On Friday, Matt Sheffield and Bob Owens and other conservative bloggers spread the news that Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sent pro-Obama tweets out on Election Night, retweeting one that said "Barack you my dawg" and hailing how “america is impervious to the f--kery #justforthisoneday.”
Speaking of impervious, Politico reporter Josh Gerstein reported on Monday that "The Boston Marathon bombing suspects’ geopolitical leanings are still largely a mystery, and so is their American political outlook, after a review of records in this city where they lived for the last several years."
Gerstein ignored the Twitter scoop, and focused only on voting records: "Though there have been reports that Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were registered to vote and there are entries in commercial databases indicating they were, they were not according to the documents available at the Cambridge Elections Commission." The headline was "Boston bombing suspects not registered to vote."
The Politico story detailed how Massachusetts voter registration forms "say in large, bold capital letters that one must be a U.S. Citizen to register," even though the Cambridge City Council once voted to let non-citizens vote in local elections. There was no acknowledgment that Dzhokhar may have had a "dawg" in the presidential campaign, whether he voted or not.
