MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough cause a Twitter storm when he posted a misleading tweet about Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT). Scarborough misrepresented Hatch’s comments about entitlements generally as being specifically about CHIP, a program created back in 1997 when Hatch co-sponsored the legislation with then-Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA).
Scarborough has since taken down the tweet, but here is a screen cap of it:
Newsweek has the fuller context:
During the tax debate on Thursday evening, Senator Orrin Hatch, from Utah, commented on the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), saying that it would be funded but that the lack of funds available was problematic for CHIP.“Nobody believes more in the CHIP program than I, I invented it – I was the one who wrote it,” Hatch said on Thursday.“[L]et me tell you something: we’re going to do CHIP. There’s no question about it in my mind. It’s got to be done the right way. But we, the reason CHIP’s having trouble is because we don’t have money anymore,” Hatch continued.. . . . He added a liberal philosophy had created millions of people who “believe everything they are or ever hope to be depends on the federal government rather than the opportunity this great country grants them. I’ve got to say – I think it’s pretty hard to argue against these comments.”. . . . He added that “more and more” federal programs had been created to help people – some of which were “lousy” and some, like CHIP, which were good and would be retained.
Watch Hatch’s statement in its entirety:
Hatch says quite clearly and several times that CHIP would not be affected and that it’s a good program. His comments are clearly about entitlements in general and not specifically, as Scarborough stated, about “children’s health.”
The pushback was immediate, and so was the leftist outrage.
The left, of course, gobbled up Scarborough’s misleading tweet and reacted as expected:
Even Newsweek and Vox included the full context of Hatch’s statements (though neither called out Scarborough for his deceptiveness. Eventually, all the pushback led Scarborough to delete the tweets (screencaps embedded above) and then issue a multi-tweet sorry, not sorry.
Except he doesn’t disagree because he took it down.
So what does any of this matter? It’s just yet another instance of leftist “throw grandma off a cliff” hysteria, after all. And that is the problem. Some of the responses to Scarborough’s multi-tweet diatribe are deeply disturbing.
One Twitter user points out that the premise of Scarborough’s misdirection is faulty and makes zero sense.
And the response:
Here’s the thing, though. Scarborough knows that Republicans don’t want to kill people, and he knows that Hatch doesn’t want to kill children or defund CHIP.
Democrat voters, however, don’t know this; they truly believe that Republicans want to “literally kill people” in the name of amassing wealth for themselves and their donors.
Scarborough is new to this game, having been a Republican until this year, but this leftist tendency to misdirect and even tell outright lies about Republican policy and motivation feeds the deep partisan division in our country, a division that might help both sides win elections but that makes it all-but-impossible for Congress to function.
The question becomes: If demonizing Republicans with falsehoods and overt deception of their base makes working with Republicans in Congress impossible, why do Democrat politicians even want to be in Congress at all? It’s obviously not to “work for the people,” as they claim because they’ve strategically made it impossible for them to do so once they are re/elected.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY
