Since last week, NewsBusters has been presenting each category from the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015,” our annual awards for the year’s worst journalism. Today, the “Hopeless Haters Award,” for the worst quotes denigrating the conservative GOP presidential candidates. (Thanks to our 39 judges who patiently reviewed dozens of quotes to select the very worst of the worst; the full list of winners can be found at www.MRC.org.)
Winning the top slot: MSNBC Morning Joe regular Donny Deutsch, who on March 23 slammed just-declared GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz as “scary,” “slimy” “dumb” “ignorant” and “dangerous.”
“Everybody keeps saying he’s a smart guy. This is a guy who basically is saying that climate change is not a fact...So wait, that’s not smart. That’s dumb. But that’s ignorance. That word is ignorant and that’s not smart...I think he’s the worst. I think he’s scary, I think he’s dangerous, I think he’s slimy and I think he brings no fresh new ideas.”
“There is no longer a Republican center-right that would have no problem raising the gas tax for something as fundamental as infrastructure. Sure, there are center-right candidates — like Jeb Bush and John Kasich. But can they run, win and govern from the center-right when the base of their party and so many of its billionaire donors reflect the angry anti-science, anti-tax, anti-government, anti-minorities, anti-gay rights and anti-immigration views of the Tea Party and its media enforcer, Fox News?”
In third place, one of the obnoxious questions posed by the CNBC moderators in their October 28 debate (although there are many questions, to a variety of candidates, that could have been selected for this honor). Early in the debate, CNBC Squawk on the Street co-host Carl Quintanilla tried to bully Florida Senator Marco Rubio with a damning editorial from the liberal Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Florida:
“You’ve been a young man in a hurry ever since you won your first election in your 20s...Now, you’re skipping more votes than any senator to run for President. Why not slow down, get a few more things done first, or least finish what you start?....So when the Sun-Sentinel says Rubio should resign, not rip us off, when they say Floridians sent you to Washington to do a job, when they say you act like you hate your job, do you?”
Finally, on the September 19 McLaughlin Group, The Daily Beast’s Eleanor Clift condemned Carly Fiorina for her criticism of Planned Parenthood, with Clift claiming that, despite video evidence, the abortion group does not harvest and sell baby parts, and it was “offensive” of Fiorina to say otherwise:
“She played real fast and loose, though, with the facts around Planned Parenthood and I think she really is overreaching in the criticism she’s making of an organization that millions of women in this country have gotten services from. And to imply that they are selling and harvesting and selling baby parts — that doesn’t bear out with the facts and I think it’s really offensive.”
Tomorrow: the dopiest quotes of 2015. The full report, with 10 categories plus the judges’ selection of Quote of the Year, is available at: www.MRC.org.
