On his October 6 Hardball program, MSNBC's Chris Matthews hyped a new NBC poll that shows Democrat Alison Grimes up two points on incumbent Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky). This represents a six-point swing from a recent poll showing Grimes down by four, Matthews enthused.
But let completely unmentioned during Monday's Hardball was a recently released hidden camera video of a Grimes acolyte, Gina Bess of the Fayette County Democratic Party, admitting she "absolutely think[s]" that a Sen. Grimes would, in the words of the Project Veritas Action Fund hidden-camera investigator, "do the right thing and... try to wipe out that coal industry and go for better resources."
In that same video, another Democratic operative, Juanita Rodriguez, justifies Grimes's coal-friendly rhetoric as part of the "lying game" of politics. You simply "do what you have to do" to get elected, she said matter-of-factly.
You can watch the video here at the Washington Free Beacon website.
While Matthews ignored the shocking video on this evening's Hardball program, he has a prime opportunity to discuss it on Tuesday's program, which he promised viewers would be an hour-long 2014 midterm election special devoted to handicapping key races in the fight for control of the U.S. Senate. It's also worth noting that Matthews's colleague Chris Hayes briefly touched on the video on the October 6 edition of All In.
Of course Hayes huffed that the video was probably edited deceitfully and that at any rate, the central admission made by Democrats in the video -- that it's changing market conditions, not EPA regulations which have doomed Kentucky's coal industry -- is incontrovertibly true.
