The Huffington Post with a positively breathless report on the “locker room” exchange between Chuck (Not my favorite Senator) Grassley and Kent Conrad during a budget session:
Marking up budget legislation can be a brutal affair, often beginning early and lasting long into the night.
But buried within the hours of debate in the Senate on Thursday is an exchange you’d be more likely to hear in a locker room than a congressional hearing.
Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) was on the receiving end of this one, after telling Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), “Oh, you are good.”
“Well, your wife said the same thing,” Grassley responded.
Sounds positively adolescent the way HuffnPuff’s Ryan Grim reports it, doesn’t it? Turns out he is relying on creative editing cutting off the capper to the exchange:
The exchange has been picked up all around, depicted – and scolded – as cheesy, sex-laced banter, during discussions about rather weighty issues like, uh, the deficits. But what’s missing from the takes at other Web sites – even though the follow-up line alludes to what’s going on between the two – is indeed the context.
Senator Grassley’s comeback and the ending line close the loop. Senator Conrad responded: “She did, she said you were the biggest hit of all the speakers at the event.”
The event, we’re told, was the 20th Annual Legislative and U.S. Government Policy Seminar on Wednesday at noontime, when Mr. Grassley spoke. Senator Conrad’s wife, Lucy Calautti, attended and did indeed compliment the Iowa senator’s presentation.
I am not surprised at all that the HuffnPuff Post is factually challenged. I am surprised that the revelation of their false reporting comes from the New York Times. Kudos to Kate Phillips. And an agitprop award to the HuffnPuff and their slanted coverage of pretty much everything.
No, make that everything.
Via Memeorandum.
