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.
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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.
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