Sandy Fitzgerald writes in an Oct. 3 Newsmax article:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is a “sick, twisted old man” for making comments about refusing to pass a funding bill that would allow young cancer patients to continue with clinical trials during the government shutdown, Fox News anchor Sean Hannity charged.
[…]
On Wednesday, the Nevada Democrat questioned why funding should be provided to the National Institutes of Health to “help one child who has cancer,” and then attacked CNN reporter Dana Bash, calling her “irresponsible and reckless” for asking him about it during a Capitol Hill news conference.
“What a sick twisted old man to say, ‘Why would we want to do that?'” Hannity said on his Fox show later Wednesday. “To help a kid with cancer? Pretty heartless . . . pretty sick. I mean, if you want to talk about cold, callous, heartless, mean-spirited, hateful, all the rhetoric that Harry Reid recklessly throws around about Republicans, it fits him.”“I have a question for Harry Reid: How would you feel if it was your grandson or granddaughter? Or your child?” Hannity asked. “Maybe that’s why you’d want to fund the NIH as the House is passing the bill, and put aside your bitter, angry partisanship.”
Fitzgerald doesn’t mention that Hannity is lying by ignoring the context of Reid’s remarks — specifically, the fact that he was dismissing the notion that that funding the NIH should be accomplished via a lone spending bill when it could instead be achieved with the passage of a “clean” continuing resolution that would fund the entire government. As Media Matters points out, Hannity’s false smear of Reid is particularly callous given the fact that Reid’s wife is a cancer survivor.
Will Fitzgerald and Newsmax provide its readers with the full context of Reid’s remarks? Don’t count on it.