Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story punctures two sets of falsehoods: The family tales Obama passed on, unknowing; and the stories Obama made up.
[snip]
The two strands of falsehood run together, in that they often serve the same narrative goal: To tell a familiar, simple, and ultimately optimistic story about race and identity in the 20th Century.
Continue reading #rsrh Shorter Ben Smith: Shorter David Maraniss: Obama makes up stuff…
No, really: check out the job description.
Email campaigners are responsible for planning, writing, and executing grassroots campaigns to advance the President’s agenda for change.
Back in December when Ben Smith reported on this the first time, the DNC’s response was “Your in-box isn’t going to fill itself.” Which is a very unintentionally revealing statement, given that it essentially concedes that the DNC assumes that there’s no such thing as a spontaneous popular movement. After all, if they don’t exist on the Left – and if they existed, the DNC wouldn’t be advertising for people to create them – then they don’t exist anywhere. This probably explains their more nonsensical statements about Tea Parties: the idea of a legitimate populist, grassroots-driven movement is as alien to them as a reactionless drive would be to a modern physicist. Continue reading DNC *still* advertising for astroturfers.
You know, I don’t really expect anyone from this administration to be gracious, or even polite, to either Republicans or conservatives. It’s nice when it happens, but by and large the the executive branch doesn’t like us, they downright hate having to pretend that they do, and they get petulant about the whole thing. So if it had been Brother Caleb or Michael Goldfarb asking this question, I’d expect that Bill Burton would be a bit of a schmuck about replying.
But why is he sneering like this to Ben Smith?
A photograph posted by the White House to the photo sharing website Flickr includes an image of a document with the letters CIA printed beneath what appears to be the word “secret.”
[snip]
The other words on the visible portion of the document aren’t easily legible, and a White House spokesman, Bill Burton, dismissed it as innocuous in an email.
“Uh oh. Please don’t tell me that the enemy is now going to know what our fax coversheets look like. (That is indeed what it is.),” he emailed.
Aside from the fact that, actually, we don’t want the enemy to know what official fax cover-sheets look like – apparently, Burton is ignorant of the term ‘trashing‘; God only knows what he thinks ‘social engineering‘ refers to – this wasn’t a particularly gracious answer, particularly since the White House thought that the situation was important enough to remove the photo anyway. Also, given that (as Ben noted) something like this cost a British counterterrorism officer his job earlier this month, you’d think that this might have resulted in a more serious response.
I’m being sarcastic, of course. Nobody mentioned in this piece really expected any better from the White House.
Moe Lane
Crossposted to RedState.
