This has to be seen to be believed — and having seen the whole thing, I still am having trouble believing it. You can watch the video at Crooks and Liars; John Amato’s text explanation is below:
Judd Gregg just had a meltdown on MSNBC that came out of nowhere. He’s been attacking everything Obama, almost from the minute he turned down a Cabinet post offer from the White House, but his performance today was really weird. The conversation was about spending and, as usual, Gregg was acting like the incredible deficit freak that he is.
Melissa Francis is a CNBC talker who believes just like he does, and for some reason he mistook her for a dirty f*&king hippy and claimed she was setting him up as a man who wants to cut all spending on education. …
Francis is actually talking over Gregg, protesting, “I’m all for small government, tell me how you’d do it….” She and Brewer wanted him to say what programs, specifically, the Republicans would cut, given their criticisms of the federal deficit and their insistence that spending had to stop. For some reason, he took their questions as a personal attack on him:
Contessa Brewer brought up the fact that many economists think that when FDR became a deficit hawk so soon after expanding spending that he helped stop the country’s economic growth. She asked him if he thought money from education should be cut, he went off and called them liars.
Gregg: First off, nobody is saying no money for schools, what an absurd statement to make. And what a dishonest statement to make. On its face you’re being fundamentally dishonest when you make that type of statement.
Brewer: Senator, you’re going to be asked to cut certain programs from government if you’re on the Senate banking committee. Which programs — just tell us — would you cut?
—Gregg: And then it gets misrepresented by people like yourself who say they are going to, if you do any of this stuff you’re going to end up not funding education. I mean that statement alone is the most irresponsible statement I’ve heard from a reporter probably in a month.
Brewer: It wasn’t a statement, it was a question.
Gregg deliberately misconstrued what they said, and the conversation went downhill from there. Gregg acted like a typical conservative bully around women, and if they were both men he would not have tried to call them liars. Meanwhile, Contessa ended the interview very professionally. He owes Brewer and Francis an apology for his behavior.
That’s for sure.
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