“Morning Joe” hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski lambasted Democrats for pretending not to know economist and MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, even though past footage continues of President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and John Kerry praising his expertise on health-care reform.
“If these people that are trotting themselves out every couple days saying ‘Gruber? Who Gruber? Where Gruber? Horton hears a Gruber. I don’t hear a Gruber’ — they’re embarrassing themselves,” Scarborough said. “Nancy Pelosi saying she has never heard of Jonathan Gruber, and yet she’s praising him at the height of the debate during the Affordable Care Act?”
“Barack Obama doing this act — and I don’t know who tells him it makes him look cool, it doesn’t, it really makes him look out of touch … for Barack Obama to say that he’s just some adviser, when his own team is saying he helped draft the bill,” Scarborough continued. “When he was at Brookings Institute and asked who he would put in charge of reform if he were president of the United States, and he said Jonathan Gruber for health-care reform.”
“Talk about taking a one-day story and making it a one-week or two-week story,” he said. They should have just come out and said ‘Jonathan Gruber, really smart guy, he helped us draft the bill: he’s an idiot. There are obvious reasons why he’s a tenured professor, because he’s an idiot in front of cameras, but he’s pretty smart behind cameras, and he helped us put together this package.’ But they didn’t do that.”
“They’re being too clever by half, and they’re screwing things up for themselves. They can’t get out of their way,” added Scarborough.
“Watching those two sound bites back to back of the president back when he first mentioned Gruber’s name and saying he didn’t know him, I agree, now he should say that guy is an idiot,” Brzezinski replied. “He’s a total jerk. He’s completely a hypocrite.”