The fool and the fools who follow them

Last week President Obama made a speech which included a political line that had the rare quality of being true:

“I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth. Michelle wasn’t. Somebody gave us a chance. Just like these folks up here are looking for a chance.”

The line had the additional bonus of making an unspoken comparison between Obama and his Republican opponent who was, to put it mildly, to the manor born. Such implied comparisons, or far more explicit ones, have been part-in-parcel of American politics at least back to the days of Andrew Jackson.

But that really isn't the point. The point is that FoxNews took this clever, but not that clever a line, and turned into the "class war" outrage de jour. And they did so by adding words that were not there.

Steve Doocy of Fox News, who while interviewing Romney on live TV Thursday, quoted Obama as saying, “Unlike some people, I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth.”
But Obama never prefaced his statement with the words “unlike some people”

That Steve Doocy would push false stories about Obama is no surprise. After all he is the man who made the most "FoxNewsian" false claim of them all:



But what is surprising is that Steve Doocy is aaccepted news source:

Regardless, the unspoken words were imputed to Obama in a Washington Post article, a New York Post editorial and conservative blogs after Doocy’s segment.

It just keeps getting to be a longer year.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]