This morning (saved here at host for future reference), Philip Elliott and Kasie Hunt at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, demonstrated how apparatchik propagandists work.
In their recast of reality, it's Mitt Romney whose presidential campaign has been focused on gay rights, not Barack Obama, his administration, his campaign, and the lapdog establishment press which have been obsessed with it for days. As to the 5,400-word hit piece prepared by Jason Horowitz and published in the Washington Post on early Thursday which portrayed an incident Romney says he does not recall during which he allegedly forcibly cut a classmate's hair against his will with the assistance of others -- It's "a news report" about which there are no stated doubts (there are lots of' em). Samples of the AP pair's misdirection and opportunism follow (bolds are mine):
Romney to shift focus from gay rights to economy Republican
Mitt Romney is trying to shift his campaign's focus back to the sluggish economic recovery and will use a commencement speech at an evangelical university to cast strong families as central to a strong economy.
... Romney's campaign released excerpts of his speech a day early. His remarks will be delivered a few days after he reaffirmed his opposition to same-sex marriage after President Barack Obama's historic embrace of gay marriage. The former Massachusetts governor also spent Thursday shrugging off a news report that he had bullied a gay classmate in prep school.
On Friday, Romney will try to shift the discussion back to jobs and the economy during an appearance in North Carolina, where voters this week approved a constitutional ban on same-sex unions.
While raising money Thursday in Kansas City, Mo., Romney all but ignored the discussion of gays and lesbians prompted by Obama's endorsement of gay marriage.
The renewed attention on gay rights came as Obama thrust the issue into the forefront by becoming the first president to support allowing gay couples to wed, shifting the campaign debate to social issues, where Romney faces skepticism among the Republican base.
Obama's unexpected embrace of gay marriage continued to overwhelm the presidential campaign as liberals and conservatives debated the political merits of his endorsement of an issue over which a president has little practical impact.
For Romney, the discussion of gay rights turned personal when The Washington Post published a story recounting how he and several schoolmates held down classmate John Lauber and cut off his bleached blond hair after seeking him out in his dorm room at their boarding school in the wealthy Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
Elliott and Hunt never note the holes in WaPo's story which have been known for almost 24 hours, namely that one of those supposedly troubled by the incident for years (as originally written by the paper's Jason Horowitz, before undisclosed scrubbing began) now says he didn't learn of it until the Post told him about it, and that one of Lauber's sisters is now saying that their now-deceased brother never told them about the incident.
It's all in a day's propaganda at the Administration's Press.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
