Say Anything Blog

For a guy as bright and intelligent as Barack Obama, he sure says some stupid things. He makes Joe Biden look guarded by comparison.

Stick a fork in him, he's done.

Here is an incomplete catalog of Obama gaffes:

• When asked how we would respond to another major al-Qaeda attack on the U.S., he talked about disaster response instead of military action.
• Last May, in the wake of the deadly Kansas tornado, Obama said "Ten thousand people died - an entire town destroyed". The death toll was actually 12 people.
• Obama stated that he would meet with enemy dictators - without any preconditions.
• Not long after, he said "if we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharaf will not act, we will." With allies like Obama, who needs enemies?
• He then declared that the use of nuclear weapons against al-Qaeda were "not on the table."
• Obama just last week referred to the 'president' of Canada. Canada has a prime minister, not a president.

Plus: when did it become the Associated Press' job to campaign for Barack Obama? Yesterday, the AP released an article Fact Check: Obama on Afghanistan which claims to 'correct' Republican outrage over Obama's latest gaffe, in which Obama said

• "We've got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there."

Nedra Pickler offered this response -

THE FACT CHECK:

A check of the facts shows that Western forces have been killing civilians at a faster rate than the insurgents have been killing civilians.

The U.S. and NATO say they don't have civilian casualty figures, but The Associated Press has been keeping count based on figures from Afghan and international officials. Tracking civilian deaths is a difficult task because they often occur in remote and dangerous areas that are difficult to reach and verify.

As of Aug. 1, the AP count shows that while militants killed 231 civilians in attacks in 2007, Western forces killed 286. Another 20 were killed in crossfire that can't be attributed to one party.

This 'fact check' competely misses the point. Pickler ignores the fact that we have thousands of boots on the ground fighting and killing the Taliban, and it should be obvious to a neutral observer that the effort in Afghanistan consists of much more than air-raiding villages. Pickler then sidesteps Obama's insinuation that our troops kill civilians indiscriminately, and that this is official policy. This is the real Republican complaint here, and Pickler's fact check just further falls apart by not even addressing it.

Can we can expect a fact check from Nedra Pickler when the DNC jumps on a supposed gaffe by a Republican candidate? Well if this is the best she can offer, she needn't bother. Not that she was going to. That would be an act of even-handed fairness and detached journalism, which the AP continually proves itself incapable of.

Crossposted from WILLisms.com