Cliff Schecter Pummels Right-Wing Mouthpiece

Poor Cleta Mitchell.

When the Republicans dragged her out from under her rock to debate my buddy Cliff Schecter on MSNBC today, they obviously didn’t tell Cleta that the same old tactic of lying, verbal barrages may not work with a new group of strategists and pundits emerging from the Progressive blog community.

When host Norah O'Donnell asked Mitchell about Republicans taking yet another hit on their lack of ethics in the Mark Foley case -- and the resulting cover-up by Republican leaders -- Mitchell ran the standard GOP playbook of deceive and distract by smearing Democrats and implying that this is an isolated case. At which point, she ran into a buzz saw with the ready-and-able Schecter.

Here's Cliff:

"That's just hysterical. I'm not sure what planet you're living on, Cleta…You're saying there's one incident on the Republican side? Let's see, you've got Randy 'Duke' Cunningham who's in prison. You've got Bob Ney who's going to prison. You've got Tom DeLay who's probably going to prison. You've got Bill Frist being investigated for insider trading. You've got Denny Hastert, who covered up what Mark Foley was doing and who's being investigated for it now. You've got Tom Reynolds who covered it up and is being investigated. You've got Bob Corker being investigated in Tennessee over shady land deals.

"You've got George Allen being investigated for the fact that he might have stuffed a deer's head in an African-American couple's mailbox back when he was a younger man. And I could go on and on. Let's see Jack Abramoff. Scooter Libby. You want me to take this whole show? I mean, what a joke, Cleta. What you say is laughable on its face. One person? Your whole party is a party right now that is basically a party of criminals and pedophiles."

I love that last part.

Note to any fellow Democrats going on radio and television between now and election day: That's how it's done.

Here's the YouTube version of it.