MRC’s Notable Quotables: Evil Republicans Making War on the Poor

This week’s edition of MRC’s Notable Quotables newsletter is chock full of liberal media quotes showing reporters’ slanted approach to the tax and budget issues now at center stage. In fact, there’s so much bad material, we had to add an extra page to our usually three-page newsletter (you can view/download the PDF here).

The whole issue is up over at www.MRC.org. Here’s a baker’s dozen of the worst quotes (including two video clips), all collected in the last couple of weeks:

Once Again, Evil Republicans Making War on the Poor

“Guess what? Paul Ryan is doing it on the backs of poor people and seniors...He’s not doing anything in terms of raising taxes to compensate and say, ‘you know what, the sacrifice is going to be shared across all areas of our economy.’ The rich get off like scoundrels.”
— Juan Williams on Fox News Sunday, April 10.

“You voted to give tax cuts to the richest Americans, the top two percent, you gave them tax cuts of about $800 billion over a decade, which is exactly what you guys are saying we now need to cut from health care for the poorest Americans. That was a trade off that you made. How can you justify that as a matter of ethics, morality or simply good conscience?...You are driving the government to bankruptcy and then balancing the budget on the backs of the poor....”
— CNN’s Eliot Spitzer to Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz, In the Arena, April 5.


Ryan’s Budget Would “Kill Half” of Matthews’ Audience

“Most people who follow the news and watch the newspapers every day and watch television shows like this on Fox or this network, MSNBC, or anywhere, on CNN, they — those most attuned to this debate over the budget are either retired or close to it....Let them [Republicans] offer a big slash in Medicare, which is going to kill half the people who watch this show.”
— Chris Matthews talking about the House GOP budget plan on MSNBC’s Hardball, April 11.


Don’t Reduce Government Spending or “People Will Starve to Death”

“I stopped eating on Monday and joined around 4,000 other people in a fast to call attention to congressional budget proposals that would make huge cuts in programs for the poor and hungry....These supposedly deficit-reducing cuts — they’d barely make a dent — will quite literally cause more people to starve to death, go to bed hungry or live more miserably than are doing so now.”
— New York Times food writer Mark Bittman in a March 30 op-ed, “Why We’re Fasting.”

As Always: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit

“If it [the proposed Republican budget] respects the Treasury, what it does not respect are women’s rights, what it does not respect is the environment. Is it going to undermine potential success here if you force social issues on to the budget table?”
— Daytime anchor Contessa Brewer to Republican Congressman Mike Pence on MSNBC Live, April 1.

“Poor white people, poor black people are the ones who are oppressed by the right wing in this country, but they don’t seem to get that. They vote against their own interests all the time.”
— Headline News host Joy Behar on her Joy Behar Show, April 12.

Touting Victims of the Shutdown That Never Happened

“The shutdown will stop new funding for medical research and hope for desperate patients....Doctors at the National Institutes of Health would be forced to stop seven new clinical trials, four involving children, next week; and stop admitting new patients at 640 ongoing trials, 60 of them involving children with cancer.”
— ABC’s Jake Tapper on World News, April 6.

Correspondent Jonathan Karl: “And there’s the sixth grade class at Central Elementary in Coleraine, Massachusetts. They’ve been looking forward to visiting Washington D.C. on Monday.”
Unidentified girl: “The government is mean.”
Karl: “But now they may be due for an entirely different kind of civics lesson, as most of the city may be shut down.”
— ABC’s Good Morning America, April 7.


Matt Took the Spin Right Out of Chuck’s Mouth

Matt Lauer: “When you look at some of the things the Tea Party and others on the far right are asking for — no funding for Planned Parenthood, no funding for climate control, public broadcasting — does it seem to you, Senator, that this is less about a fiscal debate or an economic policy debate and they are making an ideological stand here?”
Democratic Senator Charles Schumer: “That’s exactly right, Matt. You’ve hit the nail on the head.”
— Exchange on NBC’s Today, April 6.


Right on Cue, Media Start Chirping for Higher Taxes

“He [Paul Ryan] doesn’t deal with the revenue side at all....His goal is to do 18 percent of GDP as revenue. That’s not enough. We’re going to have to raise some taxes and we’re going to have to face up to that...”
— Former Newsweek managing editor Evan Thomas on Inside Washington, April 8.

“Finding a way to raise taxes may well be the central political problem facing the United States.”
— New York Times chief economics writer David Leonhardt, April 13.

“Is raising taxes on the table?...Why shouldn’t the burden be equally shared? Why shouldn’t we put some of that burden on the wealthy and corporations?”
— Matt Lauer to Representative Michele Bachmann on NBC’s Today, April 13.


It’s “Awesome” Just to Be Near the “Anti-Reagan”

“If you were a kid in the Northeast during the 1980s, as I was, there is something awesome — in the literal sense — about sitting across a desk from Mario Cuomo, even if he now misplaces names and occasionally grasps for the point of an anecdote that has fluttered just out of reach. He was, at that time, the anti-Reagan, a powerful and resonant voice of dissent in the age of Top Gun and Alex P. Keaton. Cuomo, Ted Kennedy and Jesse Jackson were the three titans of the day who seemed to possess the defiance needed to rescue liberalism from obsolescence.”
— Correspondent Matt Bai in an April 10 New York Times Magazine profile of Cuomo.

And there's plenty more where those came from. Just click over to www.MRC.org for even more outrageous quotes from the liberal media.