Thankfully, Kate O’Beirne knows who Elisabeth Hasselbeck is. (From Hardball last night where Rosie refers to our troops as terrorists):
ROSIE O‘DONNELL, “THE VIEW”: 655,000 Iraqis are dead. Who are the
terrorists
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Who are the terrorists?
O‘DONNELL: 655 Iraqis—I‘m saying you have to look—we invaded—
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Who are you calling terrorists?
O‘DONNELL: I am saying that if you were in Iraq, and another country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are we killing their citizens, or are their people also killing their citizens?
O‘DONNELL: We are invading a sovereign nation and occupying a country against the U.N.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MATTHEWS: Kate O‘Beirne, what do you make of that charge that we‘re the terrorists?
O‘BEIRNE: You go Elizabeth. Poor Elizabeth. You saw the look on her face. I don‘t think Rosie O‘Donnell‘s foreign policy views are too widely shared for good reason.
MATTHEWS: Ron Reagan, it‘s tough to have her on your side, isn‘t it?
REAGAN: Yes, it can be at times. Let‘s sort of peel black the bluster there and talk about what she is actually saying though. We have killed a lot of civilian in Iraq and in Afghanistan. Now it‘s vital that we win hearts and minds in both of those countries. And you can‘t do that when you are randomly killing a bunch of civilians.
We have a big problem in Afghanistan, where soldiers have shot up families and then somebody show up with a wad of bills and hands them 2,000 bucks. So we killed your son. Here‘s 2,000 dollars, go away.
MATTHEWS: Ron, do you think we‘re randomly killing people in those countries?
REAGAN: Not as a matter of policy, but on the ground you have panicky soldiers who, when they come under fire, have been known, as you know, to drive down a street opening fire on any vehicle they see.
MATTHEWS: — they are legal cases, because these soldiers have been charged, obviously. But you are saying beyond the ones charged, this is a practice over there?
REAGAN: I am saying it happens in any war, and you have to figure out a way to justly compensate the people whose lives you have destroyed.
O‘BEIRNE: Ron, it has happened less in this war than any war I can think of. And our own American troops put their own lives at risk in order to bend over backwards in order to protect innocent civilian lives.
REAGAN: Well, some do and some don‘t, Kate.
O‘BEIRNE: It‘s a very unfair charge against our military. And Rosie O‘Donnell, not withstanding, terrorists and insurgents in Iraq are wholesale targeting innocent civilians.
REAGAN: I agree. I am not sticking up for terrorists. And I‘m not saying that our military are terrorists. That doesn‘t make any sense. But we do have a problem with killing civilians in these countries?
O‘BEIRNE: But we bend over backwards to keep it to a complete minimum.
REAGAN: Let‘s hope so.
O‘BEIRNE: — as humanely as possible.
REAGAN: Let‘s hope so. We certainly should.
MATTHEWS: Well, the unfortunate reality of these kinds of comments by people like Rosie O‘Donnell and the comment made by Ron Paul the other night is they allow the people who support the war to turn into cartoons those that oppose it. Is that a problem, Ron?
REAGAN: It is a problem, yes. I mean, Rosie O‘Donnell is not the spokesperson I want for the anti-war movement. She just goes too far. Calling our military terrorists is simply factually untrue. It‘s not what they do. But we do have an issue here, as I said. And that should be addressed, but not by Rosie O‘Donnell.