Rep. Eric Cantor’s spokersperson Brad Dayspring has written an op-ed in Politico to address the fallout from a meeting between his boss and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York last week. In the piece, Dayspring expresses outrage with the news media, which “hyperbolically suggested that the incident was a scandal, or worse, a felony.”
Last week’s flap grew out of the following section of the press release which Dayspring wrote about the meeting:
Eric stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington. He made clear that the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other.
At the time, Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency argued that he “can’t remember an opposition leader telling a foreign leader, in a personal meeting, that he would side, as a policy, with that leader against the president.”
In his op-ed, Dayspring accuses Kampeas and Politico’s Laura Rozen of pushing this “false assertion” about the meeting, and says that Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly, Glenn Greenwald at Salon and Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic, among others, “expounded on and further mischaracterized” the story.
“These are serious accusations and must be treated as such. As the author of these two sentences, I feel it is my obligation to set the record straight,” Dayspring writes.
Dayspring reiterates his argument that the GOP “check” Cantor spoke of was not in regards to U.S.-Israel relations. “[I]t hardly seems shocking that a senior member of the House would reiterate the constitutional responsibility of checks and balances.” Of the “special relationship,” Dayspring writes that Cantor only “reiterated administration policy, according to its own definition.”
He concludes with a parting shot at the media:
“In the four days since the original post, the charge has been repeated hundreds of times. This kind of echo chamber is not only sloppy, but terribly dangerous.”
Read the rest here.
