There was a real dust-up on today's Morning Joe over Benghazi and the House select committee empanelled to investigate it. In the move-on-nothing-to-see corner were Chuck Todd and Donny Deutsch. Opposing them was Nicolle Wallace, who made an impassioned case that the Obama admin's cover-up of the talking points that the White House furnished to Susan Rice, falsely blaming the attack on an internet video, merits anger and investigation.
As MRC's Jeffrey Meyer has noted, Todd has been on a tear trying to downplay Benghazi and disparage the select committee. But in his determination to defend all things Obama, Todd today ran badly afoul of the facts. He claimed that the false talking points weren't worth caring about since the Obama admin stopped citing the internet video within "two days." Could Todd truly have forgotten that two weeks later, in a formal address at the United Nations, President Obama was still talking about that infernal video? View the video after the jump.
CHUCK TODD: But as for the need for the select committee, they're just -- you know, I'll hear from Republicans that say, but there are unanswered questions. Well, no, all the questions have been answered. There's just some people that don't like the answers. That wishes the answers were somehow more conspiratorial, I guess.
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NICOLLE WALLACE: Let me try to say this as calmly as I can to you and to Chuck.
DONNY DEUTSCH: Don't lump me with Chuck.
WALLACE: Well, you are now in my Chuck category which is not a good place to be.
DEUTSCH: That is not a good place to be.
UNIDENTIFIED: You're about to be ground chuck.
WALLACE: I can't make you care if you don't, but you should very much care about the White House talking points. And so should you. This is not about not getting to the bottom of what happened. I think the Republicans feel, the Defense Department, in explaining and detailing what happened on that night has been extremely cooperative. I think Republicans feel as far as investigating on what happened that night, there's a whole lot of information and testimony. What came out last week, what enraged Jon Karl, the White House correspondent from ABC News, who is a lot angrier than Republicans even in the moment, was that the White House did not release all the information about why Susan Rice went out and blamed the attacks on a video. That should interest everybody. Not just Republicans. You should care. Chuck should care. Everyone should care about why the White House said what they said. This isn't about polls, Donny. This is everything that's wrong about politics. This shouldn't be that the polls show --
DEUTSCH: They're not polls!...
TODD: The idea that the White House did talking points on this, I don't think anybody is shocked there was talking points for somebody going on a Sunday show. What I don't understand why the focus is on this talking points is that two days later the video was no longer even a part of the conversation.
