On Wednesday’s “Morning Joe,” co-host Joe Scarborough challenged pro-life advocates to “come at” him with their “stupid words” after going on an extended rant attacking Judge Kavanaugh’s failure to shake Fred Guttenberg’s hand at yesterday’s Supreme Court nomination hearings. Scarborough saw the apparent snub as a “hateful” act and evidence that Kavanaugh might not have a “shred of humanity” in him given Guttenberg’s subsequent claim that Kavanaugh had personally directed security to throw Guttenberg out of the hearings after their encounter.
During the segment in question, Scarborough’s initial rage was directed solely against Kavanaugh and had no direct references to pro-life advocates. However, after spending several minutes driving home the message that Kavanaugh was a monster for ignoring and then “harassing” Guttenberg —whose daughter was murdered in the Parkland school shooting earlier this year —Scarborough ended the segment by taunting pro-life advocates and insulting their intelligence [transcript adapted from Mediaite; emphasis mine]:
“It’s one thing that the guy [Guttenberg] can’t get Congress to do the ring thing and even pass reasonable background checks. Here, he can’t even get a judge to shake his hand. He’s the one who had to go to his fourteen year-old daughter’s funeral and go to the grave site and bury his fourteen year-old daughter and go there instead of going to her school events this year —in what should have been a joyous year —he has to go take flowers to her graveside and Brett Kavanaugh can’t shake the guy’s hand, and then 20 minutes later, he sends his security detail out to harass him.
“Yeah, please, please, get on -- get on your blog this morning and defend that lack of humanity because you’re pro-life. Please, come at me. Attack me with your stupid words because you’re pro-life.
“Why don’t you just get sucked down into this drain of this inhumane Trump world that we live in right now in politics? Why don’t you defend Kavanaugh, okay? Why don’t you enable him to be hateful to other people?
“Or perhaps you could say: Hey, you know what, judge, we support you —you really screwed up yesterday. You owe Fred an apology.Wonder if you’re that much of a human to do it. I doubt it, because I’ve read your work before.”
It wasn’t clear if Scarborough was referring to specific bloggers or pro-life groups in his rant, buy he may simply have been attacking pro-life advocates in general given Kavanaugh’s previous rulings on abortion-related cases.
You can watch the full segment via Mediaite at this link.