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GLENN BECK PROGRAM
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
GLENN: Last night
with the debate, Michelle Malkin has done her homework on
who the people were that were asking the questions on the
debate and it is absolutely phenomenal to me after all we
heard about Tim Russert and how unfair his questions were
that the outcry at CNN.
You know what, when I walk those halls, CNN better be in a
full-fledged uproar of what happened on the debate last
night and who they selected to ask the questions in their
youtube debate. Michelle Malkin is here with us now. Hi,
Michelle.
MALKIN: Hey, Glenn, congrats first on all your success.
GLENN: Thank you so much. I'm a big fan of yours. I think
you are one of the smartest, most focused people out there.
I checked your website this morning and you have not only
the youtube debate questions but then you also have their
blogs and their youtube appearances before the debate where
they are clearly exposed. Well, let's just tick them down
one by one on who these people were last night.
MALKIN: Sure. Of course, the most prominent plant, the one
that Anderson Cooper gave his mea culpa for was a military
guy who earned boos from some very savvy members of the
audience very early on not knowing who he was because he was
so clearly grandstanding. Keith Kerr, turns out you to a
dimple Google search, you don't have to do some major
excavation to find, that the guy was in fact a Hillary
campaign committee lesbian and gay committee member. In
other words, an official of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
But that's really just the tip of the iceberg. I can't even
think of the analogies here, the horticulture. So basically
CNN looks like it's turned into the home and garden TV
network, Glenn, because there were at least three other of
these plants who have been tied one way or the other to
Democrat campaigns either as declared supporters or
activists or sympathizers. For example, the girl that looked
like a Janeane Garofalo dead wringer, the girl who asked the
question about abortion and whether women would be
prosecuted, turns out she wasn't just some concerned young
undecided person. Turns out she was a declared John Edwards
supporter and you could find this out by looking at her
youtube profile, clicking through to her blog and seeing
that she was an active John Edwards supporter. And
Anderson's ego will be assuaged because it also turns out
that she is a big slobbering Anderson Cooper fan as well.
GLENN: You know what, Michelle, I have to tell you. I am not
a CNN apologist. You know I work for CNN. I'm not a CNN
apologist. I work for them. We work together. I'm the only
show on CNN to have an independent company, my company,
produce the show. So I am technically not an employee of
CNN. So I'm not going to apologize for them. I don't think
there's a grand conspiracy over there, but I think there are
people over there that do have agendas. But with that said,
Anderson Cooper is not one of them. I think Anderson Cooper
is one of the most fair people I have ever met.
MALKIN: Actually I believe his mea culpa, I believe he
didn't realize who these people were but really that's part
of the problem. I mean, obviously here it's either, as one
other blogger in the blog here put it, a case of either
constructive incompetence or convenient ineptitude. I don't
buy the total grand conspiracy, either. I think there were
probably smaller little conspiracies of agendas of probably
individual producers, particularly with regard to the
military guy. I mean, come on. To believe that they didn't
realize when they had plucked this guy and brought him down
to the debate, planted him in the audience and we're
supposed to believe that someone didn't do a simple
background search on that guy? Now that's said, I've
mentioned, too, there's two others and it doesn't take some
hidden journalist with an MA from the Columbia School of
Journalism to find these things out.
GLENN: Well, give me the others.
MALKIN: Sure.
GLENN: We have the general, we had the abortion question but
we have two others.
MALKIN: That's right. The third one was the guy who came on
and asked how the candidates, Republican candidates would
feel about Log Cabin Republican support. Clearly the guy
left the intentional impression that he was a Log Cabin
Republican. Well, it turns out that that guy, David Cercone,
and once again a simple Google search would have turned this
up on the very first search page. Turns out that the guy is
a declared Obama '08 supporter. He had a blog on the Obama
'08 campaign page. This should be disclosed. People should
know that these weren't just ordinary citizens who were part
of the Republican party or conservative movement who hadn't
decided among the candidates. The guy's an Obama supporter,
Glenn!
GLENN: Right. And the last one is the undecided mom.
MALKIN: That's right. We have a concerned mom with two kids
and she looked very earnest as she talked about lead and
poise and it turns out this ordinary concerned mom also
happens to be a staffer for a head of the United Steel
Workers and a very prominent union activist in Pittsburgh.
Once again, just Google it.
GLENN: Okay. So first of all, let me start at the most
innocent way all of this happened. Michelle, I don't know
how many liberals you have ever worked with but when it
comes to liberal journalists, I mean, next to MSNBC, belly
of the beast, for the love of Pete. What I have found is
many of these liberals have never even met a real
conservative because they're from New York, they live in New
York. They don't even know what a real conservative is and
so they don't understand the questions.
When you look at these questions, first of all, a
conservative would say, are you going to prosecute the moms,
you know, the people who are going to have the abortion.
That's not a question from a conservative. A conservative
wouldn't phrase it that way in the first place. They would
be talking about how pro life you are, et cetera, et cetera.
Then you have the Log Cabin Republican. Most conservatives,
not universally so but most conservatives do not have two
questions of Log Cabin conservatives and the don't ask/don't
tell policy. It is so far down on a conservative's radar
right now that it's incomprehensible. And the other, on the
lead paint with China, you know, that one, maybe. As long as
we keep framing it in, you know, China and is China really
an enemy and what's really happening there, et cetera, et
cetera, you could possibly see that one coming from a
conservative.
The best-case scenario is they just don't even understand
how conservatives think and so they didn't even spot -- you
don't have to Google. You can look at these questions and
go, what is this? That's a setup question. There's not a
conservative out there that's asking this question. Am I
wrong? You don't even need to Google it.
MALKIN: Well, yeah, that's partly true, Glenn. And look,
I've been working in print journalism for 15 years and
broadcast journalism for the last seven. I worked in two
major metropolitan newsrooms and have come across the kind
of liberal journalists that you're talking about. But even
if you grant, even if some of these questions were questions
that conservatives conceivably would have formulate on their
own and not raised alarms on someone's BS detector, there's
still the issue that these connections were out there, they
should have been disclosed, and it's not like CNN hadn't
been given a heads-up that there were planting problems.
They had plenty of time to vet these people. You've got
extraordinary odds here, Glenn. Out of 5,000 videos and 32
that actually made it onto air, at least four involved
people who were declared Democrat supporters or actual
staffers or activists.
GLENN: There's absolutely -- look. Michelle, I know the
standards that I'm held to. I know that standards and
practices comes to me and says, you're going to go with that
on the air? There's this evidence and this evidence that
it's not true. And I'll say, well, there's this evidence and
this evidence that it is true. Okay. Well, if you want to
look stupid. I mean, they are in my face all the time to
make sure that we are -- not a single thing goes on the air
that, you know, is questionable. You can't tell me that -- I
mean, how -- was everybody drunk that was putting these
things together? I mean, how did they miss this?
MALKIN: Well, I would list names. Let's grant that Anderson
Cooper was innocent in all of this, and I'm perfectly
willing to do that. I've actually reflected some of his
work. For example, when he went to Lebanon and pretty much
called what was going on there with regard to the staging of
fake Hezbollah propaganda. So I don't think of him as the
enemy. I don't think of him as some --
GLENN: He's not.
MALKIN: -- totally incurable left wing idealog. He's not.
But somebody is obviously using him as a tool. I think it's
clear. I cannot give the same benefit of the doubt to the
people who were able to pick these plants and weeds out of
the 5,000 videos that were submitted.
GLENN: Let me go here. Is this the death of one of two
things. Is this the death of these youtube debates because
we now know it's bogus; or, does this now show the hypocrisy
of the Democrats, or maybe the ability to, you know, see the
future because they see the way they do things. Does this
show the hypocrisy of the Democrats who will not go and face
a debate on Fox News, all of the questions performed by
credible journalists. They complain about the unfairness of
the questions of Tim Russert and yet at the same time they
will plant someone from their camp to ask questions and yet
the Republicans take it. They do it. Which one of these is
more open to an honest debate?
MALKIN: Well, I think the two scenarios are not mutually
exclusive. I definitely think that you hit the nail on the
head with the latter scenario and, you know, I'm actually
very proud of all these candidates, although I'm not really
juiced up about any one in particular that they agreed to do
it because remember a couple of months ago Mitt Romney
wasn't going to do it, a lot of the right wing bloggers, my
fellow conservative bloggers including myself and others
that, hey, you know, you need to get in the game and this
could be an opportunity for you to expose liberal bias. You
need to be in the opportunity to create it. And look, they
didn't even ask, it was a theater basically for CNN to smack
itself in the face over it. But -- and yeah, I mean, the
Democrats have Fox derangement syndrome and I think people
will see through that. I mean, I think the question is how
much will this debacle penetrate to ordinary citizens. You
know, it's a small amount of people who actually read the
Internet. You've got a huge audience. Talk radio has a huge
audience. But look, CNN's not going to want to talk about
this on the giant airwaves for more than a day and the New
York Times is not going to put it on the front page
although, of course, if the scenario were reversed, we
wouldn't hear the end of it. We would have Paul Krugman
columns with the reverse scenario until the end of next
year.
GLENN: Yeah.
MALKIN: So yeah.
GLENN: Michelle, you just keep beating the drum and the
truth will come out and I think you said, you know, it's the
right thing to stay engaged. It's the wrong thing to back
away because, you know, you give people enough rope and they
hang themselves if they have an agenda.
MALKIN: Yeah. And it was, I have to say, day to day for much
of the conservative audience that has watched CNN get away
with so much.
GLENN: Michelle, thanks a lot. Appreciate it.
MALKIN: Thanks.
END TRANSCRIPT |
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