On Wednesday, MSNBC’s Morning Joe provided a knee-jerk defense of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripping up a copy of President Trump’s State of the Union address as the speech concluded Tuesday night. They claimed the nasty move was justified because of Trump’s “lies” and applauded it as “the most effective” Democratic response.

“I think she sat there and listened to a pile of lies and the only way to communicate that visually was to rip up the speech, which was useless because it was full of lies,” co-host Mika Brzezinski proclaimed as she attempted to excuse Pelosi’s partisan stunt. The anchor sympathized with the Democratic leader having to listen to Trump’s speech:

And she’s fed up. I’m not sure what else you can do to point out that this man in front of her, the President of the United States, was not only using the State of the Union as a campaign rally and to play to his base, but was lying to the American people time and time again, over and over again. That was just a symbolic way of saying this is all lies, without being rude.

Husband and fellow co-host Joe Scarborough raved: “I will say, of all the Democratic responses I have seen in my lifetime, that was the most effective.”

He went on to label the President “a bully” as he hailed: “Nancy Pelosi is the leader of the Democratic Party right now and when you are being bullied and when a bully stands in your House and spreads lies not only to everybody that is in your house, the people’s house, I give her – I give her some leeway to make a point if she wants to about, again, historians will record that as lies, almost all of it lies.”

Scarborough concluded: “I think it’s okay for Nancy Pelosi to show a little grit and toughness.”

Just imagine if John Boehner had torn up a copy of one of Barack Obama’s State of the Union speeches, would MSNBC have cheered that as a show “grit and toughness”?

Here is a transcript of the February 5 exchange: