MSNBC's Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough hammered Bill Clinton on Tuesday regarding a number of comments the former Democratic president had made blaming “angry white men” and other external factors for GOP candidate Donald Trump's win over his Democratic rival, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Scarborough was particularly peeved about Clinton's insistence that his wife only lost because America had entered a “post-truth” era. “Oh, my god,” the male host told co-host Mika Brzezinski. “This coming … from the man that said it depends on what your definition of 'is' is!”
According to an article by Alex Griswold for the Mediaite website, the male co-host said: “I would ask if he has no shame, but he proved decades ago that he didn’t. If [the Clintons] would just get out of the way and be gracious about this, there would be people carrying their water.”
“Scarborough slammed the former president's use of the term 'angry white men' that annoyed Scarborough the most,” Griswold noted.
“Those ‘angry white men’ that Bill Clinton is talking about are the same ‘angry white men’ that got him elected president and the same ‘angry white men' that Bill Clinton was complaining about for months that the Clintons weren’t reaching,” the Mediaite reporter noted.
During the interview, the former president stated:
You know, I've watched her work for two years. I watched her battle through that bogus email deal and be vindicated at the end when Secretary [of State Colin] Powell came out, and she fought through that.
She fought through everything, and she prevailed against it all, but you know, in the end we had to rush it and the FBI deal, she couldn't prevail against that and she still won by two million votes.
At that point, Brzezinski came onscreen to quote “some more recent venting from the former president earlier this month.”
“Bill Clinton spoke with the [unnamed editor of the Bedford-Pound Ridge] Record Review, a small weekly newspaper near the Clintons' home in Chappaqua,” she noted.
“While the former president browsed at a local book store in the comments obtained by Politico, Clinton acknowledged he received a phone call from Trump on the day after the election and that the Manhattan billionaire was strangely cordial, 'like it was 15 years ago,'” Brzezinski noted.
At that time, Trump “was friendly with the Clintons and would socialize with them.” Clinton also said Trump told him that Hillary Clinton “was tougher than I thought she’d be.”
“Of the new president, Clinton said he doesn't know much, but the one thing does know is how to get angry white men to vote for him.”
As for the big news story of the moment, Clinton made it perfectly clear that he believes Russia backed the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, Hillary’s campaign chairman.
“You would need to have a single-digit IQ not to recognize what was going on,” he said.
James Comey “cost her the election,” he added, noting: “We were seven points up at the time” when the FBI director began “re-stoking the fires of the private email server controversy” by announcing with less than two weeks to go before the election that the bureau was examining fresh evidence related to her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.
“And he took a dig at Trump's win,” the Mediaite correspondent added, asking: “Landslide? I got something like 370 electoral votes,' correctly recalling his 1992 total. "That was a landslide.”
Clinton also said we're living in a new world, a “post-truth era where facts don't matter.”
That's an amusing comment coming from the president who shook his finger at the TV cameras in 1998 and said: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss [Monica] Lewinsky,” regarding the intern he later had to admit he did indeed have an intimate relationship with.
