I'm virtually certain that he wouldn't dream of it, but the Associated Press's Josh Lederman seriously needs to consider correcting two extremely embarrassing paragraphs he wrote in his coverage of President Obama's appearance on Jon Stewart's Daily Show earlier this week.
At the 15:03 mark of the Comedy Central video following the jump, Obama treated Stewart as if he's a legitimate journalist, telling him that "It's not your job to focus on the three-quarters of a loaf or half a loaf that we get. Your job is to point out what we still haven't gotten." Actually, after enduring the video, it seems far more correct to say that Stewart's job was to make it look like he was challenging Obama by giving him a bit of grief several minutes earlier about the still-scandalous situation at the Veterans Administration, and then to give him a virtual open mic the rest of the way. But I digress.
The prior context of Obama's laughable "loaf" remark was twofold:
- On Obamacare, he wasn't able to get a "public option" but in his view, he got a number of desirable things, ticking off items commonly seen as serious exaggerations of the truth, and said, "I'll take that."
- On Iran, he said, after congratulating himself for assembling an international negotiating coalition, he said that "we had to take some consideration into Iran's saving face (Stewart: "Right") as they moved forward on this deal, as long as we knew they weren't going to get a bomb."
Here's that video. Obama begins regaling Stewart over what he was able to achieve with Obamacare at the 13:29 mark:
So it's clear that Obama's outsized take on his accomplishments:
- Involved both Obamacare and Iran.
- Included a claim that he got "the three-quarters of a loaf or half a loaf" in these instances. (One could even argue that Obama may have meant three-quarters with Obamacare and one-half with Iran.)
Now let's see what the AP's Lederman did with this:
Lord have mercy.
First, Obama said "three quarters of a loaf or half a loaf." Lederman told us only about the larger figure.
Second, Lederman told readers that he's with Obama in his assessment. The AP reporter didn't write about the "three-quarters of a loaf he said he was able to get." He simply agreed with Obama that "he was able to get" "that "three quarters of a loaf."
I would suggest, in light of news about Obama's sellout side deals, John Kerry's awful congressional testimony, and Iran's tweeted triumphalism, that Lederman (and Obama, of course) needs to admit that his report was not only was seriously wrong then. It's even more seriously wrong now.
I know. It's not going to happen.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
