A failure of premise
Jonathon Martin at Politico devotes a good bit of his story to the premise that Obama had a great weekend including a plug from Maliki on the pullout of US forces. He stayed with that story even though Iraq and Maliki disavowed the Spiegel story on Saturday and Martin's story was written at 7:46 PM EST on Sunday. He was not the only one to ignore the revised Iraqi story.
Sabrina Tavernise and Jeff Zeleny at the NY Times gets the story basically right.
My post at 9:20 PM CST Saturday on the Iraqi clarification was based on a CNN story. The Iraqis claim it was a translation problem. It possible was just some sloppy language by Maliki, because on a couple of days before hand the Iraqi government had agreed with the US on a conditions based "asperational time horizon" for US troops to leave. It defies logic to suggest that the Iraqi government would back out of that deal by making an announcement in a German paper.
If the media had just marianated that thought for a moment it might have overriden their eagerness to treat the misstatement as a repudiation of the Bush administration only hours after agreeing with it.
Maybe the editors who usually catch this stuff in their vaunted fact checking were off this weekend. Or, it could be that too many have sold out to Obama mania to fact check the Messiah.
Sabrina Tavernise and Jeff Zeleny at the NY Times gets the story basically right.
My post at 9:20 PM CST Saturday on the Iraqi clarification was based on a CNN story. The Iraqis claim it was a translation problem. It possible was just some sloppy language by Maliki, because on a couple of days before hand the Iraqi government had agreed with the US on a conditions based "asperational time horizon" for US troops to leave. It defies logic to suggest that the Iraqi government would back out of that deal by making an announcement in a German paper.
If the media had just marianated that thought for a moment it might have overriden their eagerness to treat the misstatement as a repudiation of the Bush administration only hours after agreeing with it.
Maybe the editors who usually catch this stuff in their vaunted fact checking were off this weekend. Or, it could be that too many have sold out to Obama mania to fact check the Messiah.
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