Tag: jake tapper

Jay Carney pretty much flubs everything about Operation Fast & Furious.

[UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers.  Come, I will conceal nothing from you: it’s been a rotten week (the whole family’s been down with colds, which is precisely as much fun as it sounds when your youngest is two and a half). Retail therapy would be nice: hit the tip jar to the side and I promise to spend it on wargame miniatures.]

This is going to be a very visual post, and, as usual, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney provides little if any actual semantic content, so I will simply summarize each video. First off, we have the standard obfuscation:

Continue reading Jay Carney pretty much flubs everything about Operation Fast & Furious.

#rsrh This is darn good advice…

…even if you aren’t a reporter.  I don’t have a fraction of Jake Tapper’s experience when it comes to following campaigns*, but I can tell you that what experience that I do have match up with his 13 pieces of advice for new reporters.  Particularly #8:

No 8 – Even the people who you like and trust on the campaign will lie to you.

Nah, it doesn’t bug me anymore.  Much.  Politics and sausage, folks: politics and sausage.

Moe Lane

*I cover conventions and specific events, and I don’t travel with campaigns.  At that, I do more field work than many sites do.

WH demonstrates that it can read immigration polling.

Like a large section of the right-blogosphere, I like Jake Tapper while being slightly resentful that I have to.  It’s nothing against the man; Jake’s a good guy who will do things like this.

TAPPER:  You’ve said we’re a nation of cowards because we don’t talk
freely and openly about race.  So in that spirit, let me give it a
shot.  Do you think the Arizona immigration law is racist?

HOLDER:  Well, I don’t think it’s necessarily a good idea…

[snip*]

TAPPER:  Do you think it’s racist?

HOLDER:  I don’t think it’s racist in its motivation…

What’s annoying is that he’s so bloody rare for doing this. Continue reading WH demonstrates that it can read immigration polling.

#rsrh @jaketapper wins Merriman Smith Award.

Very cool.

ABC News president David Westin toasted Jake Tapper last night as the ABC News White House correspondent was honored with the Merriman Smith Award for presidential news coverage at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

I like Jake: he’s a good reporter.  In fact, he’d deserve the award even if pretty much everybody else eligible for it in the mainstream media didn’t suck utterly at covering this administration.

Oops, did I just type that out?

Moe Lane

Jake Tapper illustrates the use of Twitter.

Somebody in the regular media was whining about what the point of Twitter was, a few days ago.  The answer?

Rerouting around obstacles.

hey Chinese government – i found a way to sneak around your firewall on my laptop to get to twitter. Dont fear freedom, Chinese government.

He’s also commenting on the ChiComs’ attempt to stop American media from interviewing students. Sounds like there may be some juicy stuff on ABC tonight.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

The White House has found a place for the Uighurs! Palau!

I had to look it up, too.

8,188.82 miles away from Washington, DC (if this site is to be believed), which is actually about 8,000 miles less than I expected. Then again, there probably isn’t anything there except empty ocean*, and if the administration was just going to dump terrorists into the water it would have said so.

Palau (Who?) to Take in 17 Uighurs

The obscure Pacific nation of Palau, one of the world’s youngest and tiniest countries, has agreed to take in the 17 Uighurs — Muslim Chinese — currently being held at Guantanamo.

President Johnson Toribiong announced in a statement to the Associated Press that Palau “agreed to accommodate the United States of America’s request to temporarily resettle in Palau up to 17 ethnic Uighur detainees.” He said their resettlement in Palau would be “subject to periodic review.”

[snip]

The US government has pledged $200 million in aid to Palau, but a White House official denied that money, for development assistance, had anything to do with the Uighurs going to Palau.

No word from Jake whether the official was able to say that with a straight face.  Well, that’s how the game is played.  See also Hot Air and AoSHQ for some healthy doses of cynicism; mine below the fold. Continue reading The White House has found a place for the Uighurs! Palau!

John Dickerson nuances his explanation of Obama’s nuance.

It is all very meta.

He knows that you can’t just say – unlike, say, Jake Tapper – that the President likes to play with straw men, so he’ll sort of sidle up to it:

The Careful Exaggerator… balances his rhetoric… study in nuance… practically grisaille… nuance-free exaggerator… exaggerates to free himself from the demands of the news cycle… hopes to do though this exaggerated description… plays Aunt Sally… doesn’t mischaracterize, exactly, but he exaggerates… intended to make his opponents look foolish… offered another cartoonish view… probably exaggerates no more than a typical politician….

While Dickerson probably could have used the services of an online thesaurus (by the way, I’m not buying that he knew ‘grisaille*’ right off of the bat, unless of course he was an art minor or something), his point can be eventually determined if you step back far enough: the President plays fast and loose with the truth in order to get his way, or just out of trouble. Of course, Dickerson would be absolutely insane to just write that, given that, say, the aforementioned Tapper gets screamed at by every unhinged member of the Online Left whenever he actually does his job: Slate lives or dies with online clicks, ABC News doesn’t. Unfortunately, Dickerson is also stuck with having to deal with the central paradox in all of this:

Continue reading John Dickerson nuances his explanation of Obama’s nuance.