There were no lack of media voices praising Hillary Clinton’s appearance last week before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, but former Washington Post Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein took it to another level when he shouted McCarthyism.
On CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 just minutes after the day-long hearing ended, Bernstein not only praised Clinton’s “command,” but slapped the GOP majority as “reckless and outrageous.”
He also bounced over to another CNN show, CNN Tonight, to double down on the McCarthy charge.
On Anderson Cooper 360, he said:
“I thought we got a great look at who President Hillary Clinton would be, for the first time really, a kind of competence, the kind of command over the whole scene that she was being asked to testify under. She knew the issues. There was nuance about her positions. It was very impressive, given what she was up against and the other thing is I think you have to go back to Joe McCarthy, to the House Un-American Committee, to find a process as abusive in a congressional hearing as this one was….This was a reckless and outrageous hearing.”
And he added on CNN Tonight an hour later:
“She did great, because she was up against a group of demagogues. You have to go back to Joe McCarthy to see this kind of demagoguery in a congressional hearing and what they did is they gave to give her a platform to show her what kind of President of the United States she would be.”
Media Research Center Vice President of Research Brent Baker explains our pick: “Nobody is better than Bernstein in symbolizing how many in the Washington press corps are emotionally linked to Hillary as their candidate who must be protected at all cost. In this case, Bernstein was particularly disreputable in impugning the motives of anyone who dared to challenge her. What is he so afraid of?”
Rating: Five out of five screams.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
