OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
While God had a pretty good week in Charlotte, N.C., enjoying His own Sally Fields Academy Awards moment (“You like me! Right now! You like me!”), one person who has had a decidedly bad week is Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The acerbic Democratic National Committee chairwoman with the grating voice has been on a dizzying downward slide. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, DWS has been parlaying her petty partisanship to anyone who sticks a microphone in her face. And she’ll say anything — doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.
It all started with a flat-out, bald-faced lie. At an Obama campaign Jewish outreach “training session,” DWS was instructing Jewish Democrats how to persuade their fellow Jews to get on board the Obama train.
At the end, she claimed that she’d “heard no less than Ambassador Michael Oren say this, that what the Republicans are doing is dangerous for Israel.”
Now, that’s a pretty heavy statement — if true, devastating to Republicans and their nominee, pro-Israel Mitt Romney. But it wasn’t true at all: it was made up out of whole cloth. “No less than” Mr. Oren himself immediately came out to deny the charge, vehemently. “I categorically deny that I ever characterized Republican policies as harmful to Israel.”
Well. The whole thing was chronicled by the Washington Examiner. And then, DWS was asked about the matter by Fox News’ Shepard Smith.
“I didn’t say he said that,” she lied. “And unfortunately, that comment was reported by a conservative newspaper. It’s not surprising they would deliberately misquote me.” Note to up-and-coming liberals — always attack the messenger, especially if it’s conservative. The mainstream media will nod and move on.
But, wait, she did say that — the Examiner taped her interview and posted the clip of her saying exactly that. Caught in a flat-out lie. Did the MSM care? Not one whit. The story appeared only on conservative news outlets and disappeared in a day.
Yet it wasn’t her first bold-faced lie. Last month, none other than CNN’s Anderson Cooper took her to task for a “complete misquote” of the Los Angeles Times in a fundraising email that sought to link Mitt Romney’s abortion stance with that of Rep. Todd Akin, the Missouri nutball who said that women who are victims of “legitimate rape” rarely get pregnant.
The email said the GOP “voted to embrace Akin’s position by including a constitutional ban on all abortions — even in cases of rape or incest — in their 2012 platform.” But, she added: “Guess what? The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that the platform was, and I quote, ’written at the direction of Romney’s campaign.’ “
Mssr. Cooper noted that the Times quote was taken “completely out of context.” “The abortion language in the 2012 platform, it hardly differs from the 2008 language and the 2004 language in the platform. That language obviously wasn’t written by the Romney campaign,” he said.
Pressed, DWS said simply: “that’s the responsibility of a presidential campaign. … There’s no way that a presidential candidate, a party’s nominee, can separate themself from that party’s platform.”
Pressed further, she said, bluntly, “It doesn’t matter.” Mr. Anderson was flabbergasted. Sure, lies don’t matter.
Then, back to this week. The Democratic platform left God out altogether, along with the status of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The convention was rocked with a discordant and highly embarrassing vote on Wednesday whether to include those items in the platform. No longer “the responsibility of a presidential campaign” — and let’s forget the whole “there’s no way that a presidential candidate, a party’s nominee, can separate themself from that party’s platform” — DWS said those two minor items were “a technical oversight.”
“You know, look, platforms are many pages long. The bottom line is that we’ve taken steps. We’ve amended it,” she said.
“And the language on God you would call a technical oversight as well?” the CNN reporter asked.
“Yeah, the language on God, while we were amending the platform to include Jerusalem and the president’s personal view, we also felt it was important to make sure that we made a reference there.”
Good. A “reference” to God. That’ll placate those pesky 200 million religious Americans.
By mid-convention, DWS was canceling TV appearances, no doubt afraid that reporters would ask her about her bare-faced lies. She all but disappeared — the DNC chairwoman, nowhere to be found.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the head of the entire Democratic Party, is poised to lose more seats in the House, most likely lose the Senate and quite possibly lose the White House. What’s clear now is that if that happens, she certainly won’t take responsibility for it — and maybe she’ll just lie about the outcome. Won’t be the first time.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at jcurl@washingtontimes.com.
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