Orrin Hatch Slanders DailyKos with Lies on Senate Floor

For all the Kossacks out there, this one is hilarious and irritating all at the same time:

I know that most of us were watching CSPAN3 to see Fredo squirm before his questioners yesterday, but an interesting thing happened on the CSPAN2 while few others were watching.

Orrin Hatch (R-UT) was on the Senate floor on CSPAN-2 in the late afternoon, pontificating about the late-term abortion ban, and called out DailyKos, calling it the "online meeting place of the left." In so doing, he once again showed ignorance of the community and the way it works.

His first mistake was to mispronounce the "Kos" in DailyKos with the familiar "kaws" pronunciation--though he quickly corrected himself to say "or DailyKos [correct pronunciation] as I guess it's called."

But his second mistake was far more egregious. Though I don't have the transcript available (it just happened), he said that DailyKos was promoting anti-Catholic bigotry by harping about the Catholicism of a few of the Supreme Court Justices. Mr. Hatch said that this was an example of what he called the "radical, I mean progressive, left" taking extreme positions and acting out of what he called "hysteria" (an interesting choice of words by Hatch in this context, given its misogynistic etymology and origins.)

Needless to say, it wasn't difficult to do a search of diaries on dKos over the last three days for any mention of the word Catholic. And what do I find? JUST ONE DIARY ON THE SCOTUS RULING. One. That particular diary by Sociosam--the only one of hundreds of diaries on the topic to make any statements that could be construed as anti-Catholic--was further peppered with comment after comment after comment after comment upbraiding the diarist for attacking the justices on the basis of their religious affiliation.

Most importantly, though, no frontpagers or "those who officially speak for DailyKos" ever mentioned the word "Catholic" once during discussion of the issue. Not one. It is a flat-out lie to say that "DailyKos" promoted anti-Catholic bigotry--a bald-faced, flat-out lie that has become all too typical of Republicans in Congress.

Amusingly, Hatch then went on to attack another blogger (I don't remember whom) for saying that an anti-choice congress with an anti-choice President and an anti-choice Supreme Court passed this legislation, using the argument that Nancy Pelosi and the majority of Democratic Senators are pro-choice! As if the current make-up of Congress has anything to do with a law passed during the Republican-only one-party rule.

So once again, a prominent Republican lies, makes shit up, slanders this community, and makes himself look like an idiot in the process.

Typical.