Put simply, MSNBC’s Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough has a very nasty habit. When someone disagrees with him, he often resorts to hammering that person as being either “too stupid” or “too incompetent” to be taken seriously.
That pattern of behavior continued on Wednesday, when the former Republican stated that “you’re too stupid to handle household appliances” if you believe there was a conspiracy by the Justice Department, the FBI and the administration of former President Barack Obama to rig the 2016 presidential election.
Scarborough laughed while making the accusation that the concept of planting spies in Donald Trump’s campaign is “absolutely ludicrous.”
“If that were the case,” he noted, “and they were all characters out of Mike Judge’s Idiocracy” -- a science-fiction comedy about two people who hibernate for 500 years and awake in a dystopian society -- they “probably water their grass with Gatorade.”
The MSNBC co-host continued:
[A]fter all, the investigation into Donald Trump’s possible contact with Russia was kept quiet while Hillary Clinton got a letter from the FBI 10 days beforehand that was absolutely devastating to her campaign.
Everything the FBI did in the home stretch was to Donald Trump’s benefit and Hillary Clinton’s detriment.
“Now, for somebody not to understand that -- I mean, seriously -- suggests only one thing,” he told co-anchor Willie Geist, “and that is they are either intentionally lying or that you’re too stupid to handle household appliances. I’ll leave it to you, Willie, to decide which it is.”
“I can’t believe it’s the appliance part,” Geist responded. “Toasters aren’t that hard, so it has to be the willful thing.”
“I mean, these are the same people who celebrated James Comey coming out with that letter” stating Hillary Clinton was being investigated over use of a private email server while doing work for the federal government, the co-anchor said.
“Remember, James Comey was the boogeyman for the Clinton campaign and the reason a lot of people around her and supported her think she lost, and now that narrative has been flipped on a total 180 by the Trump White House.”
The Morning Joe staff was responding to a series of Twitter posts made by President Trump earlier that day, one of which read: “Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State.”
“They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before!” the Republican official added before noting: “What goes around, comes around!”
However, Trump is not the only GOP president Scarborough has criticized. In August of 2006, the MSNBC host called George W. Bush an “idiot” and went so far as to claim the Republican occupant of the White House “is in a league by himself. I don't think he has the intellectual depth as ... other people."
As NewsBusters previously reported, Scarborough lashed out at critics in June of 2010 for his coverage of a political angle regarding the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Referring specifically to Twitter users, the MSNBC anchor called them “stupid” and “dumb,” and instructed them to “shut up.”
“The people on Twitter who are whining about us covering a very important part of this story are whiners and beyond that, they’re just stupid,” he fumed.
Things hadn’t improved by early January, when Scarborough called Trump a “bumpkin” and “some stupid old blubbery man” whom his staff treats “like he’s just a fool,” making him “the weakest leader on the planet.”
“Well, you really can’t trust anything coming out of Donald Trump’s mouth,” the MSNBC host said at the time.
At the end of that month, Scarborough asserted that only “very, very stupid” people questioned the validity of Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation into whether Trump colluded with the Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign.
“Anybody that writes an op-ed and suggests that Donald Trump has not put himself directly in the target of an obstruction charge is just fooling themselves and some very, very stupid, ill-informed readers,” he charged.
In mid-April, Scarborough argued that anyone who subscribes to the idea that former FBI Director James Comey and former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe have an animus against President Trump should not handle “anything sharp because you will hurt yourself because you are too incompetent actually to use any basic household appliances.”
Whether the MSNBC host considers you to be “too stupid” or “too incompetent,” that’s a badge of honor he only reserves for those who don’t agree with him while resorting to name-calling as his last line of defense.
