WOO! HOO!

Your humble correspondent has just beaten Ruslan Chagaev in the ring to become the World Heavyweight Champion! Okay, so maybe Chagaev wasn't even in the ring with me because I was only shadow boxing. However, I can count on  Peter Nicholas  of the Los Angles Times to report my victory despite my lack of an opponent in the ring.

That is pretty much how Nicholas reported the "victory" by Linda Douglass  in his story, White House rebuts Drudge Report link. Instead of the non-existent Chagaev in the ring, there were the missing Drudge videos which appear neither via link nor quote in the Nicholas story. In fact if you watch the Linda Douglass video on the White House blog, she never once shows the videos from the Drudge Report. Instead that White House page shows recent videos of President Obama proclaiming himself to be in favor of allowing people to keep their private health insurance. Of course, no link from either Linda Douglass nor Peter Nicholas to the actual Drudge videos or what was said in them.

Here is Nicholas' glowing report on how the White House "rebuts" the Drudge Report link videos which they never show:

Reporting from Washington -- In another display of adapting campaign tactics to governing, the White House posted a video on its official website Tuesday to rebut accusations that President Obama's healthcare proposals would do away with private health insurance.

The video shows White House spokeswoman Linda Douglass sitting in front of a computer monitor displaying the Drudge Report website.

Douglass points to a link featured by Drudge and proceeds to discount it, assuring viewers that patients who are satisfied with their private health coverage would be able to keep it.

Yeah, Linda "discounts" Drudge by neither presenting the videos nor quoting from them. All she did was present what Obama has recently stated for political purposes about private health insurance:

Looking into the camera, Douglass says: "The people who always try to scare people whenever you try to bring them health insurance reform are at it again. And they're taking sentences and phrases out of context and cobbling them together to leave a very false impression."

It's unusual for the White House to give such prominence to a conservative-leaning website -- one Democrats often deride. But in the battle to pass a healthcare bill, the administration has concluded that accusations cannot go unanswered and that campaign-style tools and technology are needed to prevail. The Obama political operation has enlisted its array of campaign supporters to press the president's policy goals.

Introducing herself in the three-minute video, Douglass says part of her job is to "keep track of all the disinformation that's out there about health insurance reform." Because the president has talked so much about healthcare, Douglass says, he is at risk of having his words distorted by people with "a computer and a lot of free time" who might "take a phrase here and there, they simply cherry pick and put it together and make it sound like he's saying something that he didn't really say."

You mean Obama never said what he said in this video? Here is what he supposedly never said:

I don't think we're going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There's going to be potentially some transition process...

And here is what Obama said with greater specificity about his support for single payer in a 2003 speech to the AFL-CIO in another uncut, not cherry-picked, video which was left on both the Linda Douglass and Peter Nicholas cutting room floor:

I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.

Somehow Nicholas couldn't be bothered to report on what was actually said in these two videos in question although he was able to fit in a quote from a certain somebody trying to worm his way back into favor at the White House again:

Scott McClellan, another Bush press secretary who later broke with the administration, wrote in an e-mail: "The Obama team cannot afford to let such charges go unanswered when they are given such prominent play on a prominent conservative website and then, in this day and age, spread around the Internet with the click of a keypad. By posting the video response, the White House arms its countless Web-savvy supporters so they can flood the Internet with it."

Beam me up, Scotty. How do you answer charges when you simply ignore the facts presented in them? Only by pretending that what your lyin' eyes saw didn't happen. And both Douglass and Nicholas conveniently dropped those videos linked from the Drudge Report down the memory hole.

Barack Obama is not for single payer. He has never been for single payer.

We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.  

—P.J. Gladnick is a freelance writer and creator of the DUmmie FUnnies blog.