Joe Scarborough Defends Biden’s Segregationist Remarks, Compares Him To FDR

Joe Scarborough went to bat for former Vice President Joe Biden Thursday morning. Speaking on his MSNBC show, Morning Joe, Scarborough defended Biden’s comments about working with segregationists and political civility. Other Democrats had strongly criticized Biden.

Scarborough began by dramatically wiping his face with a handkerchief, apparently mocking Democrats’ criticism of Biden.

“First of all, I love Kamala [Harris] but Joe Biden didn’t coddle any segregationist in anything that he said,” Scarborough said. ”

“In fact, he called one of them one of the meanest people he ever met. If that’s coddling, please, stay away from me, Joe, don’t hug me, don’t coddle me. That’s not coddling.”

“Also, he didn’t speak with adoration about these segregationists. His point was — I mean, it wouldn’t have been very persuasive, would it if, he said ‘I have proven over the last 30 years I can work with Tom Carper and every member of the Delaware delegation’. That’s not the point. He picked the people who were the most repugnant to him, who he disagreed with the most and said I could even work with them.”

“Who was it who said – Was it Rumsfeld who said, you fight on the battlefield with the enemy that’s presented to you, something like that?” Scarborough said. “Well guess what, FDR, the brilliance of FDR, he could work with Yankees from New England and he could work with segregationists and racists from the south. And you know what happened when FDR did that? He passed social security, he passed the New Deal, he saved this country and saved poor people like my parents.”

“In the deep south, he also saved black Americans. In Chicago — FDR didn’t sit there and go I’m not going to deal with the racists in the south,” Scarborough said. “Eleanor and I are going to just sit here and have tea and we’re going to have radio broadcasts where we speak in self-righteous indignation all day, and we may have a crumpet, too. But the point is, I’m not talking to those people because they offend me.”

“He also had to deal with segregationists as we moved toward World War II to defeat Hitler. Sometimes to get to 60 votes, to change America, you have to deal with people whose views you may find repugnant.”

“You can say the same thing about LBJ who had to deal with people in ‘64 and ‘65, he had had to drag them over the finish line to pass the voting rights act. He did it in ’64 and ’65.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.