Absolutely fabulous. So glad to see Dick Armey find no way out of Rachel Maddow’s grasp — other than the repeated ones that David Gregory gave him.
Also, this is the Rachel Maddow that I love. Smart, informed and persuasive — without some of the gimmicks that MSNBC puts into The Rachel Maddow Show.
Transcript of Maddow, Armey and Gregory below the jump.
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Meet the Press
Sunday, August 16, 2009
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MR. GREGORY: Congressman Armey, FreedomWorks, your organization, advocacy organization getting together a lot of folks, coordinating a lot of the efforts to get people out for the protests. Do you bear some responsibility for the tone of the debate?
FMR. REP. DICK ARMEY (R-TX): Not, not whatsoever. Not when you see the kind of extreme thing you just saw, the—you know, I had my differences with President Bush, George W. Bush, there’s no doubt about it. They were well aware of that. But when moveon.org ran those ads that compared President Bush with, with Adolf Hitler, I thought it was despicable.
MS. RACHEL MADDOW: They never did that.
REP. ARMEY: They did do it. I’ll show you the ad.
MS. MADDOW: They didn’t do that. They never ran an ad that compared…
REP. ARMEY: All right. Anyway. All right.
MS. MADDOW: MoveOn never ran an ad that compared Bush to Hitler.
REP. ARMEY: All right.
MR. GREGORY: Well, hold on, hold on. Finish your thought and then…
REP. ARMEY: What, what, what, you’re going to get your chance to talk. Well, I, I, I just looked at the moveon.org ad again this morning, and it, it was a horrible thing.
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MR. GREGORY: All right, but that—just, you have to admit, the notion that people are being well mannered is not happening.
REP. ARMEY: That, that may not—that may be with some people.
MR. GREGORY: All right.
REP. ARMEY: I’m appalled by what I see, too, by some people.
MR. GREGORY: All right.
REP. ARMEY: But for anybody to say that Dick Armey is…
MR. GREGORY: So, so you repudiate the Nazi imagery. The Nazi imagery and all of that, you repudiate that.
REP. ARMEY: Absolutely, I repudiate it.
MR. GREGORY: That has no place in the debate.
REP. ARMEY: I—as I said, I repudiated it when moveon.org did it to George Bush. Did anybody here at this table repudiate it?
MS. MADDOW: You remember a…
REP. ARMEY: We’ve just heard that it was all right when MoveOn did it.
MS. MADDOW: That’s not true. They never ran an ad that said it.
REP. ARMEY: But it is not all right when anybody does it.
MS. MADDOW: The Tea Party Patriots is an organization that your organization is a member of a coalition with. It’s called the Tea Party Patriots Health Care Freedom Coalition partner. That’s what Freedoms Work***(as spoken)***is, that’s what Americans for Prosperity is. If you go to Tea Party Patriots right now, what they’ve got on their front page of their Web site, the top item, is a video showing the violence at the town hall in Ybor City, in Tampa, Florida, essentially promoting that as if that was a good thing that happened, that showed what the Health Care Freedom Coalition wants to have done in the healthcare debate. FreedomWorks is part of that coalition.
REP. ARMEY: Right.
MS. MADDOW: You can say that you denounce it, but the organization that you head is part of it.
REP. ARMEY: Listen, this—one of the fascinating things, by the way, about the Tea Party, Tea Party movement, it is, it is an enormously impressive grassroot uprising across the country, loosely affiliated people, and there’s probably a hundred, 200 different Web sites by different people. Somebody in Oregon’s got one, somebody in Illinois. We’ve got a situation with somebody in Connecticut that we did not know and who did not know us put out something that was mischaracterized and then attributed to us by somebody who obviously didn’t have enough diligence in their ability to do their research to get their facts straight. These things happen.
MR. GREGORY: Right.
REP. ARMEY: People get blamed for what other people do.
MR. GREGORY: Beyond, beyond the…
REP. ARMEY: But the fact is, that just causes further aggravation. The—especially when you start talking about elected officials, people that have the privilege of having news shows under the license granted by the federal government. They should at least have the adult discipline to get their facts correct.
MS. MADDOW: Are you a member of the Tea Party Patriots Health Care Freedom Coalition?
REP. ARMEY: I’m a member of FreedomWorks, and FreedomWorks works with many people who fight for and, and argue on behalf of individual liberty.
MR. GREGORY: All right, I want to move on.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Chris Geidner is a lawyer in Washington, D.C., who writes at Law Dork, is the senior political writer at Metro Weekly and has written for The Atlantic Online, Advocate.com, Salon and other publications. An extended biography can be found
Textbook definition of squirm.
Evidently no one explained to Armey the difference between his computer screen (where he can see a video that someone *submitted* to have MoveOn run) and his TV screen (where he can see the ads MoveOn *actually* runs).
Truly, Adlai Stevenson was right about these folks: “I don’t want to send them to jail. I want to send them to school.”