Braided like a pretzel on the wheel

Time’s Mark Halperin—apparently acting on behalf of his fellow Villagers eager to do to Barack Obama what they did to Bill Clinton and didn’t do to George W. Bush (that is, savage him)—has been pushing the myth that the media was oh-so-nice to Obama (months-long tail-chasing press obsessions with Obama’s alleged ties to Bill Ayres, Jeremiah Wright, and even Louis Farrakhan notwithstanding) and viciously mean to John Sidney McCain III.

One of McCain’s own spokescritters, campaign lawyer Trevor Potter, shot this down rather neatly last week, talking about all the damaging McCain stories suppressed by the national press—stories that Halperin and his fellow Villagers almost certainly knew about. (If they didn’t, they are too stupid to breathe. That, however, is not something we can rule out, judging from their demonstrated inability to do actual legwork, instead relying on RNC talking points whenever possible.)

But the fact that it’s not true won’t stop them from using the false "we coddled Obama, now we must destroy him" meme to justify bending if not breaking facts in their attempts to make Truth Pretzels that imply one thing even as they show another.

So what’s a Truth Pretzel? Simply stated, it’s when a journalist takes the facts that point in one direction and try to twist them around to make it look like they point in another. It’s one step beyond merely "burying the lede": It’s taking a tire iron to the lede and breaking its bones so you can more easily pretzelize what’s left.

And, as Christy Hardin Smith showed Wednesday, and Digby and Media Matters showed Tuesday, that’s exactly what Liz Sidoti, Michael Isikoff, and Contessa Brewer, to name but a few, are doing. HuffPo’s Bob Cesca points out that nobody dared use the T-word ("taint") to describe George W. Bush’s deep embrace and endorsement of Tom DeLay after DeLay was indicted. This includes all the people currently using the T-word against Obama today.

When even David Broder, who loves to wag his rhetorical finger at Democrats, is saying that Obama is clean on this — and for once Broder, being a native Illinoisian, knows whereof he speaks — it’s pretty obvious that he is. Yet the Halperin Imperative, and the GOP/Media Complex’s natural bias against Democrats that gave us the hyperventilated attacks against Bill Clinton and Gary Condit and other Democrats (as well as the near-silence on the worst crimes of Bush and McCain and other Republicans), will ensure that the press continues to flog this thing as hard as they can.

Update:  And sure enough, the AP’s Phillip Elliott reports Obama’s statement today that while his staff may have discussed the subject of Obama’s Senate seat with Blagojevich’s people (discussions which, so long as no quid pro quo was demanded, would be not only perfectly OK but perfectly normal), he was confident that no one on his staff succumbed to Blago’s pay-to-play scheme.  But of course, Elliott has to pad this with some heavy-duty insinuatory pretzeling, of which the low point was this sentence, set off all by itself in its own paragraph to make sure the reader notices it:  "In addressing the issue, the usually smooth-talking Obama occasionally stuttered or stumbled."  Why mention this?  Is it to imply something that Elliott knows better than to say flat-out — namely, that he wants to make it look like Obama is lying without having to actually lay out any real proof?  (By the way, Obama’s  hemming and hawing, far from being unusual with him, is fairly common, so much so that conservatives attack him all the time for it.)

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