What do you call Republicans who want 1/10th of 1% of the budget to be used to build a border wall? "Terrorists"—if you're MSNBC contributor Eleanor Clift, that is.

On Ari Melber's MSNBC show this evening, Clift, praising Dem refusal to negotiate over the shutdown, said:

"The Democrats are defending a principle here: that you don't negotiate with terrorists when they're holding hostages."

"Terrorists," Ms. Clift, are the sort of al Qaeda-affiliated scum that recently invaded a shopping mall, killing or injuring 59 innocent people.



For Clift to call her democratically-elected political opponents "terrorists" typifies the kind of despicable, irresponsible language that has poisoned our national dialogue.

Back in the McLaughlin Group day, Clift might have been a wrong-headed but innocuous liberal. What happened to Clift that somehow along the way, she has devolved into a no-holds-barred, hyper-partisan, echoing the most extreme voices on the left?

A transcript of the comment is below: