Pot, kettle, hello? If Dems wanted to find someone to attack Chris Christie's credibility for claiming he didn't know what was going on in his administration, couldn't they have found someone less vulnerable than Robert Gibbs? After all, Gibbs served as spox for Barack Obama, the man who has made an art form out of claiming he only found out about his admin's latest scandal when he read about it in the paper.
But there was Gibbs leading with his chin on Morning Joe today, asking "how many times can [Christie] play the card of 'I had no idea this was going on in my own office?" Joe Scarborough was only too happy to oblige Gibbs with a haymaker to his rhetorical jaw: "Robert, it's getting to the point he is starting to sound like Barack Obama." View the amusing video after the jump.
Even after absorbing Scarborough's blow, Gibbs soldiered on like the Black Knight, regurgitating his original accusation that Christie can only claim so many times that he didn't know what was going on.
Question: how could Gibbs not have realized that he was setting himself up for a classic pot-meet-kettle takedown?
ROBERT GIBBS: You really do have to wonder does he have any idea what's happening in his office, and how many times can you play the card of "I had no idea this was going on in my own office?" This is by all accounts --
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Robert, it's getting to the point where he's starting to sound like Barack Obama: I had no idea until I read about it in the paper, whether it was the AP or Fox, or whether it was the IRS, whether it was NSA.
GIBBS: I knew there was a limit to your capacity to be critical of Chris Christie and now we I assume we've reached it.
SCARBOROUGH: What is it with these politicians? I am actually, Barnicle, making a serious point. I'm sorry to rudely cut off Robert there . . . So what's irritated a lot of us Republicans over the past year is the fact every time bad news comes out, Barack Obama says, oh, I had no idea until I read about it in the paper. I'm just as angry as you. And now they've got the guy that wants to be President of the United States saying, oh, hey, I didn't know about this until I read about it in the paper. Despite the fact it was in my own backyard and I'm just as mad as you. You can understand why some Republicans would be a little concerned with Chris Christie sounding a lot like, in our opinion, about Barack Obama over the past year, right?
GIBBS: Well I don't know whether he sounds like Barack Obama. I certainly know that he sounds as if he has no idea, like I said, what goes on in a statement that came from his office. The decision by the deputy chief of staff as you said to close the world's busiest bridge. Again, I think you can only use that so many times.
