WASHINGTON – Senator John F. Kerry said this morning that Congress was “taken hostage” by some House Republicans during the ferocious debt-limit debate that ended this week, and criticized the media for giving them a platform. Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the Massachusetts Democrat said in an implicit reference to Tea Party Republicans who resisted raising the debt limit as “a group of people who are completely unaware or didn’t care about the consequences of their actions.”
“They were actually arguing for a default, which would have been even more catastrophic with respect to what’s happening in Europe and what’s happening here at home now,” he said.
But Kerry didn’t reserve his criticism to those making those arguments, saying that in the name of balance, the media gave too much ink and airtime to those obstructing a debt limit deal.
During the interview, Kerry also discussed the situation in Syria and Libya, and pressed for passage of his bipartisan proposal for an infrastructure bank that would build roads, bridges, and other public works without large public investments.
Here are excerpts of his comments:
“We have to change the minds of those people in the House of Representatives who have appropriately focused on the deficit and debt, but who have completely inappropriately left out any kind of plans whatsoever for how you create jobs and grow America. Everybody’s talked it, yes the Congress was taken hostage, the country, the economy was taken hostage. You had people there who were literally ready to cut the baby in half.
“I’ve heard a lot of criticism of the president. The president had no choice here. Congress had no choice here. We did the same thing the president had to do, which is save America from a default, because a default would have been far more disastrous. And what we had was a group of people who are completely unaware or didn’t care about the consequences of their actions. They were actually arguing for a default, which would have been even more catastrophic with respect to what’s happening in Europe and what’s happening here at home now. So we have to break that.
“And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it’s exercising today. The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.
“It doesn’t deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do. And the problem is everything is put into this tit-for-tat equal battle and America is losing any sense of what’s real, of who’s accountable, of who is not accountable, of who’s real, who isn’t, who’s serious, who isn’t?”
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Poster Comment:
“And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it’s exercising today. The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual."
Pray tell - who gets to decide, John?
