Today’s installment of the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2013,” as selected by our 42 expert judges: the “Let Them Eat Dog Food Award, for Freaking Out Over the Sequester’s Puny Cuts,” and “The Kamikaze Award, for Disparaging Conservatives During the Shutdown.”
In late February, as automatic spending cuts were about to take a tiny sliver off of the $3.5 trillion annual federal budget, reporters mindlessly parroted the Obama administration's doomsaying about the consequences. Then in October, when conservatives attempted to block the implementation of the dysfunctional ObamaCare law, journalists blasted them as lunatic terrorists out to destroy America. (This year’s winners and videos below the jump.)
First, the winner of the "Let Them Eat Dog Food Award, for Freaking Out Over the Sequester’s Puny Cuts." On his February 25 radio show, the math-challenged Ed Schultz insisted that the $85 billion cut would amount to "damn near a third" of the overall budget, when the reality was it was barely two percent of the total (MP3 audio):
“Now you’ve got a budget of three and a half trillion dollars in this fiscal year. This will take $85 billion out of it. That’s damn near a third....You can’t take 30, you can’t take 30 percent of operational money out and expect to have the same product. You can’t do it! It’s impossible!”
Runner-up in this category: ABC's Josh Elliott, who began the March 1 edition of Good Morning America by trying to scare his audience with a litany of the sequester's supposed horrors:
“Deadline day. Hours, now, until massive government cuts go into effect that could impact every American: jobs vaporizing, flights delayed, even criminals walking free.”
Moving to "The Kamikaze Award, for Disparaging Conservatives During the Shutdown," Politico's chief political columnist Roger Simon took first prize for a snotty October 14 column that included this line:
“Question: If Ted Cruz and John Boehner were both on a sinking ship, who would be saved? Answer: America.”
Next up, MSNBC's "news" anchor Thomas Roberts — who is as opinionated as any of that network's left-wing prime time hosts — scolded Representative Marsha Blackburn on October 15 for "taking the government hostage" because of her dislike for ObamaCare:
“Congresswoman, let me ask you though, when it comes to ObamaCare, do you hate ObamaCare more than you love your country?...Because you’ve taken the government hostage through a shutdown, and all the American people — you’re walking them to a cliff, the economy, and you’re going to push them over one-by-one, based on the fact that you don’t like the ACA. That’s all it is. You don’t like the Affordable Care Act.”
Finally, The Daily Beast's outgoing editor-in-chief Tina Brown accosted Senator John McCain at an October 10 "Hero Summit" that her Web site had sponsored, a clip that quickly made its way to MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell Reports:
“The story of this political crisis is really, you know, the culpability not just of the Republican crazies, but of the Republican non-crazies. I mean, how did we get to the point where Mitch McConnell is Rand Paul’s bitch?... Where’s the heroism in your own party? I mean, why aren’t the moderate Republicans, you know, fighting back? We’re always saying why don’t, you know, the moderate Muslims fight jihad, but, you know, this is jihad.”
Tomorrow, the "Obama's Orderlies Award," for championing the sadly broken ObamaCare law. The full report, with 15 categories plus the judges’ selection of Quote of the Year, is available at: www.MRC.org.
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