[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.
I’m not sure if this reflects a bad link on Hot Air’s part, or whether the AP’s Erica Werner really did drastically did rewrite this article between 10:35 PM and 12:52 AM. Compare two equivalent passages for an idea of how extensive the latter would have been.
Original (WaPo, supposedly; copy found at Breitbart)
Obama used the same language toward Republicans as he did toward extremists in the Muslim world in his inaugural address. Of Republicans, he said Wednesday, “We extend a hand and get a fist in return.” In his inaugural address last year, he said the United States “will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”
WaPo’s version:
The president said he meant it when he told House Republicans that he wants to work with them. Then he sharply added: “We’ll call them out when they say they want to work with us, and we extend a hand and get a fist in return.”
The rest of the piece is like that, of course. I’m singling out Erica Werner because she’s listed on the WaPo article as a contributor to the article, but not what looks to be the original: if this was a rewrite, presumably she had a busy night*. Or somebody did. If we start seeing articles being rewritten hastily after they show up in major blogs, well, then we’ll know. And need to start screenshotting again, of course.
As to the specific bit here about how the President thinks of my party in the same terms as he does of armed terrorists who take special care to murder women and homosexuals… well, let me put it this way. The first draft of this post was a satirical apologia for President Obama’s repeated attacks on Las Vegas. I was going to excuse him for it because he had been raised in a profoundly insular, somewhat xenophobic, and definitely rigid sub-culture that was notoriously intellectually indifferent to the belief structures of other groups: in short, he was a typical urban academic. I couldn’t make it work, and I couldn’t figure out why.
I have now figured out why: I wasn’t being satirical. It was all true.
Moe Lane
*I’d really like to believe that this was a bad link on HA’s part, but I can’t, quite.
Crossposted to RedState.
. So there’s that.
apparently slipped through the cracks. Odd.
. Must see the original, some day.
