Here's the person that President Obama has been holding out as an example of a Republican he can work with. Chuck Grassley's latest excuse for his the government is going to "pull the plug on grandma" nonsense. Obama made me do it.
From Think Progress:
Today on CBS’s Face the Nation, Grassley struggled to explain why he made that statement. Clearly uncomfortable with the question, Grassley stumbled over his words and even blamed President Obama for his word choice. He said that even though he knew the House bill “doesn’t intend to” kill senior citizens, he felt that he had a responsibility to nevertheless play to those fears.
[....]
Obama did use the phrase “pull the plug on grandma.” But he used it as an example of the lies his opponents were pushing around to scare the American public. Despite Grassley’s claim, he did not respond in “exactly the same way.” Obama said the right-wing myth was completely baseless; Grassley said that it was definitely something to be feared.
Grassley can't even stop the fear mongering while acknowledging there's no basis for it. Stay classy there Chuck.
Transcript below the fold.
SCHIEFFER: Senator Grassley, you have talked as Senator Conrad has about a bipartisan approach. But you really caught some Democrats off guard, a couple weeks ago, when you said this the other day. Listen to this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GRASSLEY: We should not have a government program that determines you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SCHIEFFER: Now, Democrats say there is nothing in this legislation that would pull the plug on grandma, or even require people to discuss it. Why did you say that, Senator Grassley?
GRASSLEY: I said that because -- two reasons. Number one, I was responding to a question at my town meetings. I let my constituents set the agenda. A person that asked me that question was reading from language that they got off of the Internet. It scared my constituents. And the specific language I used was language that the president had used at Portsmouth, and I thought that it was -- if he used the language, then if I responded exactly the same way, that I had an opposite concern about not using end-of-life counseling for saving money, then I was answering --
SCHIEFFER: All right.
GRASSLEY: And relieving the fears that my constituents had, and from that standpoint, remember, you’re talking about this issue being connected with a government-run program which a public option would take you with. You would get into the issue of saving money, and put these three things together and you are scaring a lot of people when I know the Pelosi bill doesn’t intend to do that, but that’s where it leads people to.
SCHIEFFER: Well, that’s what I was trying to get from you this morning. You’re not saying that this legislation would pull the plug on grandma, you’re just saying there are a lot of people out there who think that it would. Or do you want to say this morning that that is not true, that it won’t do that?
GRASSLEY: It won’t do that, but I wanted to explain why my constituents are concerned about it, and I also want to say that there is an $8 billion cost with that issue, and if you’re trying to save money and you put an $8 billion of doctors giving you some advice at the end of life, doctors are going to take advantage of earning that $8 billion and constituents see that as an opportunity to save some money.
It just scares the devil out of people.
So that ought to be dropped.
And by the way, some newspaper people were saying that we dropped it from the Senate Finance Committee because of the hullabaloo that you just played, and that’s not true. We got this out of our bill a long time ago.
And Senator Conrad will tell you that I was in conversation with people on the Finance Committee way back in March that we were not going to have any of this end-of-life stuff in our bill because it scares people.
SCHIEFFER: All right. That point taken.
