Pirate's Cove

It’s rather cute how the media continues to prostitute itself for Team Obama. Deluded and absurd would also be words we could use. Oh, look, here’s the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake:

Context be damned: Obama’s ‘It worked’ quote should work for Republicans

Context is dead. Long live context.

For the second time in two weeks, Mitt Romney’s campaign has an out-of-context quote it can use to bludgeon President Obama. First it was “You didn’t build that,” and now it’s two ill-fated words that Obama spoke at a fundraiser Monday: “It worked.”

As with “You didn’t build that,” the Romney campaign’s attacks on “It worked” will be criticized for being out-of-context, lowest-common-denominator politics. And as with “You didn’t build that,” “It worked” is going to … well … work.

Here’s why.

There’s a lot of controversy these days about campaign tactics and what crosses the line. Obama’s team has been crying foul for two weeks now that “You didn’t build that” has been taken badly out of context by Republicans.

The problem is, the gray area is just too gray. Fact-checkers are great (especially our Glenn Kessler), but as long as either side has an argument to justify its attacks, the history of politics dictates that it’s all fair game. (snip)

In all of these cases, we’re dealing with a somewhat ambiguous quote.

Except, neither of Obama’s off-script quotes are ambiguous. In fact, when you read/hear the full quotes, they tend to be worse than the shortened versions.

In the case of “It worked,” as Dave Weigel notes, it’s perhaps even clearer that the words are being taken out of context.

You’ve seen the quote (“Just like we’ve tried their plan, we tried our plan. And it worked.”). What of the full quote?

“I’m also going to ask anybody making over $250,000 a year to go back to the tax rates they were paying under Bill Clinton, back when our economy created 23 million new jobs, the biggest budget surplus in history and everybody did well. Just like we’ve tried their plan, we tried our plan. And it worked.”

Yet, we’ve had 41 months of 8%+ unemployment, record numbers of people dropping out of the jobs market in despair….you know the whole depressing list. His plan was to pump more and more borrowed money into the economy, and try and get more and more money out of “the rich” to pump into the federal treasury. Because bureaucrats, political appointees, and elected officials, many whom have never worked in the private sector, never had to make a payroll, never had to expand a business, apparently know more about how the economy runs than the people who are out there making lots of money.

And, really, Obama shouldn’t be talking about “budget surpluses” when he has presided over 4 straight years of trillion dollar plus deficits. And few are doing well.

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU.