Marjorie Taylor Greene May Have Finished Off Lesley Stahl on Sunday Night – The American

CBS News’ Lesley Stahl has been around forever, and it’s a little difficult to understand why.

Stahl isn’t a particularly good reporter. She asks a lot of dumb questions, and she’s biased in a way that is often comic. There’s the famous interview with Donald Trump from back in 2020 in which Stahl treated the president with utter disdain and scoffed at everything he said, in particular Trump’s allegation that his campaign was spied on in 2016, only to have the facts prove Trump out.

Stahl sticks around mostly because she parrots elite-media narratives seemingly from the heart. And one of the usual Stahl 60 Minutes tropes, at least when political interviews come her way, is to attempt to marginalize Republican and conservative figures as freaks, oddballs, bigots, and liars in ways she and her compatriots at CBS News would never do to figures on the left.

Fewer and fewer Republicans will take the bait and consent to a Lesley Stahl interview now as a result. It’s a high-risk, low-reward proposition at this point — when Trump released his video copy of the 2020 interview, it was fairly clear how it was cut to make him look bad.

So it was a bit of a surprise to see that GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, quite probably the most maligned member of Congress not named George Santos, agreed to an interview with Stahl on Sunday. The reflex would be to call it a mistake to go on 60 Minutes’ air and allow Stahl and her producers to cut up an interview for maximum partisan effect.

Except Greene is that rare GOP politician who just doesn’t give a damn. She’s had the kitchen sink thrown at her and easily won reelection, she’s been stripped of committee assignments without actually having done anything to deserve such a rebuke only to become a fundraising dynamo … she’s the Notorious MTG and she owns it.

So there is nothing Lesley Stahl can do to her that would materially affect her career in a substantive way.

And yes, the interview was as slanted and hostile as anyone would imagine. It consisted of Stahl asking Greene questions, Greene answering, and then a voiceover “fact-checking” her to make her out to be a nut and a liar.

CBS edited out an exchange over Ukraine, in which MTG questioned whether we should fund the Ukrainian war effort without limits and Stahl responded by questioning her commitment to American national interests. One imagines when Greene responded to that back and forth by asking why a negotiated peace isn’t an acceptable American policy, a position most voters would probably agree with (and eventually will if they don’t today, as it’s obviously how that war ends), it was seen as not suitably convenient for broadcast.

So this only made it to the digital version.

MTG came off a whole lot better than Stahl. So naturally, 60 Minutes’ television viewers didn’t get to see that part.

Instead, what they saw was this, which wasn’t any better from the media elite’s perspective…

I have been laughing about this for the past ten minutes.

I’ve always opposed calling Democrats pedophiles and groomers. MTG just changed my mind, but not because of facts.

I’m in for as long as Democrats label Trump supporters racists. It’s a fair response. https://t.co/VtrRTxvuDx

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) April 3, 2023

This is not the argument the Left wants to have. If more Republican politicians would take MTG’s lead and press it as a matter of sheer predatory politics, it would matter on Election Day.

Here’s what I said Monday about this at RVIVR.com…

Is it rude? Of course it is. They hate it like poison. But calling someone a groomer is no worse than calling them a racist, and Democrats do that with impunity.

There ought to be more of this. It ought to be standard-issue GOP politics to call a Democrat opponent a groomer or a pedophile.

Because if nothing else, the Democrats nominated and elected a man as president who serially creeps on children; there are dozens if not hundreds of video clips of him acting inappropriately around other people’s kids. And the diary of his daughter Ashley contains an accusation, never answered by Biden in one of the most amazing journalistic passes of all time, that he inappropriately showered with her when she was 12.

MTG is happy to hit below the belt and “go there” because she has nothing to lose, but also because American politics is nastier now than it’s been in well more than a century and there is no fixing it while Democrats exist to do nothing but make scurrilous and defamatory accusations about the GOP and its pols.

When a dyed-in-the-wool pot like James Carville is free to toss around charges of “racism” at every kettle he sees, there are no rules. And it clearly doesn’t serve Republicans well to try to be “above” such attacks. As Ron DeSantis said in a speech over the weekend, the winners get to set the agenda and the losers go home. Those who set the agenda get to determine what’s acceptable and what isn’t, and right now it’s the Democrats with that power. They’re gleefully abusing it, as Trump’s indictment — and the far more sinister federal conviction of blogger Douglass Mackey in a New York kangaroo court — shows.

So yes. If calling the soft-on-pedophilia party the Pedocrats gets votes, and it will, then more GOP pols should do it. Try to stop them from putting gay porn into the children’s section at the local library and they’ll slander you as a book burner. By all means call them groomers and worse.

And let them do what Stahl did. Let them roll their eyes and whisper “wow.” And let them explain why they reflexively take all the positions somebody would take if they were actively trying to use culture and public policy to push pedophilia into the mainstream — sexualizing children in schools, libraries, pop culture, and elsewhere, exposing kids to Drag Queen Story Hour and worse, “educating” kids as young as 4 or 5 about sexual identities they aren’t close to understanding, turning deviant sexual behavior into a civil rights cause (one imagines Martin Luther King might be turned into a source of electric power, so quickly is he spinning in his grave over the perversion of his movement).

Let them tell us how that isn’t the use of public policy and cultural hegemony for pedophiliac purposes. Let’s have that argument. Let them scream “QAnon!” all they want, seeing as their overreaction to the Q phenomenon has already cost them the House. It’s not an answer to the charge, by the way — by now, there’s hardly an American alive who doesn’t recognize the old saw that you might be paranoid but that doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

Or your kids.

Not all Democrats are pedophiles. Not all pedophiles are Democrats. But it’s clear which party is soft on the question, and it’s also clear that the Democrats — or Pedocrats, if you prefer — are happy to cast aspersions not based in fact given all the names they call their opponents.

And if they want to disprove MTG’s allegations, then perhaps they can drop all of Biden’s advocacy about trans kids and the like.

Or maybe they can drop Biden, who looks for all the world like our most pedo-friendly president.

Either way, the accusation ought to be repeated until it sticks. Good for Marjorie Taylor Greene that she’s willing to keep making it.