GOP Sen. John Kennedy is facing widespread backlash after he suggested that Joe Biden’s nominee was a communist because she was born in Kazakhstan, which was controlled by the former Soviet Union at the time.
During questioning, law professor Saule Omarova, who Biden picked to serve as Comptroller of the Currency, politely told Kennedy that she doesn’t subscribe to the communist ideology and that she cannot choose where she was born. But the Republican senator continued to grill her over her upbringing in the USSR.
In response, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough ripped the Louisiana Republican, calling his line of questioning “beyond despicable.”
“You may look at that and think that Sen. Kennedy is stupid,” the ‘Morning Joe’ host said. “No, he’s not, he knew exactly what he was doing. He went to Oxford. This is what’s going around the Republican Party, people that went to Ivy League schools, went to Oxford, try to play as dumb as possible for the cameras — they’re not fooling anybody.”
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“That was as cynical and hateful of a spectacle attacking somebody because they were born in a totalitarian regime, one of the most evil regimes in the history of this planet and they’re attacking somebody for having the horrible misfortune of being born under that regime and being indoctrinated from a young age — he’s trying to use that against somebody who came over here,” Scarborough continued.
He added: “You could have said the same thing about Solzhenitsyn, about Sakharov, about Gary Kasparov, the greatest dissidents in the history of the Soviet Union, [who] went through the same thing — they indoctrinate their children. Here you have an American senator, of the United States of America, who’s trying to attack a woman because her parents had the misfortune of being born in one of the most brutal regimes in the history of mankind.”
“This was sick,” agreed co-host Mika Brzezinski. “This was really hard to watch. It made me want to cry.”
“I’m sorry,” Scarborough added, “it’s beyond despicable.”
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