Last August, I ran into Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, outside the Senate chamber in the Capitol.
This was before the Obama surge, before he had omnipresent Secret Service agents, back when you might see him strolling solo.
We chatted for a second, mainly about the Pakistan speech he’d recently given and about how the media had covered it. He was in good spirits.
As any close friend or family member can attest, I have an unusually keen sense of smell and immediately I smelled cigarette smoke on Obama. Frankly, he reeked of cigarettes.
Obama ran off before I could ask him if he’d just snuck a smoke, so I called his campaign.
They denied it. He’d quit months before, in February, they insisted. He chewed nicorette.
But I knew what I’d smelled and I asked his campaign to double-check and to ask him if he’d had a cigarette.
They reported back that he had told them he hadn’t had a cigarette since he quit.
And maybe that was true. Maybe I imagined the cigarette smoke. My olfactory nerve somehow misfired.
Except….last night on MSNBC’s Hardball, Obama admitted that his attempt to wean himself from the vile tobacco weed had not been entirely successful.
“I fell off the wagon a couple times during the course of it, and then was able to get back on,” he said. “But it is a struggle like everything else.”
Now I wonder about last August.
It’s not a big deal in the scheme of things — the war on Iraq, a major economic crisis — indeed, it’s miniscule. Hardly worth mentioning.
Except that I don’t like feeling that I wasn’t being dealt with honestly. And as much as citizens who are suspect of the media might scoff at such a notion, many of us consider ourselves to be your representatives to help make sure our leaders are telling us the truth, and leading the country down a path we’re confident is the right one. (Corny, I know.)
We are still unpacking the memos written by Bush’s henchman that paved the way for torture, and a member of our media has his panties in a knot because a candidate may have been less than candid to him about smoking a legal substance. Where was this fucking spidey sense the past eight years?
As someone who took ten years to finally quit smoking, and still, to this day, keeps a box of Nicorette in the cabinet, Jake Tapper can go piss off. After the lawyers, I say we kill the media.
*** Update ***
I had to dash this post off in a fit of rage before heading to the panel I discuss in the next post, and it appears I forgot to note why this tapper dribble pisses me off so much (aside from the obvious reasons). Tapper feels like Obama lied to him, and feels bad because he “wasn’t dealt with honestly,” and he HAS NO FUCKING REASON TO FEEL THAT WAY. He made any dishonesty up in his head.
He says himself he did not ask Obama. He asked the campaign, who more than likely had no idea if Obama had had a cigarette right before he talked to Tapper. They responded like any staff would- no, he isn’t smoking, he is chewing Nicorette. Then a year later, when Obama is asked directly, he responds that yes, he has slipped from time to time.
Rather than be dishonest, as Tapper is portraying Obama, he is being honest and forthright on the issue, and Tapper gets sand in the vajayjay anyway. It is mind-numbing. How does this guy have a fucking job working for a major news organization?
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