Remember when President Obama attended a January House Republican caucus gathering in Baltimore and schooled jackasses like Mike Pence who weren’t used to their weak-ass Fox talking points getting challenged? Well, fast-forward 10 months, and the new word is that Obama crashed their party:
“He has a ways to go to rebuild the trust,” said a top Republican Hill staffer. “The Baltimore thing was unbelievable. There were [House Republicans] who only knew Obama was coming when they saw Secret Service guys scouting out the place.”
TPM demolishes this bullshit, which was credulously repeated in Politico, by linking to press releases from Mike Pence and others, welcoming Obama and thanking him for accepting their invitation. Josh Marshall finishes his otherwise excellent piece with this:
This whole episode, this made up story, is embarrassing.
I don’t know who he thinks is embarrassed, Politico or Republicans, but it doesn’t matter, because he’s wrong about both.
The piece is a bitch-slapping win for the Republicans. When Obama spoke with Mitch McConnell on election night, he suggested a November 18 meeting. McConnell and Boehner aren’t ready to have that meeting until November 30. That’s the real story, but instead of looking like what they are — unprepared and scared — Republicans are claiming that Obama fucked up the meeting time. In order to push that bullshit line, they simply made up a whole new story about how that uncivilized, unsocialized black man crashed their meeting in January.
The story is also a win for Politico, because it is what they covet, a morning-winning “exclusive”. It’s also a beat-sweetener. House Republicans are the new power in DC, and Politico needs to “win the morning” by being first to print every bullshit talking point that will come out of Boehner’s press operation. By showing that they aren’t going to be too picky about fact checking, they’re setting themselves up as the perfect conduit for a series of anonymously-sourced horseshit stories just like this one.
Update: Commenters point out that Politico has issued a correction that removes the last sentence of the staffer’s anonymous quote. That makes everything all better, of course.
cleek
Politico is a troll. they are trolling for hits. you’ve been trolled.
Suck It Up!
Meanwhile Jed Lewison of DKos tells his readers that the meeting was postponed because the Republicans already sense victory on tax cuts.
Hmmmm…..I’ve never heard of postponing a meeting because you’ve already won the debate.
wormtown
This is all just so depressing.
LGRooney
It seems every other day I think I have read the story embarrassing enough for the press that the real narrative will finally start to be told, i.e., that the right-wing lies can no longer be provided cover by a cowering press (or is the editorial staff?). These tipping points often seem to start with something so innocuous as this. Could it be?
Okay, perhaps I just need another coffee to wake me from this dream even though I’ve been at work over an hour…
arguingwithsignposts
@cleek:
except mm didn’t link to the Politishit.
c u n d gulag
I eagerly awaited Politico when it was about to come out. It took me about 3 days to realize it was a POS, and I haven’t clicked on it since.
Of course, 30+ years ago, I thought CNN and having 24 hours of news on cable was a great idea.
In other words, I’m basically a f*cking idiot who’s learned to live with disappointment.
And yeah, I supported Obama…
Republicans in the HOUSE! Obama to meet with Republican “leadership.”
I’m putting the Suicide Hotline on speed dial as soon as I get done typing this.
JoshB
Reality has a liberal bias.
aimai
The only thing that gives me any hope is that the Republicans are still scared of Obama’s magical gift of making them look like utter fools. Because otherwise I can’t see any hope in the present circs at all. I am not anticipating that the Democrats will figure out how to fight from a prone position for the next two years. We will hear nothing but “nothing matters/can get done until we retake the house in 2012” and so no serious politicking and political advantage positioning will take place until then and we will, in fact, lose a ton of rhetorical battles and leave the electorate still more confused about who they should vote for and why.
aimai
Dave
It shouldn’t matter if someone shows up unexpectedly. If you have these great ideas that are so full of awesome and you know they are going to save America, then you should be able to talk about them no matter who pops up. As opposed to saying the big, black man made you shit your pants.
Also, too…can we just finally start saying the truth? That the reason the GOP/Tea Party has lost their collective shit is because a black guy is in the White House? Everyone in the media seems to bend over backwards to avoid making that statement.
Kryptik
Taking bets on how long it takes until this is the new accepted ‘history’ of that moment by the media.
scav
yeah, so far, coffee still seems to work in this post-reality world.
Mudge
We’re still at war with Eastasia.
Michael
OT sort of, but this might be one of the best pieces I’ve ever seen written at the GOS.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/11/17/921220/-Southern-history-repeating-itself:Descent-into-madness
He’s of an age with my mother, had some of the same experiences (including contact with a former slave), but unlike her, came to a far different spot in his development.
He marched with John Lewis, while my mother voted for George Wallace in 1968.
Read it, absorb it, understand it.
OGLiberal
Politico has already “corrected” the story. Here are the revised first three grafs:
The roots of the partisan standoff that led to the postponement of the bipartisan White House summit scheduled for Thursday date back to January, when President Barack Obama dominated a GOP meeting in Baltimore to deliver a humiliating rebuke of House Republicans.
The one-sided televised presidential lecture many Republicans decried as a political ambush – Obama’s staff wanted the event be broadcast and GOP aides agreed reluctantly at the last minute — has left a lingering distrust of Obama invitations and a wariness about accommodating every scheduling request emanating from the West Wing, aides tell POLITICO.
“He has a ways to go to rebuild the trust,” said a top Republican Hill staffer “The Baltimore thing was unbelievable.”
So, instead of “Obama blindsided us” it’s, “We invited him and he made us look like ignorant idiots. And we’re so stupid that we agreed to let them put it on TV. So Obama has a ways to go before we feel better about being so stupid and unprepared.”
Of course, the initial total lie of a story is probably what will drive the morning chat shows, not the “corrected” version.
Wilson Heath
“Clownsourcing” is Politico’s news-gathering alternative to “crowdsourcsing.”
cleek
@arguingwithsignposts:
oh well :)
wolfetone
Well, Politico “corrected” that first graph. The analysis remains the same, but at least the opening lie is gone.
SiubhanDuinne
I was just listeing to Mara Liasson on Morning Edition talking about this. She said the reason for the postponement is that the Repubs are working on their new caucus assignments. It’s all such bullshit. I’m sorry, you just don’t blow off an invitation from the POTUS.
Anyone remember that West Wing episode where the House (GOP) leadership “invited” Bartlet to meet with them at the Capitol — he stopped his motorcade and walked up Pennsylvania Avenue, stopping on the way to chat with tourists — when he got to the House, they kept him cooling his heels in the waiting room, and he got fed up (well, Josh did) and left.
Obama needs a few moments like that.
arguingwithsignposts
@OGLiberal:
I love how they put the correction at the very end of the second page of the article:
Shorter: we couldn’t be assed to check our facts, and Josh Marshall called us on our bullshit.
Nick
The media wouldn’t do this if only Obama used the bully pulpit.
Nick
@SiubhanDuinne:
except they did, and the media thought it was just fine
knowing our media, they’d spin it as “this pretentious President showed up at the Capitol demanding a meeting with busy, hard-working Republican leadership. Who the hell does he think he is?”
PeakVT
Here’s another irritating and depressing story: companies are refusing to hire unemployed people because… they’re unemployed. (Warning: totebagger link.)
Napoleon
@Michael:
I am reading Halberstam’s “The Children” right now about the civil rights struggle and its the only thing right now keeping me from loosing my mind since the good guys will win in the end.
JasonF
@OGLiberal: The most pathetic thing about the correction is the way it just omits the portion of the quotation from the “Top Republican Hill Staffer” that is a demonstrable lie. No reportage on the fact that “a Top Republican Hill Staffer” tried to spin some bullshit and got caught doing it. Not even an attempt to play the “Republicans say this, hippie bloggers say that, and who can tell which is right!?” Just straight down the memory hole, let’s pretend “a Top Republican Hill Staffer” never lied about everyone being surprised when the Secret Service showed up in Baltimore. Even worse, by omitting that context, Politico is able to shoe-horn the remaining portion of the quotation into its narrative about how the fact that it was televised was what upset the GOP, despite the fact that the original context is clear that this was not what “a Top Republican Hill Staffer” was talking about.
Steve
@arguingwithsignposts: The awesome thing about the correction is they didn’t merely correct their own statements. They silently truncated the quote from the anonymous Republican staffer – he had originally said “The Baltimore thing was unbelievable. There were [House Republicans] who only knew Obama was coming when they saw Secret Service guys scouting out the place.” – in order to make the meaning vague and remove the part that was just a blatant lie.
That’s pretty amazingly shoddy journalism. Use the cloak of anonymity to lie to Politico, and not only will they not call you on it, they’ll quietly “fix” your quote so no one can see what a liar you were.
arguingwithsignposts
@JasonF:
I suppose someone should just start taking screencaps of every story Politico puts up so the record will at least show that they are changing their story.
SiubhanDuinne
@Nick #21: You’re right, they would.
I prefer to live in the fictional West Wing world most days than the one I’m in.
Mojotron
Politico: “We’re halfway around the world before the competition* has their boots on!”
Jim C
@JasonF:
The only thing about this that I disagree with, Jason, is that I actually have such a low opinion of GOP Congresscritters, that I found the concept some of them might have been unaware the President was coming entirely plausible. Some of these folks don’t know what day it is unless an aide tells them. Would anyone really be surprised to learn Michelle Bachmann has a Dressing Aide to make sure she puts her clothes on in the right order, rather than suit coat first, then blouse, then bra?
(And just to be all totebaggy and faux-balanced, Roland Burris is just about this clueless.)
Ash Can
@PeakVT: That’s nothing new. I found out when I got out of grad school in the early ’80s that it takes a job to get a job. I had educational pedigrees to spare, but it wasn’t until after I started working temp jobs that I finally found permanent, full-time employment.
John PM
We need to stop calling what Politico, Fox and most of the MSM do journalism. A kangaroo court is not a legal system, and Politico is not a news organization.
Ash Can
@Jim C: Actually, this crossed my mind as well, in an even more realistic sense — I can easily envision the GOP leaders simply not bothering to tell their underlings that they had invited the prez, and said underlings figuring it out on their own at the last minute.
mikefromArlington
Politico are the TMZ of politics.
aarrgghh
hmm … now that you mention it, my own recollection of that event was a bit different from politico’s as well …
El Cid
@Michael: I agree. I read much of it extremely late last night / early morning during a lack of sleep period, and I was really impressed.
[Also, having studied it a bit, people would be surprised, perhaps, at the volume of studies both within and outside of the South recognizing its undeveloped, backward status as a coherent problem and searching for its causes and remedies.]
El Cid
The worst thing about Obama coming in with his Secret Service and forcing his way into Pence’s Republican caucus meeting was that Obama’s trip there cost $200 million per day, and required 14 Army battalions to regroup.
El Cid
Famed New Deal study, Report on Economic Conditions of the South.
catclub
@Napoleon:
“since the good guys will win in the end.”
Except for all the good guys that die before the end.
Admiral_Komack
@SiubhanDuinne:
“I was just listeing to Mara Liasson on Morning Edition talking about this. She said the reason for the postponement is that the Repubs are working on their new caucus assignments. It’s all such bullshit. I’m sorry, you just don’t blow off an invitation from the POTUS.”
You do if he’s BLACK…and you know he’s going to make you look like fools.
WyldPirate
@Dave:
This is utter nonsense.
The GOP/Tea Party lost their “collective shit” decades ago during the Reagan era. They made up shit out of whole cloth then, got away with it, and ramped up the crazy during the Clinton administration. The Rethugs “do it” not because of the racism, but because they hate Democrats and have tried to make the words liberal and progressive a pejorative (quite successfully) since Nixon.
Our biggest failure as a country is with the media and the idiot populace. The media has completely turned into a “he said/she said clown show. Rethugs have known for years that they get challenged on none of the nonsense they say. That’s how Reagan can get hailed as the great fiscal conservative when he added more to the national debt in a shorter time (non war time at least) than any other President. Same goes for both Bush’s who have added more to the debt–needlessly I might add–than any of the Dems since Carter. Because the media doesn’t challenge the Rethugs is why they can get away with their fiscal foolishness of the Bush years and shift the blame to Obama.
The press corpse has been dead since Watergate. Now it is simply a clown show in pursuit of ratings.
Then we have the idiot populace who have been placated with a steady diet of AM talk crap and slipped into an uneducated morass unaware and unconcerned of the theft and decay of their country going on under their noses. They don’t care because they have plenty of Budweiser, McDonald’s and the like. They get told the enemies to blame–the unions, gays, overpaid teachers, high taxes, the “libs” dark folks, Mooslims–anyone but themselves for their sloth and inattentiveness to their own democracy. This allows the plutocracy–who controls the media–to quietly steal every thing that isn’t nailed down and deflect the blame to, and stir up enmity amongst, the lower classes who are getting robbed.
That Obama is black is just gravy on top of the attacks from the Rethugs. They would be attacking like a pack of rabid wolves and lying through their teeth if Obama were white. Sure, they can get out a few extra crazies who wouldn’t be paying attention unless Obama was black. Were he white, the Rethugs would make up some other nonsense to go after him over just as they did with Clinton and Carter.
The media would and will just go on letting the Rethugs spew idiocy and playing the false equivalency game. The nonsense gets eyeballs which gets advertisers. They’re not going to revert to exposing the lies because that would require something that couldn’t be explained in the less than 4 minutes between commercials and that would exceed the viewers attention span.
Steve in Iowa
The GOP caucus can be counted on to be the disloyal opposition every time. Hopefully Obama has learned that after dealing with them for two years.
I have one hope for the GOP House caucus during this Congress. I want public hearings into the birth certificate. Please, Boehner! Please, Issa! Please throw your base the red meat that they crave! Please show the hearings live on C-Span! Please Politico cover every aspect of the birth certificate! Please call Orly Taitz as an expert witness!
Can even the GOP be this crazy? Whether they do hold hearings or not–then we have the answer to the stupid or evil question once and for all. Hold hearings: stupid/crazy. Don’t hold hearings: Evil. I’m betting on Evil.
JohnR
It no longer matters. The only pushback against these increasingly blatant and casual lies comes on sites like this, which of course nobody “important” reads. Any lie, no matter how transparent, immediately becomes The Truth, since it is immediately repeated and amplified by “even the liberal” media. “Bitter partisan” commentators like Olbermann (he always acts kind of “bitchy”, doesn’t he? I think you know what I mean…) and that shrill lesbian are self-evidently making stuff up, since the Serious People all agree with deep thinkers like Brooks and Hiatt that the problem is all on the rude, intransigent Democrats.
Soon enough Olbermann and Maddow will be gone again, that rude Senate clown will be defeated like the rude House clown was, and the country will be back in the good “Leave it to Beaver” times again.
Martin
Congress, as part of their new reform movement should require that a forum for the President be set up regularly. Question time was awesome. People actually learned stuff. That should be happening every month.
El Cid
@El Cid: The only difference between today’s TeaTards and the ’90s crazies, I believe, or recall, were that in the Clinton ’90s there was almost no popular organizing elements to it. There were the proliferation of the various militia movements, but there weren’t the Koch-funded fake grassroots organizations sending buses to have people scream about Clinton being a Nazi and going around to members of Congress and at town halls to scream about government takeovers of the whole economy.
FlipYrWhig
@Suck It Up!:
That was unbelievable bullshit, and, of course, quickly drew hundreds of angsty replies about how Obama is such a wuss that he already gave up without fighting. When, you know, nothing of the kind happened, except in the mind of Jed Lewison, who said “probably” that’s what the Republicans were thinking.
It was if anything even greater bullshit than the same guy’s laughable point about how since 9% of those polled disapproved of Obama because he wasn’t liberal enough, we should consider that 20% of the disapproval number, because, um, 20% is bigger than 9% and WE WILL NOT GO TO THE BACK OF THE BUS?!
DailyKos is bananas, b-a-n-a-n-a-s.
Bulworth
I don’t doubt that they’re unprepared, but also, too, this just sounds like the new Repub leadership disagreeing to disagree. If Obama says the 18th, then the Repubs will say the 30th, just for spite. Or maybe Dec 6. Or Dec 25.