Wow
The Washington Post editorial page is pretty routinely cringe inducing, but today’s editorial is pretty amazing even by their contemporary standards.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who has a history of tailoring his public statements for political purposes, made headlines by saying he would support a withdrawal of American forces by 2010. But an Iraqi government statement made clear that Mr. Maliki’s timetable would extend at least seven months beyond Mr. Obama’s. More significant, it would be “a timetable which Iraqis set” — not the Washington-imposed schedule that Mr. Obama has in mind. It would also be conditioned on the readiness of Iraqi forces, the same linkage that Gen. Petraeus seeks. As Mr. Obama put it, Mr. Maliki “wants some flexibility in terms of how that’s carried out.”
Putting aside the transparent effort to put a good spin on it, the problem remains that none of that is factually accurate. Maliki didn’t say “end of 2010,” an aide did. What Maliki said was ” U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.” So yes, he did explicitly endorse Obama’s plan. And the “walkback” didn’t actually repudiate anything, it simply implied a “misunderstanding,” which had been taken to mean mistranslation, but that has been pretty well shown to be unlikely. Damn liberal media.
In any event, this is pretty damn embarrassing for a major paper to be publishing, you would think. Although I suppose it’ll be interesting to watch in real time what the neoconservative imperialists finally settle on as a response. So far it’s “ignore them” vs. “fuck them and drop the facade.” I’m betting the latter wins out.
In a lot of ways, this Obama trip and the McCain Team’s spin on it has been a win for McCain. They have somehow gotten the media wondering if there IS a media bias against McCain. This editorial at WAPO just proves it, as they attempt to show just how “even-handed” they are!
But, as you have noted, it’s kind of hard to spin things like Maliki’s OWN WORDS, or the crowd expected to listen to Obama in Berlin, or the representative of the Jordanina government who says that Obama “gets it,” and would bring a new voice to the Mideast Peace process.
Well, we’ve known for a while that the truth has a liberal bias…
I don’t really know that the editorial proves much of anything. The Post’s editorail page has been really embarrassing for quite a while now, and so far as Iraq goes they seem to be one of those outlets that are making up for the fact that they relentlessly cheerlead for the war in 2002 by putting out a lot of misinformation and really appalling spin, like this nonsense.
So far as McCain’s antics, I don’t really think they were a good idea, and I think once again the campaign was caught not thinking about the implications of their actions. So McCain complains that the press isn’t paying attention to him, and they respond by giving him attention. The problem is that he complained at a point when he was making a lot of silly, inarguably wrong statements of fact involving foreign policy, and so that’s what the media has to pay attention to. So now the McCain campaign, after relentless complaining about a lack of attention, is cancelling their media availability today.
Go figure.
-Brien