Charles Babington -- find new work!
-MSNBC commentator Keith Olberman, after Barack Obama's speech accepting the Democratic nomination.
If you know the name Charles Babington at all, that's probably where you know it from. A political analyst for the Associated Press, Babington wrote what anyone hearing Obama that night would consider a pretty inaccurate take on that speech. Babington, not even waiting until the speech was finished, panned the speech as unspecific and flowery. Anchoring the coverage with Chris Matthews, Olbermann found the piece and brought it to his audience's attention before the applause for Obama's speech had even fallen off.
Yesterday, I came across a piece by Babington titled "Will Public Believe McCain 'Doublespeak' -- Or the Press?" -- although it might as well be titled "Babington Redeemed."
The "Straight Talk Express" has detoured into doublespeak.
Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a self-proclaimed tell-it-like-it-is maverick, keeps saying his running mate, Sarah Palin, killed the federally funded Bridge to Nowhere when, in fact, she pulled her support only after the project became a political embarrassment. He accuses Democrat Barack Obama of calling Palin a pig, which did not happen. He says Obama would raise nearly everyone's taxes, when independent groups say 80 percent of families would get tax cuts instead.
Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain's skirting of facts has stood out this week. It has infuriated and flustered Obama's campaign, and campaign pros are watching to see how much voters disregard news reports noting factual holes in the claims.
He points out that McCain had originally seemed to plan an honorable campaign, as I did yesterday. McCain, in 2000, was the victim of an incredibly dirty campaign, in which the Bush team smeared him as insane and his adopted daughter as illegitimate. "John McCain has an illegitimate black child," the whisper campaign repeated throughout South Carolina, scoring Bush big points with the racist, the stupid, and the eager to hate in that state...
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