David Shuster: He May Be Morbidly Brazen, But At Least He's Inaccurate

Gah.

A couple days ago, describing here the way MSNBC's David Shuster used a fallen soldier to play a tasteless "gotcha" game with Rep. Marsha Blackburn, (R-Tenn.), I surmised that things couldn't "get much lower."

I was wrong.  They just did.
...
Blackburn had been invited onto "Tucker" ostensibly to discuss MoveOn.org's "General Betray Us" ad. But Shuster, serving as substitute host for Carlson, suddenly sandbagged Blackburn with this "gotcha" question.

SHUSTER: Let's talk about the public trust. You represent of course a district in western Tennessee. What was the name of the last soldier from your district who was killed in Iraq?

MARSHA BLACKBURN: The name of the last soldier killed in Iraq from my district? I do not know.

SHUSTER: OK, his name was Jeremy Bohannon. He was killed August the ninth, 2007. How come you didn't know the name? ... I still think it's a little bit surprising that you didn't know the name of this last soldier killed in Iraq who's only 18 years old yet you do know so much about the MoveOn.org ad and the tactics you didn't like.

It now turns out that Army Private Jeremy Bohannon had not, contrary to Shuster's claim, lived in Rep. Blackburn's congressional district.

Facts - they're the only things standing between media hacks and the righteousness in which they mean to bathe.

Update: Shuster apologizes.

On Monday evening while guest-hosting the 6 p.m. evening hour, I conducted an interview with Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn. The congresswoman spoke at length about a newspaper ad that criticized General Petraeus. In what I believed was an effort to examine Representative Blackburn's priorities, I then asked her to name the last soldier from her congressional district killed in Iraq.

She responded "the name of the last soldier killed in Iraq from my district, I do not know." After that response, I identified who I believed to be that fallen soldier, a Tennessean killed in Iraq last month. But according to Pentagon documents, that young man came from a town inside a neighboring congressional district, not from Representative Blackburn's, and for that, I apologize for that mistake.