Here’s how it might have read:
Democrats yesterday highlighted a mistake she made over the weekend when she said that mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.” Both have operated as private companies and have not been funded by taxpayers. The crowd – and McCain – cheered after she said the line.
A couple of additional points:
- This story is about McCain, too, given his cheering for the line
- Just as the Feds are proposing a pretty radical scheme to, basically, nationalize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, shouldn’t the currently most visible politician in the country have a responsibility to inform “the crowd” correctly? It’s not just about catching her in a mistake, she’s contributing ignorance to any public debate on the issue
To writer Scott Helman’s credit, later the article takes note of her misstatements on the bridge to nowhere and earmarks. But, even there, the slant is how “Obama’s campaign has also begun aggressively criticizing Palin for rewriting aspects of her record as governor and mayor of Wasilla.” Isn’t the news that the McCain campaign continues to make false claims about her record, despite ample evidence that those claims are not true, not that the Obama campaign has stepped up criticism?
It really demonstrates how clearly the entire thing could have been written to actually described what happened.
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p>I agree with you that the discrepancies in Palin’s past should not be framed as Obama is criticizing them.
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p>This is in some ways a strange twist on 2004, where they refused to evaluate whether Kerry and the people on his boat and the official Navy record OR the SBVT, with no proof behind them were right.
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p>Now, they are implying a political agenda when real discrepancies are shown. (The McCain team go beyond the BG in saying that these investigations are unfair.) Then, they took provably politically motivated lies and refused to reject them. The only consistency – they favor the Republican.