country singers, actors, and radio hosts who were attacking Maines?

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I carry no brief for Pelosi, and Pelosi could indeed be misrepresenting what CIA actually briefed to her, even though the additional questions about its briefing schedule are numerous. But if Scarborough had bothered reading, say, an acclaimed history of the CIA, he would immediately see that it’s extremely well documented that the CIA has often misled Congress about sensitive intelligence programs. Basic due diligence, unfortunately, would get in the way of his preferred storyline, so don’t expect anything like this latest self-induced humiliation to prompt an on-air reflection of the way “Morning Joe” operates. The unaccountable ability of some cable TV hosts to just pretend to their audiences like they know what they’re talking about is really staggering.

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“Which vice presidential candidate was taken off the campaign trail and which one was out there drawing thousands of people?” asked Joe Scarborough. Of course, then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) was not “taken off the trail,” and as TWI’s Laura McGann has reported, Palin’s crowds were always overrated. Scarborough’s quasi-co-host Mika Brzezinski followed this up by saying Palin represented “real Americans,” and that some people in “urban America” didn’t get it.

This is fascinating. In 2004, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) lost the presidency with 48.3 percent of the vote, and no one seriously suggested that they represented “real Americans” or anything else. As Ben Smith reported after the election, at least 79 percent of Americans now live in urban areas; the people with whose opinion Brzezinski is so concerned represent a demographic and political fringe. Famously, the county in North Carolina that Sarah Palin pegged as an outpost of “real America” went for Barack Obama over John McCain, by 18 points.

By every metric, Palin is one of the less popular Republican politicians on the national stage: her ticket even carried less of the vote in Alaska (59.4 percent) than the Bush/Cheney ticket carred in 2004 (61.1 percent). And yet mainstream pundits insists that she represents more of the country than the people who won the 2008 election. It’s quite extraordinary.

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