The Republican party’s most prominent pre-Scott Brown himbo really is a boob. He gets caught telling an outright lie about what happened after the undie bomber was Mirandized. Maddow calls him out on his lies.
While we’re at it, another simple question to a simple answer. First Read asks (via):
There is no doubt that Republicans have scored big political points on this subject. But at what point do you start losing the P.R. war when the facts aren’t on your side?
The answer is “never” if you’re a Republican. So it goes in our contemporary post-realist political narrative.
valdivia
OT–Evan Bayh is not running for a third term!
kay
@valdivia:
I’m afraid he’s screwing them on the way out.
Why announce this as they release a letter that says they have a compromise proposal on health care?
Why not wait 2 weeks? He’s waited too long already to line up a candidate. 2 weeks won’t make any difference. I hope like hell this isn’t his parting gift to his financial backers.
General Winfield Stuck
@kay: I think because the filing deadline for a dem replacement candidate is this Friday.
Napoleon
@valdivia:
Wow!
ChrisS
Maddow calls him out on his lies.
Or, perhaps, how the rest of the media and the GOP sycophants interpret that:
Liberal apologist claims he lies. And honestly, who are you going to believe? Scott Brown, everyday Joe US Senator? Or a liberal blowhard that wants to take your guns and make you embrace Obamacare. Makes you ask which one has the agenda.
John PM
@valdivia:
Since Bayh is retiring, it is important that the Senate take no further action on health care until his replacement has been elected. :(
BTW, the Washington Post story says that Bayh has $13 million in his re-election fund. I would hope that some of that money would find its way to the new Democratic candidate. I think there should be a law that if an incumbent decides to not seek re-election all of his donations should go to the party to which he belongs, or the money should go back to his donors (which I believe would help Wellpoint’s bottom line, e.g.).
valdivia
@kay:
What Stuck said. I really don’t know this has anything to do with HCR.
williamc
Gosh darnit, why’s he have to be so hot and so queer, yet so so stupid?
Has Shook come out yet?
Kryptik
I love Maddow’s withering stare when Schock talked. Her expression said it all: “What the fuck are you talking about, you mental midget?” And Schock’s expression when responding to Rachel seemed to say “Cute, girl, but let me tell you why you’re inferior”
Oh…and fuck you Gregory, for trying to undermine the facts by saying there’s a ‘debate’ when there isn’t, and completely missing the fact of what Miranda does. Miranda prevents from self-incrimination. It does nothing to disincentivize getting information for intelligence purposes, and he was read his rights AFTER he stopped talking, and it was AFTER that, when his family was brought in, that he started to reveal more. You know, standard interrogation stuff.
Sly
The filing deadline for ballot access in the Indiana primary is tomorrow at noon.
Douchebag to the last.
soonergrunt
@kay:
It is that.
OT, but what’s with the add for the ‘penis reducing placebos’ add on the left?
El Cid
It’s really weird to me — even after all these years — that this sort of freakish complaint (OMG THEY READ THE TERRORIST HIS RIGHTS THIS MEAN THEY CAN KILLUSALL NOW) doesn’t get the “My god, you’re a scaredy-cat chickenshit” reaction instead of “Wow, that’s a good point you raise, and polls show that a lot of Americans think Obama appointed Osama bin Laden to a high cabinet position — what should Obama do to repair his image in the minds of those thinking that?”
AhabTRuler
I just love Harold Ford’s mellifluous New Yawk accent, although I can’t quite place the borough.
Is it Brooklyn?
kay
@General Winfield Stuck:
Thanks. It’s terrible timing. Ezra Klein says Democrats plan to bring a compromise proposal to the health care summit, and Republicans don’t know how to respond.
Bayh just stepped all over that.
I think he’s completely bought and paid for, Stuck. I don’t trust him not to screw them on the way out. I think he and his wife would do just about anything to stop insurance reform, let alone any broader health care reform. Their personal family finances are wholly dependent on insurance reform failing. He never should have been part of any insurance reform effort. It’s a direct conflict.
Kryptik
@Sly:
So Bayh pulls a dick move to hand his seat over to Republicans? Why can’t I muster up enough shock to be surprised? God, what an asshole.
@El Cid:
Again, it ignores the fact that Miranda does fucking nothing of the sort to ‘shut them up’. Miranda covers self-incrimination as far as the term ‘anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law’. People who will shut up to not reveal information about anyone else or their organization will shut up regardless of Miranda or not. It’s just a ridiculously prolific argument to try and subvert law and due process in order to fulfill revenge fantasy faster and assuage their fears of the swarthy brown terrorists.
The most ridiculous thing is how it’s mistaken for strength when it’s the most fearful, reactionary response possible. It shows no faith in the law, and instead asks for expedience, because any slower means THEY MIGHT COME BACK AFTER YOU, BE AFRAAAAAAAAAAID. Spineless oafs.
TR
It’s pretty clear from that segment who should be the host of “Meet the Press.”
And her name isn’t “David Gregory.”
kay
@valdivia:
I love you and Stuck’s optimism, but this stinks to high heaven.
He was 20 points ahead of the generic GOP’er and he has 13 million dollars in the bank. WTF?
They have until Friday to put a name on the ballot?
cat48
@ChrisS:
I don’t think Brown minds if they are read miranda rights. His regular line is “We need to spend more money buying weapons to kill terrorists, not on attorneys for them.” This soundbite has been played a lot. Just no attorneys–that’s really moving the old Overton window.
Sly
@AhabTRuler:
It’s the Nashville section of Staten Island.
You rarely hear it because we’ve been secretly trying to get Staten Island into New Jersey for the past thirty years, and this entails ignoring their very presence every chance we get and making sure the national media does likewise.
So you didn’t read this.
Sly
@Kryptik:
It’s worse than that. You need 500 signatures from each of Indiana’s nine congressional districts to get on the ballot. Even if someone suddenly decided to run, they’d have 24 hours and 35 minutes, as of this post, to get them.
Kryptik
@TR:
And that’s precisely why if the spot opens up, the host’s seat will probably go to…Joe Scarborough.
Or hey, maybe John King will leave CNN and take the seat instead, and pimp his Human Events subscription again after he invites John Bolton.
General Winfield Stuck
@kay:
LOL. Stuck’s optimism? It caught the last train for the coast, the day campaign finance reform died.
Tsulagi
That’s a himbo?
Pretty much. Kinda like the dynamic of federal law trumping state. In R-world, wingnut meme trumps reality.
arguingwithsignposts
David Gregory: “There is a debate …” No, there is no “debate” between facts and falsehoods, you idiot!
Paul L.
Maybe he should have asked Rachel Maddow if the Constitution has a preamble?
Ron
I also noticed that even before Rachel could get to respond to the “he clammed up” lie, Gregory tried to move to another subject. She got to point out the lie and then the whole line of discussion got cut off. Gregory is terrible.
theylivebynight
I found that clip depressing for a number of reasons:
1-Schlock is exactly the type as vacuous, slick-as-shit, dumber-than-a-hat-full-of-earholes politician who always goes far.
2-Maddow may’ve corrected Schlock, but it didn’t seem like anybody really noticed or cared. Truth is treated as like it’s far left-wing opinion. Gotta take a break now, back to talk about the next issue in GOP-approved talking points right after this.
3-Wait…Harold Ford? Why does he get to go national television and pretend he represents anything? As someone who’s actually lived here for more than 10 minutes I resent Ford playing dress-up New Yorker. He’s the type of vacuous, slick-as-shit, dumber-than-a-hat-full-of-earholes politician who always goes far. Worse still, he couldn’t even tell you where to get a decent slice.
Mike Lamb
@Paul L.:
That part killed me. Schock (sp) is bald-faced lying on program. Gets called on it by Maddow, and his Pavlovian response is to neutralize the point by offering protection for Schock about there being a “legitimate” debate.
The GOP has absolutely won the culture war on the media. They are so afraid of being labeled “liberal” that media figure will not let a point stand, even if it’s the truth, if it makes Republicans look bad.
V.O.R.
“Maddow calls him out on his lies.”
My big eye-opening moment was when I realized that the conservatives I argued with didn’t just have flawed reasoning, but many (most?) of the significant facts they cited were fantasies.
I’d never encountered that before. Not even from small children. (They may be ignorant, but at least they often know it or usually accept correction.)
It was in the run-up to “Bush’s War” in Iraq, and suddenly Snopes.com became my best friend.
batgirl
Any chance that Bayh is going to fuck with Obama with a primary challenge from his right? Or is he leaving to cash in on his corporate whoredom?
TDE
What Gregory did at the end of the clip is EVERYTHING that is wrong with US news media.
cleek
exactly.
lefty blogs are trumpeting this segment as if Maddow got all “At Long Last, Have You No Sense Of Decency?!” on him. couldn’t be further from the truth. she tamely questioned him, asserted he was wrong; he didn’t respond. and then the whole thing was plowed-over by Ford and Gregory.
zero impact.
whybs on twitter
@ChrisS:
“Scott Brown, everyday Joe US Senator…”
Sure, pinup Scott Brown won on the promise of smaller, more efficient government. Yet, his mom lived on welfare! http://bit.ly/8GTp7d
Suckers & hypocrites abound!
williamc
@V.O.R.:
You are totally right on this. I have a friend, pretty much the only wingnut that I am friends with at all, and he claims to be a conservative libertarian (which apparently means that he doesn’t care about drugs or religion or sexual issues, but is standard issue wingnut on everything else).
He can not argue in good faith about anything because he only believes his side of any argument and has no recall of factual or statistical issues at all. For instance, he doesn’t know that Republican Presidents over the past 30 years have left larger deficits than Democratic Presidents, so every argument that gets into taxation and deficits, he starts with the talking point of tax and spend liberals and all the national debt that they leave, yet when I point out to him that that’s not true, the opposite is actually true, he not only doesn’t know what the truth is, I’m loony for even suggesting the facts. He constantly argues that the media is left-leaning and doesn’t broadcast a conservative viewpoint, but he only watches Fox News (and occasionally CNN to make fun of it) and reads rightwing periodicals like the Weekly Standard and the National Review and the Wall Street Journal, with his only entre into the mainstream being TIME magazine, itself not-so-liberal.
You can’t win against people who don’t know that they are loosing.
aimai
cleek et al are right. Maddow did her best but we were lost from the moment she didn’t lean over, interrupt the little shit, and say–
aimai
Tonybrown74
Aimai, Cleek,
you may be right, but I consider it a small, but important step up re: political debate in this country. We rarely get to see a liberal/progressive on the pundit shows nowadays and just getting some on TV would be a small but important step in the right direction.
Now, if we can get more (and smarter) progressives/liberals on TV more often I think we will get somewhere, especially if they become as aggressive in making their/our talking points as conservative/reactionaries currently are.
scudbucket
Notice that Gregory frames his question in consequentialist, rather than principled, terms: ‘Are Republican attacks on this president helping Al Queda?’ Wrt to the actual issue here – i.e., the factual accuracy of those criticisms – Gregory’s question might as well have been ‘Are Republican lies about this president helping Al Queda?’. To which the GOP Rep correctly responds ‘Absolutely not,’ and the rest of the panel (save Maddow) agrees. So, no harm, no foul, right?
It was also interesting to see Gregory demonstrably reprimand Maddow for being so churlish as to try to introduce facts into what is otherwise a substance free but very compelling ‘debate’.
West of the Cascades
@arguingwithsignposts: Actually, that’s the first intelligent thing I’ve ever heard David Gregory say. There is strategic value in an intelligence interrogation to not reading someone their Miranda rights — if you don’t tell them they have the right to remain silent, they may be more likely to keep talking.
Remember what Miranda rights are: they’re an evidentiary privilege, a right to not have your testimony during an investigation when you’re in police custody used against you in a criminal proceeding unless you were advised, before the interrogation, that you have the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney, etc. “Miranda rights” are not some free-standing rights that have value in a vacuum – they have value because the Mirandizing process guarantees the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.
If you have 236 eye-witnesses who saw you set yourself on fire on an airplane, coerced and un-Mirandized testimony is completely unnecessary to convict you, so it doesn’t matter if all of the interrogation testimony is inadmissible in court because you aren’t read the Miranda rights.
So the “debate” over whether — as a strategic matter, to collect intelligence information — he should have been read his Miranda rights is actually a legitimate debate to have. Gregory (I can’t believe I’m saying this) actually got this one right.
But – of course – this legitimate debate is not the debate the Republicans are trying to engage in. They’re just grandstanding on “OMG we treated him like a human being who has rights instead of waterboarding him!” to score political points.
scudbucket
@DougJ: ‘post-realist’ is nice (hadn’t seen that before). Question for Obama: Can you be post-partisan in a post-realist world?
scudbucket
@West of the Cascades: “Miranda rights” are not some free-standing rights that have value in a vacuum – they have value because the Mirandizing process guarantees the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.
Unless I’m misunderstanding you here, this isn’t right. The protections and provisions specified when read ‘miranda rights’ exist independently of, and prior to, the law requiring the reading of those rights. The reading of those rights was made into law to remind people who might not know what their rights actually are. Requiring the reading of those rights was an effort to limit corruption in the interrogation process.
From the always authoritative Wikipedia:
b-psycho
New Math, as demonstrated by MTP: for purposes of debate, Rachel Maddow = 3 conservatives.
scudbucket
@West of the Cascades: So the “debate” over whether—as a strategic matter, to collect intelligence information—he should have been read his Miranda rights is actually a legitimate debate to have.
Right. I misunderstood. You’re making a good point.
DougJ
@scudbucket:
Question for Obama: Can you be post-partisan in a post-realist world?
Very good question.
licensed to kill time
Another question for Obama: Can you be bipartisan with a bipolar Congress?
Honus
Schock is a himbo? With that hair? He looks like he’s wearing a coonskin cap.
Mike Lamb
@West of the Cascades:
And what happens if you want to charge Abdulmtullab for a crime other than the Christmas Day bombing that the interrogators learn about through their interrogation? I’d further add that it is incredibly short-sighted not to Mirandize in order to preserve admissibility because you are going to rely on eye-witness testimony down the line. Aside from the fact that eye-witness testimony is notoriously unreliable, what happens if the eye-witnesses are not available for trial?
Gregory is absolutely unequivocally wrong about there being legitimate debate as to the strategy of Mirandizing. It is stupid not to do it and you handicap yourself if you make the conscious decision not to Mirandize.
Finally, his statement was complete and total non-sequitur versus the lies being told by Schock/Maddow’s correction.
Darkmoth
@West of the Cascades:
Unfortunately, while Gregory may have raised a legitimate question about Mirandizing, it was a tangent that stepped all over Rachel’s question:
“What is so bad about Mirandizing that wasn’t bad before?”.
Any critique of Mirandizing the Undiebomber would have to apply equally to Richard Reid. That was Rachel’s intent, to explore the inconsistency. All Gregory really did was gloss over the fact that Reid and Abdulmutallab were treated exactly the same.
It’s stunning how long the GOP has been able to avoid owning up to that fact.
mclaren
“Post-realist political narrative.” LOL.
Yep, we’ve entered the post-reality era of modern politics. We’ve now got post-competent pols issuing post-reality statements.
Homo sapiens: smart primates, foolish choices. Perhaps the next species will do better.
The Pale Scot
but that does not mean they are equally barbaric in achieving their agenda.