It's also worth considering Scarborough's claim that the Bhutto assassination automatically benefits Hillary. Whatever you think of Hillary, he is obviously basing this diagnosis on the presumption that voters automatically look to presumed hawkish candidates in times of peril and confusion. According to this reading, voters will automatically conclude in such situations that they want the candidate who is imagined to be "more willing to use force," whatever that means. There's no chance that voters could be actually evaluating each candidate's foreign policy ideas.
But there's no earthly reason, as Ben Smith notes, to discount the possibility that the assassination could make people more receptive to Obama's argument that "the Clinton/Bush status quo has produced disaster after disaster, and it's time for a change."
Look, I don't have any idea who will benefit politically from Bhutto's assassination. But the point is, neither does Scarborough -- yet he goes right ahead and tells us that it's Rudy and Hillary, anyway. This is just punditry on auto-pilot, the reflexive serving up of diagnoses based on the same old flawed assumptions that have under-girded establishment punditry for well over a decade now, unchanged by external events or all evidence to the contrary. And we'll undoubtedly be hearing lots more of this in the days ahead.
And thank God MSNBC is going to give us the "insight" of Chris Matthews.
...from the credit where credit is due file, Matthews wore his sensible hat today and was fairly reasonable.