Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) fired back at Tucker Carlson on Thursday after the Fox News host called her “a coward” for not coming on to his show to address her recent anti-American comments.
Duckworth claimed neither Carlson nor President Donald Trump “know what patriotism is.”
In an op-ed for The New York Times, Duckworth explained her recent call for “a national dialogue” regarding whether statues of President George Washington should come down. In a Sunday interview with CNN host Dana Bash, Duckworth attacked Trump for his Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore, during which, she claimed, the president “spent all his time talking about dead traitors.” She went on to criticize Mount Rushmore itself for “standing on ground that was stolen from Native Americans who had actually been given that land during a treaty.”
Carlson harshly criticized the senator for that spiel. He said, “Only someone who hates the country would suggest ripping down monuments to its founder.”
When Carlson invited her on to the show, she said she’d only appear if he would first publicly apologize.
Carlson said, “Duckworth is too afraid to defend her own statements on a cable TV show,” Carlson said. “What a coward.”
Duckworth wrote in her op-ed, “Mr. Carlson disingenuously claimed that because I expressed an openness to ‘a national dialogue’ about our founders’ complex legacies, people like me ‘actually hate America.’ One night later, he claimed that I called George Washington a traitor even though I had unambiguously answered no when asked whether anyone could justify saying that he was.”
“Setting aside the fact that the right wing’s right to lie about me is one of the rights I fought to defend,” Duckworth clarified, “let me be clear: I don’t want George Washington’s statue to be pulled down any more than I want the Purple Heart that he established to be ripped off my chest. I never said that I did.”
To be clear, she wasn’t clear if that’s what she was saying.
Watch:
Sen. Tammy Duckworth calls Abraham Lincoln and George Washington "dead traitors." If that's not a dark, divisive statement, nothing else is. pic.twitter.com/lSP6jda33p
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) July 5, 2020
Duckworth continued, saying “every American’s freedom to have his or her own opinion about Washington’s flawed history.”
“What some on the other side don’t seem to understand is that we can honor our founders while acknowledging their serious faults, including the undeniable fact that many of them enslaved Black Americans.”
Without any evidence, she claimed Tucker’s accusations against her were “egged on by President Trump.”
She said, sounding a bit paranoid, that they were intended to be racist distractions from the President’s failures.
“Their goal isn’t to make — or keep — America great. It’s to keep Mr. Trump in power, whatever the cost,” she wrote, adding t hey are “insecure men who can’t tell the difference between true patriotism and hateful nationalism will never diminish my love for this country — or my willingness to sacrifice for it so they don’t have to. These titanium legs don’t buckle.”
She continued along the same lines.
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