Have you ever wished that errant journalists could get their noses rubbed in their own absurdities and outright falsehoods like puppy dogs who make a mess? Well, if you had been watching Meet The Press today then you would have seen Congressman Raul Labrador of Idaho do just that to the New York Times house "conservative" David Brooks who was slapped down not once but twice.
As you can see in this video and below the fold, Brooks didn't learn his lesson after being slapped down by Labrador for uttering absurdities about the Senate immigration bill. Labrador was forced to perform an encore performance after Brooks flat out uttered a falsehood. First we see Brooks describe how wonderful he thought the Senate immigration bill was:
DAVID BROOKS: They are here, you know, I’ve seen a lot of intellectually weak cases in this town. I rarely seen as intellectually a weak case is the case against the Senate immigration bill. The Republican say they want to reduce illegal immigration. The Congressional Budget Office says the Senate bill will reduce it by a third to a half. They said they want economic growth. All the top conservative economists say they’ll produce economic growth. They say you want to reduce the debt. CBO says it will reduce the debt. All the big major objectives the Republican stand for, the Senate immigration bill will do. And so the-- the other things they’re talking about are secondary and tertiary issues whether we get 86 percent border protection or 90 percent, compared to the big things this bill does, they’re minuscule. Mystified by what…
DAVID GREGORY: Congressman, respond to David Brooks on that.
And Labrador's response was to slap Brooks down for his absurd immigration bill stance.
REP. RAUL LABRADOR (R-ID): I’m-- I’m sorry, but what-- what I just heard was totally ridiculous. If-- if you listen to what the CBO said, they said that it’s going to be between a third and 50 percent reduction in illegal immigration. That means that every five years, we’re going to have to do another Reagan amnesty. What the American people want is a secure border. They understand that there is going to be economic growth. And I agree that there’s going to be economic growth when you have immigration reform, that’s why I’m a big proponent of immigration reform, but for somebody to sit here on national TV and say that that it is actually a weak argument for us to argue that we want something like 90 percent security, I think it’s-- it’s actually beyond the pale. What we need to do-- look-- look at just one thing. There’s two-- two components of the law that we need to-- that we need to change. For example, the-- the ICE agents have told us that if they could work with the local communities, with the local law enforcement agents, they would be much more effective in securing our-- our interior. The Democrats do not want any local enforcement of immigration laws. We do it with drug laws. We do it with all these other things where-- where we have these task forces between the federal-- federal and state and local agencies, and the Democrats do not want to do with immigration. We could do that and we could curtail a lot of the illegal immigration. There’s a lot of other things that we can do to make this law stronger.
When David Gregory asked Brooks for his response, he replied with a flat out falsehood:
BROOKS: The CBO said that it would reduce it by a-- by a third to 50 percent, and what I hear the Congressman saying is he won’t support it unless it’s a 100 percent because we’d have to go back and do a Reagan.
Gee, when did you hear Labrador say he wanted a 100 percent reduction in illegal immigration? And Labrador didn't let that pass without administering a second slapdown to puppy dog Brooks:
LABRADOR: That’s-- that’s not what I say. Don’t-- don’t put words into my mouth.
One hopes that more people on news shows were as willing as Congressman Labrador to administer quick slapdowns to journalists who make very public messes with their absurdities and falsehoods.
