Last year NewsBusters repeatedly made the case that members of the press – in particular ABC’s George Stephanopoulos – aided and abetted President Obama’s claim that the Republicans were engaging in a so-called War on Women. In a radio interview with Geraldo Rivera Wednesday, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said this might have been the case (video follows with transcript and commentary):
GERALDO RIVERA: Reince Priebus, the RNC chair was on the Republican, top politician on the Republican side, just saying that if CNN and NBC don’t cancel their planned films about Hillary Clinton, that he’s not going to allow any Republicans to participate in debates on those networks. Do you agree with that?
SENATOR RAND PAUL (R-KENTUCKY): Well, you know, you can look back to the last primary season and you wonder whether there was collusion between some reporters. You know, Stephanopoulos asks an obscure question about Griswold and birth control when no Republicans were bringing up anything about trying to put limits on birth control.
RIVERA: Griswold v. Connecticut, a big privacy Supreme Court decision way back when, but kind of obscure. You’re right.
PAUL: Yeah, and I’m in favor of the Griswold decision because I am in favor of privacy. But the thing is, it was a weird thing to bring up in a debate, and nobody understood why. But then for two years, the President’s campaign then ran ads saying that the Republicans were against people allowing birth control. So you wonder if there was a concerted action between a former Democrat operative and basically the President’s campaign.
RIVERA: Well, so you’re, are you alleging that George Stephanopoulos was a Democrat plant during the debate?
PAUL: I’m saying that there, it makes you wonder, and he’s also said publicly that he has frequent correspondence with his friends who are still involved with the White House. So the question is, are you going to get a fair shake, and I think it’s a reasonable question for Republicans to ask, should we be scheduling debates and allowing people who used to and still do have active contact with the active Democrat Party, should we be subjecting ourselves to that, or should we try to have more neutral or objective type of moderators?
