Lawrence O’Donnell:
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Please, please, please, keep calling these people liars. They are simply incapable of being confronted with being called a liar, because they are so used to folks like Candy Crowley running cover for them. Check out this outrageous clip from yesterday morning (I never found video of it, so the transcript will have to do):
SANCHEZ: I cannot believe what I just heard in your report. I was — my jaw dropped when I heard it. So let me just ask you a very direct question. I wrote it down here as I heard it.
When he says, “We should not have a government program that pulls the plug on grandma,” is he implying that there is now a proposal in Congress to have a government program to pull the plug on grandma?
CROWLEY: Certainly that’s how critics of that particular remark took it. And it certainly sounds that way. I will tell you that the senator was asked about it afterwards and he said, listen, what I’m saying is I understand that there is fear when people read this that that might happen, but that he personally didn’t necessarily translate that provision, as you know, of AARP and the AMA, American Medical Association, all support this particular passage, which is in one of four bills that are up there.
So Senator Grassley said that he doesn’t personally think you could translate it that way. But he understands why people look at it and come to that conclusion.
SANCHEZ: Isn’t it incumbent among people like Senator Grassley who are the leaders of this government and of this country to set the record straight and be telling people the truth like the truth as we know it here at CNN, that there is absolutely no proposal out there for death panels or for proposals that would actually plan to decide when people die?
CROWLEY: Yes. And here’s what I would tell you. That first of all, critics of those — and this didn’t come from Senator Grassley, but critics of that particular provision say that in the end, certainly as people get older, that that sort of counseling could be seen by those patients as coercive.
Having said that, I will bet you almost anything that if this question comes up in the next 16 town hall meetings that Senator Grassley has here, you will hear a different take on this, a more clarified version of what he told reporters than what he said on the stump.
Chuck Grassley was lying. Period. Rick Sanchez knew he was lying, and pointed out clearly that he was lying. And even then, Candy Crowley’s gut instinct was to defend, to do the he-said she-said faux even-handedness, when a reporter is just supposed to present the facts- not both sets of spin on a straight-forward issue. She had to be dragged across the line to admit that “Yes,” Chuck Grassley was lying. Candy Crowley was given a test, a no-brainer of a test, and she failed. Miserably.
Media Whores Online, RIP.