Via Ed Kilgore, who cites it as evidence that we’re “entering a fact-free zone,” I see that Dave Weigel’s bored and desperate for copy enough to fisk the latest Republican attack video:
At this point, getting video clips of Obama from Republican campaigns is like getting an article pitch from Jayson Blair. It might tell a good story, but you need to run down the source and triple-check. Jim Geraghty points to our latest example, a rapid response video from the RNC that clips Obama’s speech from Oakland.
Just like we’ve tried their plan, we tried our plan — and it worked. That’s the difference. That’s the choice in this election. That’s why I’m running for a second term.
Pretty stupid! As Geraghty points out, with a smorgasboard of links, the economy is still horrible three and a half years after Obama took office. But what was the rest of the quote?
I’ll cut out government spending that’s not working, that we can’t afford, but I’m also going to ask anybody making over $250,000 a year to go back to the tax rates they were paying under Bill Clinton, back when our economy created 23 million new jobs, the biggest budget surplus in history and everybody did well. Just like we’ve tried their plan, we tried our plan — and it worked. That’s the difference. That’s the choice in this election. That’s why I’m running for a second term.
What are the chances? Another radical Obama quote that’s just a clipped version of something all Democrats believe.
So almost immediately, Moe Lane of RedState (the dude who covered himself in glory by ridiculing Roger Ebert for having cancer),* was a-posting with the new video and needling the President like he were some kind of cancer-ridden loser. I’m sure the entire rightwing blogosphere has already jumped all over the video. That it’s a cut-and-dry misrepresentation of the President’s words doesn’t seem to matter. As I discovered in an earlier post, the actual veracity of a GOP quote of the President doesn’t matter; because even if Obama didn’t quite say what they’re saying he said, his comment nevertheless revealed his true ideology.
It’s been said before — and it’s a bit of an easy zinger, admittedly — but I’m always struck by how often movement conservatives end up sounding like unreconstructed Communists, the kind who were positive they understood their enemies’ motivations better than those contemptible bourgeois capitalists ever could. Obama is objectively anti-business owner, you see. Or, to take an example from an especially incoherent Reason blog post, he’s “objectively” not the most anti-gun President ever… except, y’know, basically he totally is:
So is Obama “the most anti-gun president in history,” as the NRA warned he would be four years ago? Objectively, no. …But his current rhetoric and his past support for highly restrictive laws, including the D.C. and Chicago gun bans that were overturned by the Supreme Court, suggest the NRA has a pretty good handle on what Obama would do if Americans were not so adamant about clinging to their guns.
Trust me, it all makes sense—but only if you’ve read your Burke.
*Update: Turns out Moe Lane and Caleb Howe are, um, technically different entities. My apologies; I was really messed-up on “Vodka shooters” when I wrote this post.
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