Paying Attention?

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When I read Jennifer Loven’s AP piece on Obama, which I flagged in the post below, it made my eyes bleed so bad I hardly knew where to start in cataloguing the awfulness. But TPM Reader CO points out a good place to start.

We’ve seen many examples over the last couple days of reporters egregiously lapping up the McCain camp’s nonsensical spin about Obama flip-flopping on Iraq. But some reporters can get spun so thoroughly that they actually retrospectively rearrange the facts of the campaign to accommodate the McCain camp’s spin. Change the facts to suit the spin, as it were.

So here you have Jennifer Loven, a veteran journalist with one of the plum spots in the profession writing this sentence (emphasis added) …

His problem is that his change in emphasis to flexibility from a hard-nosed end-the-war stance — including his recent position that withdrawing combat troops could take as long as 16 months — will now be heard loud and clear by an anti-war camp that may have ignored it before.

Sort of depends on the meaning of ‘recent’ because I think I’ve heard the 16 months line for some time. And, sure enough, from October 2007

There is no military solution in Iraq, and there never was. I will begin to remove our troops from Iraq immediately. I will remove one or two brigades a month, and get all of our combat troops out of Iraq within 16 months.

If I’m not mistaken he has said this numerous times since.

Please. There’s always, repositioning by both sides gearing up for the general. So let’s note those. And I guess there’s no stopping gullible reporters from getting jonesed up by each sides’ spinners to find subtle shifts where there aren’t any. But let’s not get so bamboozled that we actually start making stuff up. Okay?

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