Most days, Mika Brzezinski does not challenge Joe Scarborough beyond the kind of banter that's gotten the pair labeled "morning-news-romcom-vérité" by the. Thursday morning, she decided to, for a change, strongly challenge the conservative hackery of Scarborough and Mark Halperin on Mitt Romney's "binders full of women" lie , and faced an avalanche of mansplaining of the "silly woman, let the men tellhow women responded to Romney's comments about women needing to go home early to cook dinner if they're going to work at all.

The level of condescension on display here shows exactly why these guys think what Mitt Romney said was just dandy. They're every bit as sure as he is that women are accessories for their lives, sure that they know what women think—and that, gosh, it just happens to confirm their own views, conveniently enough—sure that women don't care about being lied to or marginalized or paid less, as long as we get to leave work early to go home and cook and clean. So we get Scarborough, the man the show is named after, lecturing Brzezinski, his subordinate, about what women want. Not just what women want. What working-class women want, like he's a great expert and she is, as he repeatedly said, "ridiculous."

It's an attitude designed to keep women in their place, and it's exactly the reason "binders full of women" struck such a chord with so many women. Do you want this attitude in the White House? I didn't think so.

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(Via MrSpock)