Anderson Cooper Scorches GOP Senator Who Called Reporter A ‘Liberal Hack’

"You were once a profile in courage," the CNN host said of Arizona Republican Martha McSally.
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Anderson Cooper gave Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) a “big long slow clap” for calling his CNN colleague Manu Raju a “liberal hack” as he explained the lawmaker hasn’t always been so shy about speaking with the media.

McSally lobbed the insult Thursday as she attempted to dodge Raju’s question about President Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial.

Check out the exchange here:

Cooper sprang to Raju’s defense on Thursday’s broadcast of his show, calling the reporter “incredibly fair” and “a really good human being” who is “incredibly polite asking public officials questions that they often do not want to be asked.”

Continued Cooper:

If you can’t answer that question, maybe you shouldn’t have been elected to the Senate. Wait. Oh. Sorry. Martha McSally actually wasn’t elected to the Senate. She actually tried to get elected but she lost. I forgot that. She lost to a Democrat. She only has the privilege of walking the halls of the Senate and calling others ‘a hack’ because she was appointed to the job by the governor of Arizona to fill the seat left vacant when John Kyl, who had been temporarily filling the seat of the late John McCain, retired.

Cooper highlighted former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot McSally’s previous willingness to speak to the media — from a “60 Minutes” interview about a lawsuit against the Defense Department to a 2016 profile in Elle magazine that portrayed her as a political moderate ― before explaining how she has since tried to “reinvent herself as a Trump foot solider” in a bid to win reelection against her Democratic rival, former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly.

“So, big long slow clap for you,” Cooper concluded. “A reporter was just doing his constitutionally-backed job and so congratulations, appointed Senator McSally. I’m sure the money is going to flow in and you may get a bump in the polls and you may win. But look at the company you’re now in and look how far you have come in. You were once a profile in courage, you are now a profile in politics.”

Check out the clip here:

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