After Rep. Devin Nunes recommended Americans “just go out … you can get in easily” to a restaurant in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, he ran to Fox’s Hannity show to claim he meant people should get take out, and that it was the dishonest “media freaks” who are “endangering lives.”
What Nunes said on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, with host Maria Bartiromo’s approval, by the way, was recorded for all to see. The video is below this post.
BARTIROMO: Yeah.
NUNES: Likely you can get in easily. There's -- you know, let's not hurt the working people in this country, that are relying on wages and tips to keep their small business going.
[…]
[J]ust don't run to the grocery store and buy, you know, $4,000 of food.
BARTIROMO: Right, they're cleaning off the shelves.
NUNES: Go, you know, go to your local pub, yeah.
Unfortunately for Nunes, at around the same time he and Bartiromo were offering their amateur advice, real infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci was making the rounds of the Sunday shows recommending people avoid restaurants. Poor Nunes was even harshly criticized by Fox News’ own medical contributors.
But World’s Biggest Snowflake Nunes, not only failed to own up to his own mistake, he pretended he never said what we heard him say - and attacked those who reported it.
He whined to a sympathetic Sean Hannity Monday night:
NUNES: We have a problem out here because we have people standing in line for 45 minutes at Costco. And so, what I was saying is you have empty restaurants. You can go through the drive-thru, you can do take-out. It's a great place to go.
The media freaks can do that they want, but, you know, they're endangering lives here by continuing this panic when we have no food shortage in this country. The farmers of America produce an abundant food supply. We have more food than we can eat in this country. And we have to stop panicking and ensure that people know they don't have to wait in a line at Costco for 30, 45 minutes. They need to stay calm.
If either Nunes or Bartiromo had wanted to make the point that people should get take out instead of eating in, you’d think they would have been sure to make that distinction, rather than to repeatedly suggest otherwise. Only a rank partisan or maybe Nunes’ mother would think that saying “it’s a great time” for healthy people to “go out” to a restaurant where they can likely “get in easily” during a pandemic was a suggestion to get takeout.
But speaking of rank partisans, in the opening of the same show this Monday night, Hannity boasted about his fidelity to truth:
Yet minutes later, there was Nunes lying to Hannity’s viewers without a word of pushback. Sadly, nobody should be surprised.
You can watch Nunes try to rewrite history above, from the March 16, 2020 Hannity show, and his original remarks, from the March 15, 2020 Sunday Morning Futures below.
Posted with permission from News Hounds.
