On his Thursday show, Lawrence O'Donnell said that Mike Huckabee and Bill O'Reilly were lying about Barack Obama's background.
Huckabee has been having a week of rather bad publicity after he said on a radio show that Obama grew up in Kenya. Huckabee quickly walked back that statement, saying that he meant to say Obama grew up in Indonesia, but some critics accused him of trying to appeal to the birther movement and said his explanation did not hold water.
O'Donnell has been one of Huckabee's fiercest critics, as he himself noted on Thursday. This time, he took issue with O'Reilly's interview of Huckabee on Wednesday.
In the interview, O'Reilly and Huckabee agreed that Obama grew up very differently from most people. Huckabee said that, unlike regular Americans, Obama did not grow up "going to Boy Scout meetings and playing Little League baseball in a small town." O'Reilly concurred, saying that Obama is "not a traditional guy," and that he's had a "different experience" from the "mom and apple pie" upbringing of most Americans.
This drew O'Donnell's ire. "Welcome to America, where most of us didn't grow up going to Boy Scout meetings," he said. "In fact, the vast majority of American men never had anything to do with the Boy Scouts."
O'Donnell then played a clip of Huckabee on a radio show, saying, "our communities were filled with Rotary clubs, not madrassas." That comment caused him to say that Huckabee was not telling the truth:
"If Huckabee and O'Reilly can stop lying about Barack Obama long enough to actually do some research...what they will soon discover to their utter astonishment, is that Barack Obama grew up in Hawaii, where there are Rotary clubs everywhere, but where I, for one, have never seen a madrassa,"
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