Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski spend the opening 10 minutes of their return to the show, after some paid leave, picking apart independent presidential candidate Robert Francis Kennedy Jr.’s “bizarre” and “sick” admission that he was the person who left a dead bear cub in Central Park almost a decade ago.
RFK Jr. admitted he was responsible for staging the scene of a dead cub in New York ten years ago after he picked up the bear he said a woman hit with her van. The presidential candidate published a video online talking to actress Roseanne Barr on Sunday, admitting the truth because the New Yorker was preparing to publish an article – now live – revealing his involvement in what was, at the time, a national story in the press – first published by his own relative in the New York Times.
Scarborough launched the Monday show citing the story in disbelief, reflecting that, once again, RFK Jr. was “in the news for all the wrong reasons.”
Brzezinski began: “It is really bizarre, this story about Robert F. Kennedy Jr… Was he going to eat it?”
“Skin it and eat it, something like that,” Scarborough added.
“Then he got rid of it, a baby bear?” Brzezinski continued.
Turning to MSNBC co-host Jonathan Lemire, Scarborough said: “Jonathan, I was so confused. I heard he was going to skin it and eat it but ran out of time. I don’t know these things. Then made it look like a biker ran over it. Then the New York Times story was written by his cousin… ten years. It’s all very weird. You know what? In times like these, when little things make sense at all, that’s when you want the person right there, sort of as the leveling wind, to be Roseanne. And Roseanne was there going: ‘What in the holy hell are you talking about?’
Lemire joined in: “Yeah, it’s a political staple. When you’re trying to get ahead of a story, you have to involve Roseanne. You need to go and say: ‘You’re my audience here, Roseanne.’ I will say, there are very few things that bring a nation together. The revelation of RFK Jr.’s video reunited us collectively with a ‘What the -!’
Lemire went on to recap the story. Detailing RFK Jr’s story that he had found a dead bear that he intended to skin and eat in Upstate New York but after a trip into New York City to eat at the Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn found himself on a tight time frame, needing to grab cash to pay his bill and make a flight at the airport. This, he said, in conspiracy with his dinner companions, prompted him to abandon the animal in Central Park. There he framed the scene as if the cub had been killed by a cyclist.
The panel continued to jest about the entire situation.
SCARBOROUGH: He was going to eat the bear cub.
BRZEZINSKI: Is it winter? The bear is getting warm in the car.
SCARBOROUGH: He was going to eat the dead bear cub, right? But he forgets he has reservations at Peter Lugars and so I guess I’m not going to eat the dead bear cub… Keep the bear? Who among us?
LEMIRE: We’ve all had that dilemma when you realize you’ve got the bear meat in the car
SCARBOROUGH: You know Jonathan, I walked out of the Polo bar a couple of weeks ago and I’m like, wait a second I have an elk’s head in my trunk.
LEMIRE: It happens.
SCARBOROUGH: Wait a second, I can’t eat that anymore. Right? It’s what happens to all of us.
As Lemire finished his round-up of the story, Brzezinski and Scarborough fell into stunned silence.
Scarborough summed it up, referencing another RFK Jr. story that he had a parasite in his brain several years ago: “Okay. So we have dead baby cubs, brain worms…”
“If you’re going to pick up roadkill,” Brzezinski followed, “my mother taught me that you make sure it is freshly killed, still warm, and you get it right to cut it up and freeze it. You don’t leave it in your car to smell and get grosser…”
Scarborough decided to throw it to his panelists, Washington Post associate editor Eugene Robinson and MSNBC national affairs analyst John Heilemann, also chief columnist at Puck.
Robinson mused: “This is not a youthful discretion. This man was like 60 years old. This happened 10 years ago. He recently did this and it was bear roadkill…”
The host then asked Heilemann how the bear story impacted the northern swing states, as Robinson laughed.
The panelist responded: “The guy had a worm in his brain, right? Before this? There has been a thing where he sexually harassed a babysitter? And said afterwards that there might be more of those. Now we got this bear story. I think on the scale of the weirdness… as weird as this is, it doesn’t really rate compared to the weirdness of the worm in his brain and disqualifying an issue compared to the sexual harassment claim.”
Heilemann added: “Looking forward to the day where we don’t talk about [him]… I mean, the man, his political significance is dwindling fast and hopefully we won’t have to talk about him anymore soon.”
Watch above on MSNBC.
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