Digby posted the following video under the headline, Everybody Thinks They’re a Singing Star. It is Joe Scarborough singing a song called, “Reason to Believe.” It is not the great Tim Hardin song. It is rather a country song written by the ex-politician and current television pundit. It’s not a terrible song, but it is most clearly the sort of thing that is only released when the “artist” is already famous.

Huffington Post called it a powerful antiwar song, when it was first released. That’s what you get from the media when you are well connected: flattering lies. The song is not at all antiwar. It is sung from the perspective of a parent who has a child fighting in one of our recent post-9/11 wars. The parent doesn’t like that the child is in harm’s way, but still finds a “reason to believe.” Pretty much, the song comes down to this: it sure is sad that there are evil people in the world that require us to be constantly at war.

What’s sad about it is that there are so many sing-songwriters who are vastly superior to Scarborough. But they don’t even get their music produced, much less released by a major record company, much less get booked on The View. But the way to approach this sort of thing is most definitely not to claim that it is garbage. It isn’t. See that guy there playing the the mandolin? He’s great. See the woman singing backup? She’s great. Hear the invisible violin player? Great as well. But what this shows is the absurdity of meritocracy. Even if you think that Scarborough was great as a politician or a television host, he clearly isn’t great as a singer-songwriter. Yet there he is.