Pelosi ‘Pinocchioed’ by Washington Post for Accusing McConnell of Racist Remark

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) (Screenshot)

Even the liberal newspaper, The Washington Post, has called out House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for “twisting” a comment made by a Republican in 2010 into an alleged racial slur.

On Tuesday, the Post published a fact-check article titled, “Nancy Pelosi twists an old McConnell quote into a ‘racist statement,’ in which it gave Pelosi’s comment its worst rating of “four Pinocchios” (a “Whopper”) for the following claims made Sunday on MSNBC:

“Let me re­mind you that when the Re­pub­lic­ans took pow­er when President Obama was president of the United States, what Mitch McConnell said is, ‘The most im­port­ant thing we can do is to make sure he does not suc­ceed.’ If that wasn’t a rac­ist state­ment. That is un­think­a­ble.”

As CNSNews.com reported on Monday, McConnell did not make the alleged racist comment:

“Actually, it was conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh who said about Obama, ‘I hope he fails.’ Limbaugh said he was talking about Obama's liberal agenda. McConnell, on the other hand, said, ‘The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.’"

In its fact-check, The Post demonstrates how Pelosi:

1. Misquoted McConnell,
2. Took McConnell’s comment out of context,
3. Twisted McConnell’s words, and
4. Cited the wrong (“mostly right”) date of the mischaracterized comment.

The Post also goes on to note that McConnell did, at times, help Obama to succeed. In its conclusion, the fact-check article says the newspaper can’t remember any other instance in which a senior Democrat so egregiously twisted a quote “in service of an incendiary charge”:

“We ob­vi­ous­ly don’t fact-check o­pin­ion. But clear­ly Pelosi’s par­a­phrase bears little re­la­tion­ship to what McConnell ac­tu­al­ly said in 2010 — he even said he did not want Obama to fail — and we are flum­moxed how this an­o­dyne po­lit­i­cal state­ment then is twist­ed into be­ing an allegedly rac­ist state­ment. McConnell was a tough cus­tom­er for Obama, his po­lit­i­cal op­pos­ite, but they did cooperate when their in­ter­ests were in sync.

“Democrats have some­times placed McConnell’s ‘one-term’ com­ment in the wrong year, but we are un­aware of a seni­or Democrat bun­gling the ac­tu­al quote so much in serv­ice of an in­cen­di­ar­y charge. Pelosi earns Four Pinocchios.”