Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski blasted Hillary Clinton for a "pathetic" charge of sexism against Democratic primary opponent Bernie Sanders (I, Vt.) Tuesday, after Clinton interpreted Sanders' remark at their recent debate about her "shouting" about gun control as an attack on her gender.
Clinton played that card in consecutive speeches.
"I've been told to stop, and I quote, shouting about gun violence," Clinton said last week. "Well, first of all, I'm not shouting. It's just when women talk, some people think we're shouting." For his part, Sanders laughed off the charge in a CNN interview, telling Jake Tapper, "That's not the case," and Sanders' campaign responded that Clinton's attack was "unacceptable."
Scarborough and Brzezinski lit into Clinton, talking over each other to repeatedly lambast her as "pathetic."
"Let me just say that's pathetic," Scarborough said. "That's just absolutely pathetic ... She's going to win but that was pathetic."
Brzezinski unfavorably compared Clinton to the HBO show Veep, whose main character Selina Meyer, portrayed by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is an incompetent, hypersensitive, power-hungry politician.
"That was pathetic," Brzezinski said. "I know that she's the front-runner. I'm sure she's going to win, and I'm glad. I want a Democrat to win, but that was like Veep. That was Veep. It was worse than Veep. It wasn't funny."
When Veep does it, Brzezinski said, it's funny, but this wasn't.
"I know sexism. Hillary Clinton knows sexism," Brzezinski said. "She should know better than to let her staff make her do that. it needs to be her. She needs to get out there and talk. Everyone stop writing lines for her. They're bad. Really bad. When we talk about sexism, when we talk about women and equal pay and all these things that are important, let's not denigrate it with that stupidity, because we embarrass ourselves."
She predicted she would be "killed" for her remarks, harkening back to a time where she apparently spent hours on the phone with the Clinton campaign after repeatedly criticizing her on the MSNBC program.
"That was pathetic," she said. "That was pathetic."
"Why would Hillary Clinton's campaign feel like they needed to play the sexism card? Act like a little sad victim? Poor, little me?" Scarborough asked. "'I'm not going to stop roaring about guns?' It's pathetic."