Massa interviewed by Beck

It’s a wild world out there, folks—with tragedy and history and comedy and historical tragedy and tragical-comical farce and everything in between all going on at once. Even as America is facing the imminent threat of being taken over by a socialist state and being changed forever from a free to an unfree country, we’re diverted with just-resigned congressman Eric Massa telling us about his nude encounter with White House consiglieri Rahm Emanuel in the House of Representatives locker room while the goofy self-taught political philosopher Glenn Beck looks on sagely and expresses his doubts.

Sam Stein at The Huffington Post provides a vivid account of the bizarre interview (there is a video link below article):

Eric Massa And Glenn Beck Conspire For Train Wreck TV
Sam Stein
First Posted: 03- 9-10 06:22 PM | Updated: 03- 9-10 07:36 PM

It was train wreck television on Tuesday evening when now-retired Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) appeared on Fox News’s Glenn Beck show and insisted that he had not crossed any ethical lines with staffers and was subjected to intense political pressure from the White House (including a naked encounter with Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel). Still, Massa stressed, he was retiring from Congress on his own accord.

In a one-hour interview with Beck that had much of the journalism world gawking and twittering in amazement, Massa offered a series of bizarre, even inexplicable explanations for his abrupt departure from office. Coming just hours after news broke that the he was under investigation for groping multiple male staffers, Massa insisted that the interactions were playful in nature, though inappropriate in retrospect.

“Not only did I grope him, I tickled him until he couldn’t breathe,” he said. “I should have never allowed myself to be as familiar with my staff as I was … I own this misbehavior.”

If that wasn’t enough of a head-scratcher, Massa grew even more cryptic and bizarre when the topic turned to his insistence that Democratic forces had forced him out of office—because they were so worried that he would derail health care reform. He did say that the decision “not to run again” was his and his alone—but he still pegged his immediate resignation to White House brow-beating.

And yet, the only evidence he could summon was basic and formulaic types of political pressure.

“It literally keeps me awake at night,” he said. “Glenn, I have had people come to me, union leaders—and I’m a union guy and I know you’re not—who look at me and said, ‘If you don’t support this health care bill, I will not contribute to your campaign’. Glenn that’s a bribe.”

Even Beck wasn’t buying it, pointing out that what Massa was talking about was, in fact, just lobbying.

Story continues below

When the topic turned to the now-infamous moment in which Massa claims that Emanuel confronted him while naked in the House of Representative’s shower to bark at him about a vote on the budget, things got even weirder. The ex-Congressman insisted that the confrontation did take place, even though the White House has denied it.

“I was in my first two months,” he said. “I was in a battle about the budget, Rahm was angry with me. He poked his finger in my chest while we were in the shower. I went through it on the radio show. Not only did it happen, I will never forget it. Rahm Emanuel doesn’t like me. I get it.”

Through it all, Beck prodded (indeed, practically begged) Massa to point to specific cases where the chief of staff or anyone else did something legitimately corrupt. He couldn’t.

“My arm has been twisted 17 times from Sunday,” Massa declared. “It is called whipping.”

The Fox News host seemed completely and utterly un-amused. And towards the end, he grew a bit hostile. “America, I’ve got to shoot straight with you,” he said. “I think I’ve wasted your time. I think this is the first time I have wasted an hour of your time. And I apologize for that.”

Massa tried, once more, to restate his case but to little success. He promised, however, that he would do one more interview before leaving the stage.

WATCH: Part I

[end of Stein article]

- end of initial entry -

Emily B. writes:

Though Beck’s on our side, the whole thing has made me laugh so hard this evening that I’ve had trouble breathing. Keep in mind that journalists all over Washington tuned in for this. Best of all, Michelle Malkin called into his radio program to warn him about Eric Massa. She told him that Massa needed to be taken with a huge grain of salt and giving him an entire hour was bad. Beck exploded and Malkin was taken aback. It’s especially riveting as Malkin proved to be quite prescient. Also, Beck sincerely apologized to her later.

The best line about the whole debacle was a tweet from journalist Matt Lewis: ” … Beck’s Massa interview is turning into the political version of Geraldo’s opening Al Capone’s vault.”

Here is a look back at that infamous episode.

March 11, 1:00 a.m.

A. Zarkov writes:

I watched the Massa interview with Beck last night, and I’m sorry I did because I wasted my time. Beck got stiffed with this one. I found Massa uninformative, inconsistent, incoherent, mendacious, and generally obnoxious. At least at the end Beck apologized to his viewers for wasting their time. He did.

Massa seems prone to extreme remarks such as calling Senator Grassley’s use of the phrase “pull the plug on grandma” an “act of treason.” I have to ask, isn’t “pull the plug on grandma” an apt description of what’s in the health care bill? After all if 50 percent of medicare spending goes to a mere five percent of recipients, that’s exactly the way Medicare will save money. We all know that medicare can’t possibly meet its future obligations. The problem with the health care bill is that it spends the grandma money on the currently uninsured instead of helping medicare meet its obligations. Something like a third of the uninsured are illegal aliens, so Obama is asking us to sacrifice grandma for Jose. Americans don’t want that. They want Jose to go home.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 09, 2010 10:04 PM | Send