Tea party darling and CNN contributor Dana Loesch has decided to engage in some audacious revisionism in order to defend conservatives from criticism over the booing of a gay soldier at a Republican presidential debate.
Loesch's re-imagining concerned the Fox News-Google debate during which a question given by Stephen Hill, a gay soldier serving in Iraq, elicited audible booing from the audience. Media figures and even some Republican presidential candidates have condemned the booing.
At a fundraiser yesterday, President Obama also condemned the booing while criticizing aspects of the modern-day Republican Party:
Some of you here may be folks who actually used to be Republicans but are puzzled by what's happened to that party, are puzzled by what's happening to that party. I mean, has anybody been watching the debates lately? You've got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change, it's true. You've got audiences cheering at the prospect of somebody dying because they don't have health care and booing a service member in Iraq because they're gay.
Loesch responded on Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism, claiming that President Obama had deliberately lied about the booing.
As evidence that Obama was lying, Loesch linked to a previous blog post she had written, claiming that she had “thoroughly debunked” the booing story.
But her previous blog actually confirms the fact that the soldier was booed at the debate.
In her blog post, Loesch had quoted conservative activist Sara Rumpf who was in the audience for the debate in question, and "[t]here was audible booing after [Hill's] question...however, please note that it was not the crowd booing It was only one or two people."
So, Loesch's source confirms that “there was audible booing” from the audience at the gay soldier. That's indisputable. And Obama's claim that the audience was “booing a service member” is obviously true.
Loesch did say at one point in her first blog post that “you don't boo a soldier in the battlefield, period.” But otherwise, the posts were squarely aimed at defending the audience and attacking Obama.
So the real question is why Loesch has spent so much energy trying to prove the unprovable, that the audience at the Republican debate supported the gay soldier, and so little time condemning what is indisputable, that some members of the audience did boo the gay soldier.