Van Taylor pummeled on Hardball

Thanks to HP and C&L for posting this beauty.

It was Republican Van Taylor, who's running against Democrat Chet Edwards in TX-17.

He's one of a tiny number of challengers the NRCC says they're supporting, and they're already going low against Edwards -- you'll hear Taylor accuse Edwards of not "supporting the troops" even though Edwards is beloved by the military community for work on national veterans issues and his work with the local vets community on things like PTSD. It's a big part of why he survived Tom DeLay's redistricting garbage.

Anyway, you'll see in this clip why so many Iraq vets jumped into politics as Democrats this time around while Van Taylor is the lone Iraq vet running for Congress as a Republican. The contrast between Taylor's regurgitated Ken Mehlman talking points and Paul Hackett's heartfelt, passionate outrage is just shocking. And you'll see the same kind of sincerity from Tammy Duckworth and Patrick Murphy on our side. If you've never seen Paul Hackett before, you're in for a real treat and will soon realize why he instantaneously gained so much respect in the blogosphere.

Crooks and Liars has the video. You have to see this.

Support Chet Edwards today.

dday has more.

Just wanted to expand upon what happened. Matthews started by going to Taylor, asking him about Iraq. Taylor says that we must stay in Iraq because we have to stop Al Qaeda. He walks right into Matthews' trap, saying that Al Qaeda made a decision to go to Iraq, leaving Matthews to say "so if we didn't go into Iraq, they wouldn't be there." Matthews then hits him, wondering why what we're seeing on our TV screens (even though we're not really seeing it), where 3,100 Iraqis are dying a month, and no more than 5% can be attributed to Al Qaeda. Taylor couldn't respond. Hackett jumps in with "what you're seeing is a civil war. The US military has done every single thing they can do from a military standpoint. Hackett then asked "Where's the six-foot-two, left-handed guy with the flowing white robe and the kidney problem? (Taylor) doesn't understand the war on terror." It just got worse from there.

Capitol Annex has the transcript of the interview.

Update: BOR has uploaded the video to YouTube.