I'm talking about Republican Congressman Peter King of New York. When he made an appearance on CNN recently, he and host Soledad O'Brien had the following back and forth:
O'Brien: "Never once in that speech, as you know, which I have the speech right here, that was - he never once used the word 'apology.' He never once said 'I'm sorry.'"
King: "Didn't have to. The logical - any logical reading of that speech or the speech he gave in France where he basically said the United States can be too aggressive..."
O'Brien: "Everybody keeps talking about this apology tour and apologies from the President. I'm trying to find the words 'I'm sorry, I apologize' in any of those speeches. Which I have the text of all those speeches in front of me. None of those speeches at all, if you go to factcheck.org which we check in a lot, they all say the same thing. They fact check this and they say this whole theory of apologies..."
King: "I don't care what fact check says."
O'Brien: "There are fact checks. You may not care, but they're a fact checker."
King: "No, Soledad. Any commonsense interpretation of those speeches, the president's apologizing for the American position. That's the apology tour. That's the way it's interpreted in the Middle East. If I go over and say that the U.S. has violated its principles, that the United States has not shown respect for Islam, that's an apology. How else can it be interpreted?"
O'Brien: "I think plenty of people are interpreting it as a nuanced approach to diplomacy is how some people are interpreting it. So I don't think that everybody agrees it's apology."
While Democrats have claimed that Republicans have waged a war against women and rightly so in my opinion, it seems as if they're failing to mention another war that the GOP seems to be waging - one against facts.
Mitt Romney pollster, Neil Newhouse, recently summed it up best when he said, "We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers."
I read a recent post about how a moderator over at the conservative website RedState was going to ban anyone whom fact-checked statements and included the link(s) and/or quote(s) from that site in the comments section.
Peter King is now saying, "I don't care what fact check says."
I can't tell you how many times I've read or heard a Republican who has claimed that fact-checking sites have a liberal bias.
Perhaps late-night talk show host and satirist, Stephen Colbert, was right when he said, "Reality has a liberal bias." Perhaps that's partly because it seems as if many conservatives simply don't care for or believe facts.
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