NBC News’ Chuck Todd ripped into Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) during a Monday morning appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, saying that the Texas Republican is living in an “echo chamber,” then rhetorically asking, “what planet are you living on?”
Todd, NBC News’ chief White House correspondent, was set off by a clip of Senator Cruz dismissing the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, which found the Republican Party’s poll numbers in a shutdown-fueled freefall.
“I’ll note that that poll was very heavily weighted with an awful lot of Democrats with an awful lot of Obama supporters and 20 percent of the people polled were government workers,” Cruz said, with absolutely no evidence to back up his assertion. “So, I don’t think it’s surprising that the people who work for the government who are supporters of the president and who are Democrats support the president, are Democrats and blame Republicans for the things that are bad in this country.”
“The problem is two-thirds of the country is thinking something else,” Todd said in response to Cruz’s remarks. “And that’s what you see in our poll. It wasn’t just Democrats, it was independents and it was the one half of the Republican Party that doesn’t associate itself with the Tea Party wing of the party.”
“What planet are you living on here?” Todd exclaimed.
He went on to criticize Cruz for his comments urging Democrats to stop playing games with the shutdown.
“You started this game,” Todd said. “You are the one that lit the fuse. You started this.”
Video of the exchange is below, via MSNBC:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
