Too many times Republicans simply run out the clock when they do not want to fess up to doing something completely wrong. Jake Tapper did not allow Speaker Paul Ryan to get away with that game.
CNN’s Jake Tapper called out Trump directly which forced Paul Ryan to concede the point he was making about Trump’s response to Charlottesville.
Speaker Paul Ryan timidly and shamefully attempted to give the Trump response to Charlottesville some cover by using terms that distracted from the seaminess of his statement.
“I do believe that he messed up in his comments on Tuesday,” Speaker Paul Ryan said. “It sounded like a moral equivocation or at the very least a moral unambiguity.”
Jake Tapper was not going to let him get away with that. Soon after he had a message for Ryan that got quite a bit of applause.
#CNN Jake Tapper checks bloviating Trump supporting Speaker Paul Ryan pic.twitter.com/gf4Lm8Gplc
— Egberto Willies, Politics Done Right host 🇺🇲🇵🇦 (@EgbertoWillies) August 22, 2017
“I think the issue that Eric was expressing is the reluctance to criticize President Trump for specifically saying things like — Very fine people were marching in that rally — that had swastikas and antisemitic chants. And there were not any very fine people in that rally. It wasn’t morally ambiguous it was morally wrong.”
Paul Ryan had to come back and basically concede what the president did was wrong.
“Let me just add to what you just said,” Ryan replied. “I have a hard time believing if you’re standing in a crowd to protest something and you see you know all these anti-semitic slogans and the high Hitler’s and the swastikas that you’re good with that, that you’re not a good person. You’re not a good person if you’re there. That’s just so very clear. So I totally agree with that. And that’s why I think yeah, it was not only morally ambiguous; it was equivocating. And that was wrong.”
That is journalism. Do not allow the subject to bloviate one’s way out of a definite answer.