Joe Scarborough said Thursday that the Obama administration plays the race card too often when addressing its critics.
A day after Attorney General Eric Holder said in a speech that he and President Obama have dealt with unprecedented levels of criticism, MSNBC’s resident conservative mocked Holder for suggesting that racism is at play.
“Because of racism, I mean, Holder, that’s what Holder suggested, the attorney general suggested yesterday, right?” Scarborough asked Politico’s John Harris.
“There’s no question,” Harris said. “That’s what he’s trying to get at. I don’t see any other reading of it.”
From there, Scarborough was off.
He argued that Holder, the first sitting attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress, has received the same treatment as Janet Reno, the attorney general under Bill Clinton.
Reno, he said, “was accused of murder by Republicans” after the Waco siege.
Scarborough went on to say that Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), the tea party congressman who’s dabbled in birtherism, would have been just as hard on Reno as he was on Holder. Moreover, Scarborough contended that Clinton dealt with just as much hostility as Obama.
“So when you’re going to say that Barack Obama and Eric Holder have been treated worse than anybody else in the history of American politics because of their race, well, you’re not even going back 20 years let alone 200,” Scarborough said.
Scarborough later said he’s not “disregarding” the prejudice against Obama, but he continued to insist that other public figures like Richard Nixon, Edwin Meese and Robert Bork faced the same level of scrutiny.
“Again, and this goes past just what Eric Holder said yesterday. We’ve been hearing this for six years, suggesting that there’s race behind everything — no, no,” Scarborough said. “There’s really not. This is what happens in Washington, D.C.”
“It happens to people that step up to the stage,” he added.
