CNN’s Editor At Large does a little of the ol’ Both Sides Do It with respect to the extraordinary effort of Republicans to eliminate health coverage for tens of millions of people with a quarter-assed bill that will be subject to none of the typical legislative process and little public debate. You probably already know where this is going:

To be fair, this is far from the first time a party has tried to jam something through without knowing all the consequences — as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said about Obamacare in 2010, “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. To briefly belabor the obvious (a necessity where Cillizza is involved):

Cillizza goes beyond the usual “quote Pelosi out of context without explanation” and actively distorts what she says. It’s entirely clear from the full quote that Pelosi isn’t saying that she and her colleagues don’t understand what the bill will do. She’s saying the public doesn’t understand what the bill will do, because it’s been misinformed by Republican propaganda and the abjectly incompetent work of reporters like, to pick a random example, Chris Cillizza.

The effect of this lie about Pelosi is to advance the Republican propaganda line that the process that Republicans are using to repeal the ACA is basically the same as the year-long, fully transparent, bipartisan process Democrats used to pass it. This is an inversion of the truth that happens to be politically useful to the GOP, Cillizza’s trademark.

What’s so instructive about Cillizza failing upward is that he not only spent the most election that gave us Donald Trump and very possibly tens of millions of people without health insurance wanking on about a trivial nanoscandal involving email server management and a complete non-scandal involving a charity that turned out to be remarkably free of corruption, he routinely failed to even get the stories right. But, hey, he’ll have excellent health coverage either way, so if you die or are bankrupted because McConnell and Ryan take away your health insurance while continually lying about what they’re doing, he owes you a Coke.

[Via Denverite]