“The hypocrisy in the Republican Party is off the charts,” CNN’s Don Lemon is proclaiming.
Lemon laid into Republicans during the “CNN Tonight” show on Wednesday night, where he called out “hypocrisy” over President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget Neera Tanden. She is coming under fire for past tweets criticizing lawmakers.
He noted Republicans are “suddenly calling for, get this, civility and bipartisanship. Well, civility from the other guys is what they want.”
Lemon played a clip of Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) being pressed on the criticism of Tanden despite Republican Congressmembers previously “largely [ignoring]” former President Donald Trump’s tweets. Cornyn called for an increase in “civility.”
“What?” Lemon responded, adding, “Who campaigned on civility and reaching out across the aisle while the other person was campaigning on the exact opposite?”
He added, “You guys are just beyond.”
Lemon later added:
“It is really rich that Republicans suddenly think that mean tweets disqualify a person from serving in our government — well, a Democratic woman anyway — when they tolerated the former president’s Twitter wars for years, even though his tweets incited an insurrection, got him permanently banned from Twitter. Now all of a sudden they care about the mean tweet.”
Watch the video below:
"The hypocrisy in all of this is off the charts."@DonLemon calls out GOP lawmakers expressing concerns about the social media history of Pres. Biden's nominee to be budget director.
— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) February 25, 2021
"How many times did we hear them say, oh, I don't read tweets? Seems like they read them now." pic.twitter.com/yJ5QW1yNPY
Additionally, the CNN host sought to clarify that “name-calling should really be beneath our government officials, it really should. Mean tweets, bullying, no place for that.”
“But this is what I’m talking about. The hypocrisy in all of this is off the charts,” he added.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) defended Tanden, telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday, “Sure, she went overboard when it came to those Twitter accounts and the things that she said. And she said as much and apologized, said she was sorry for what she did in that respect.”
“Think of the barrage of… tweets that we lived with for four years with this president,” Durbin added. “There were two words not in his vocabulary: ‘I’m sorry.’ She said she was sorry.”
During Wednesday’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said, “There’s one nominee to lead the Budget department, her name’s Neera Tanden. And that’s who we’re continuing to fight for.”