Did GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Say He Wanted to ‘Punch Tea Party Bullies in the Nose’?

Breitbart News has an explosive exclusive report about a recent conference call held by Karl Rove during which, Breitbart says, Senate GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) said that the tea partiers are “bullies” and he intends to “punch them in the nose.”

For Breitbart, Matthew Boyle writes that a strategy call was recently sponsored by Crossroads America, the GOP PAC headed up by anti-conservative and establishment guru Karl Rove, and on the call tea party activists and conservatives came in for harsh criticism by no less then leader McConnell himself.

Boyle writes that a participant on the call contacted him and said that McConnell attacked Senators Mike Lee and Ted Cruz by name. But what McConnell said at the end of the call was the most adversarial statement.

“McConnell said the Tea Party was ‘nothing but a bunch of bullies,'” the source said. “And he said ‘you know how you deal with schoolyard bullies? You punch them in the nose and that’s what we’re going to do.'”

Boyle did get a statement from Crossroad America’s Jonathan Collegio who denied the characterization of what McConnell said during the conference call.

“Your source is ascribing things to the call that simply were never said,” Collegio told Breitbart.

Collegia did not provide Breitbart with a recording of the call in question. However, Crossroads did allow a writer from the Washington Examiner hear the recording later that same day and the Examiner says that the Breibart report is not quite correct.

Later in the day after the Breitbart report was published, the Examiner’s Charlie Spiering claimed that he was allowed to listen to the 27-minute recording of the call and he reported that McConnell did not say that he wanted to “punch tea party bullies in the nose.”

“McConnell’s comments about dealing with ‘schoolyard bullies’ by punching them in the nose as reported by Breitbart News were accurate,” Spiering writes, “but were explicitly directed at the Senate Conservatives Fund, not the Tea Party or a specific conservative Senator.”

Spiering had a second point to make: “McConnell additionally criticized the failed fight to defund Obamacare which led to a government shutdown, a position consistent with his public remarks criticizing the government shutdown strategy.”

OK, so the upshot of this story is that the original report was taken from the faulty memory of a participant of the call, but it was <>i>not completely incorrect.

While McConnell may not have directly attacked the tea party or Senators Lee and Cruz by name he did attack the grassroots group that supports them and attacked their tactic of trying to defund Obamacare which resulted in the non-shutdown government shutdown that we experienced just before the total mess of Obamacare hit the news.

So, whether McConnell attacked the tea party or his fellow Senators by name or not, he did attack their supporters and everything they are doing.

There isn’t much difference, is there?

Whether McConnell directed his attacks specifically on the tea party or Lee and Cruz he did so obliquely and it shows that the ongoing war between Constitution-believing conservative tea partiers and the establishment wing of the GOP is still going strong.

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