ABC's Martha Raddatz looked like she was auditioning for Fox this Sunday, as she badgered House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi about being too mean to those poor old Republicans.
October 20, 2013

Who needs Fox "news" when you've got the pundits on ABC concern trolling for Republicans with the best of them? I don't know what got into This Week guest host Martha Raddatz this Sunday, but she decided it was her job to literally badger House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi about why she was being too mean to her Republican counterparts in the House when they decided to shut down the government and hold the full faith and credit of the United States hostage for a couple of weeks.

She's lucky she didn't have someone like me on there with her instead of Pelosi, because I'd have told her the mild things she quoted here about these economic terrorists are probably the nicest thing that could be said about them. They deserve a whole lot harsher criticism than what Pelosi gave them.

This seems to be a running theme among the Villagers this week. Now that the immediate crisis is over, it's damage control time for the GOP and time to badger the Democrats about the sudden need for "bipartisanship" and "civility." She reminds me of someone asking an abused spouse why they're not ready to forgive their husband right after they got out of the hospital. "He said he won't do it again. Why don't you want to forgive him and move back in together?"

If Raddatz wants to go work for Fox, I'd say she just did a fine job auditioning here:

RADDATZ: We sit here after two outrageous weeks. I know you can blame Republicans for this, but Americans look at what happened, most of them, with disgust. They blame all of congress. What responsibility do you bear to move Washington forward, to change the mood in Washington, to make the American people proud again?

PELOSI: Well, I join the American people in their disgust at what happened in terms of the shutdown of government, that's an unthinkable tactic to use in the political debate.

But I will say that I'm very proud of my House Democrats and the Senate Democrats as well. In September, we said to the speaker, we don't like the number that you have put forth, but we will give you 100 percent of the Democratic votes in order for you to bring it to the floor and pass it no matter what the votes are on your side. We think that will produce a majority. And they stood there before the shutdown and then almost every day after on the steps of the Capitol signing letters and signing petitions to say bring it to the floor.

We don't like the bill, we think it's too low a number but nonetheless it is the number. The president accepted their number. The Senate accepted their number. The House Democrats accepted.

The only people who did not accept the Republican budget number were the Republican House members. And that is...

RADDATZ: But let's look forward. How do you change the tone? And President Obama even said this week that he wants the tone changed and yet you are saying things like the Republicans are throwing temper tantrums, they're reckless. How does that move things forward?

PELOSI: Well, the fact is that it's really important for the American people to have transparency on this. All of this was then, it wasn't two weeks. It was two weeks and two days. And that's a very big -- again, every single day was a hardship. And it cost our economy, according to Standard and Poor's $25 billion.

RADDATZ: But you haven't told me what you will do or why something will be different.

PELOSI: I'm going to. If I may, Martha, I'm predicating it on we cannot go into a daily free zone. We have to stipulate to a certain set of facts, that a shutdown was a bad thing all around.

And again, everybody looks bad when something like this happens. I'm not saying we all came out -- I agree with the president, there are no winners in this. Because the American people had to lose $25 billion in our economy.

So either the Republicans didn't know or didn't care about those consequences. I believe they do care.

So we have to have facts as we go forward. We have to have common sense as we go forward. We have to go to the table understanding that we cannot shut down and we cannot place in doubt the full faith and credit of the United States of America.

But we do have to recognize that among those on the Republican side are those who are anti-government ideologues and they cannot wag this dog. And they cannot wag this dog. They cannot wag this dog.

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