

On Sunday’s Meet the Press Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) pulled no punches in his defense of the right wing’s #1 target, Attorney General Eric Holder. After an introduction painting the AG hanging by a thread, the right wing parrot completely nonpartisan David Gregory let Sen. Schumer respond:

There have been all kinds of accusations but I haven’t seen anything that would prevent him from continuing to do his job. Let’s not forget, for about two years many of our hard right colleagues spent a lot of their time on “Fast and Furious” and I’m sure there were calls for Holder to step down. He continued to do his job well and then the IG exonerated him on “Fast and Furious.” So, obviously, if there’s wrong doing we should find out who did it but the president has confidence in holder and I believe he’s going to stay.

Gregory, burnishing his objective journalistic credentials, followed up on this full-throated support of Holder by repeating Fox News talking points suggesting that Holder had perjured himself. Now, presumably David Gregory is well paid to be a reporter and said job involves some critical thinking skills. Yet, when I originally heard this accusation the first thing I thought, not being a well-paid reporter myself, was “But this all happened about 4 years ago and there was no prosecution and no indication they had any intention of bring charges against Rosen. Where, exactly, is the perjury?” This does not seem to have occurred to Gregory and sure enough, Sen. Schumer had to explain this:

Yeah. You know, I don’t think there’s perjury. There’s been no prosecution or attempted prosecution of any journalist so there can’t be perjury. The warrant is a tool to get information. I don’t think the two are contradictory. I don’t think any good criminal lawyer would say there’s a scintilla of evidence of perjury.

But Gregory wasn’t done framing the conversation in the most negative light possible:

“If there is a long investigation by the judiciary committee into the Attorney General, is that a good thing for the country?”

Wouldn’t a better question be, “If the GOP keeps ginning up manufactured controversy after manufactured controversy, is that a bad thing for the country?” But, heaven forbid, this might be seen as liberal bias because, as we all know, the GOP is beyond reproach. “Beyond reproach” defined as “If you say anything negative about us, no matter how true, we will label you a radical liberal for the next 20 years.”

Schumer puts the scandalmongering aside and makes the case for his bipartisan legislation that would allow an independent party to determine whether the DoJ has cause to seize phone records and the like. Essentially, it would take power away from the executive branch and restore some of the transparency we lost during the Bush era of grievously expanded executive power. Somehow, I don’t see the GOP going along with this. Particularly in the House. They, after all, were the ones who originally pushed for this lack of oversight to begin with.

Still, it’s nice to see a Democrat actually show some spine for a change and strongly counter the constant stream of junk from the right that the “liberal” media is only all too happy to repeat verbatim. Too many times, Democrats simply roll over and sacrifice whoever they need to in order to placate the mob mentality of the right. Of course, this is like giving a junkie a fix and the next week the conservative media will have found a new “scandal” that’s even worse than Watergate, Iran-Contra, Bill Clinton’s BJ and the Civil War times one million! More blood! More sacrifices!

The only way to deal with this nonsense is to not give in to it. If you act guilty, you look guilty. Even if you’re demonstrably not. Here’s hoping the Democratic Party remembers this simple lesson going into 2014.

Here’s the video:

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