Congressman [score]Ted Lieu[/score] (D-Calif.) may not be good for much, but he can certainly be counted on to provides comic relief every now and then. Last month, for example, Lieu propose a bill in Congress that would require the inclusion of a psychiatrist to the White House staff.
As I wrote back then, Lieu explained that “the president — any president — should have access to a mental health professional” given the enormous pressures of the job. But Lieu was just being coy when he said in an interview with The Huffington Post where he admitted that he has been “increasingly alarmed by Trump’s erratic behavior and penchant for lying about things, big and small, that are easy to disprove.” He added:
It is not normal for the president of the United States, within 24 hours, to write about death and destruction and fake news and evil. The most troubling aspect of this is it is very clear he has a disconnection from the truth. … The very first press conference he had in this administration, they could have talked about jobs or health care. They talked about crowd size. And then lied about it. It’s one of the most bizarre events I’ve witnessed in politics.
Yesterday, Lieu was back it. This time the venue was MSNBC, which is still reeling from the black eye it received following host Rachel Maddow’s much-ballyhooed leak of a 12-year-old tax return filed by Trump that revealed little more than the fact that Trump paid tax at a higher marginal rate than Barack Obama. So egregious was Maddow’s nothing-burger that she was skewered last night by Stephen Colbert.
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This didn’t stop Lieu from making an appearance on MSNBC today to share his two cents on fake news and how to combat it. His prescription begins at 0:17 in the video below. The transcript follows.
The best way to oppose fake news is for people to watch outlets like MSNBC, where you report real news all the time. And keep in mind, the president is scared that people will watch MSNBC, so you must be doing something right.
Where to begin? First, let me say that if Donald Trump is scared that people will watch MSNBC, then he is crazy. How can a network report real news all the time when one of its anchors declares on air, as Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski did last week, that her “mind is closed“?
Last month, Brzezinski made another confession of live TV, accusing the president of trying to “control exactly what people think,” then adding “that is our job.”
When you get right down to cases, MSNBC is not only a purveyor of fake news. It is everything that Ted Lieu decries in our president. Last December, anchor Stephanie Ruhle claimed that Fox News Channel held its annual Christmas party at Trump’s Washington hotel. The story was not only false. It was about a trifling matter — lying about the small things.
Maybe, Lieu secretly thinks the network is crazy, too.
