Twitter users happening upon a Monday evening tweet by the Associated Press's Josh Lederman can be forgiven if they thought they were visiting a parody account.
Lederman is a White House reporter for the AP. His LinkedIn profile indicates that his journalism career began about three years ago. His education, up to and including "a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism" after obtaining "a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from The George Washington University," apparently left him woefully short of genuine knowledge of recent U.S. history, as indicated in the tweet which follows the jump (HT Twitchy):
Obama, great. Bush, weak. Wow.
That Lederman would issue such supine nonsense is unsurprising, given his past track record, some of which includes the following:
- In April, Lederman and another AP colleague feigned surprise that the administration, which has been dumping inconvenient news on pre-holiday and Friday afternoons and evenings for years, had announced that it would give "federal agencies will have more time to weigh in" on the Keystone Pipeline.
- In August 2013, after President Obama issued a series of gun-related executive orders, Lederman never referred to them as "orders." They were "steps" and "actions."
- Six months earlier, he clearly took Obama's side in the sequestration fight by writing that Obama refused to accept any decisionmaking flexibility in allocating spending cuts because doing so "would force him to choose between the bad and the terrible."
- At the Democratic Party Convention in September 2012, Lederman and colleague Julie Pace tried to pretend that Obama had no idea that there was no mention of "God" in the Democratic Party's platform, and that it also failed to name Jerusalem as Israel's capital. The Politico, in a rare example of genuine journalism, caught the White House in contradictory stances, first claiming that Obama knew about the language in advance and then trying to walk it back.
Others had a field day with Lederman's coalition nonsense (minor punctuation changes made to certain tweets):
"... one of the nations, Qatar, is funding ISIS." (Note: NBC News reported two days ago that "A small but steady flow of money to ISIS from rich individuals in the Gulf continues, say current and former U.S. officials, with Qataris the biggest suppliers." — Ed.)
"Bush had 8x as many countries allied."
"O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA! O-BA-MA! Isn't he dreamy, Josh?"
"It would save me so much time and energy if these "journalists" just used the WH background."
Respondents had so much fun with Lederman's ludicrousness that he deleted the tweet less than four hours later.
Sadly for Lederman and his employer, the Administration's Press, evidence of his ignorance will remain as long as we have computers and data storage.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
