Brian Parks of the Village Voice interviews Morning Joe’s Willie Geist, who gives some behind-the-scenes secrets of the MSNBC morning show.
“People assume there’s some FCC rule that says you can’t drink alcohol on television,” he says when asked if “more alcohol consumed on your show” than other morning programs. “Nonsense. No such rule exists. Actually we haven’t checked the rules, but there probably isn’t one, right?”
He jokes that regular contributor Pat Buchanan “has a ‘Thug Life’ tattoo across his stomach,” in honor of Tupac Shakur. But he also reveals something real that people would be surprised to know about the conservative commentator. “If you talk in private to Upper West Side lefties who pray five times a day in the direction of Barack Obama’s birthplace of Honolulu, they’ll confess that they’ve come to love Pat Buchanan. They hate themselves for it, but they love Pat,” he said.
Click continued for Geist’s story of meeting Jose Canseco in a nightclub a couple years ago (he compared himself to the steroid-slugger)…
I met Canseco in a nightclub in Miami a few years ago, just after he had left baseball. It was late and he was standing alone. He was wearing a mesh tank-top with nothing underneath it. I went up and told him enthusiastically that he should make a comeback so he could reach the 500-home-run milestone. His response was –and I’m paraphrasing here–“F*** you.” Instead of returning to baseball, Canseco joined the cast of The Surreal Life 5 where he traded barbs with Bronson Pinchot and Omarosa. If you’re going to be a disgraced cheater, you might as well have fun doing it.