'Blithering idiocy': MSNBC's Morning Joe rains hell on Mike Pence's 'ridiculous' claims about COVID-19 testing

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski roasted Vice President Mike Pence's misleading claims about coronavirus testing.

The vice president insisted that President Donald Trump had fulfilled his promise to deliver more testing, but the "Morning Joe" co-hosts ridiculed his claim that the tests had simply not been completed.

"Okay, for all you students out there, kids doing class on Zoom, tell your teachers you can take the test but you just can't complete the test, and the vice president says so, but you still want full credit for it," Brzezinski said.

Scarborough mocked Pence's obsequious flattery of the president's "leadership" on COVID-19 testing.

"First of all, how outrageous for Mike Pence," he said. "'But for the president's leadership on testing?' History will record that Donald Trump failed miserably on testing, his administration failed miserably on testing and it left us lurching through the dark. [They] not only created a public health crisis but the economic crisis we're going through right now. We couldn't test, trace, isolate, treat and let people who were well go out into the workspace."

Scarborough then explained exactly what was so ridiculous about Pence's claims about incomplete testing.

"You know what's so interesting about just the blithering idiocy of what Mike Pence said yesterday, was that probably a month ago, I was speaking to a governor of a very large state, not New York, a very large state" Scarborough said, "who told me that, when it came to testing, that there was such a shortage because of the White House's ineptitude of the chemicals that were required to make the tests work, He said it'd be like the White House bragging about sending out copying machines without ink."

"Again, I had this conversation in early to mid-March, [he] said, 'What good is a copying machine if I can't put ink in the copying machine?'" Scarborough added. "You know, I never said anything on the air, I thought that was ridiculous. I didn't really believe that the White House would ever posit such a stupid argument. If you wait long enough, it happens. It happened yesterday with Mike Pence saying, 'Oh, we gave them the tests, they didn't have the material to complete the tests.' That's like saying, we sent them a copying machine -- there's no ink, so they can't use them."