Russert tries to sneak and mislead with Obama interview on Meet The Press

[zulchzulu]

I thought Barack Obama did well on the Meet The Press interview (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032608/), but as usual, Russert tried to fire away a number of quotes lumped together to try to slip up Obama on the war. And as I saw at the time and as Media Matters does the analysis, Russert cherry-picked and edited the full quote of Obama's to try to stick it to him. It didn't work.

Russert misleadingly cropped Obama comment to claim he wasn't "firmly wedded against the war"

Summary: Interviewing Barack Obama on Meet the Press, Tim Russert read a quote he attributed to Obama to suggest that he has "not been a leader against the war": "In July of 2004, Barack Obama: 'I'm not privy to Senate intelligence reports. ... What would I have done? I don't know,' in terms of how you would have voted on the war."

Russert did not quote the very next sentence of Obama's statement, which was, "What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made" for authorizing the war.

http://www.mediamatters.org/items/200711110004?f=h_latest

The New York Times original article:

In a recent interview, he declined to criticize Senators Kerry and Edwards for voting to authorize the war, although he said he would not have done the same based on the information he had at the time.

''But, I'm not privy to Senate intelligence reports,'' Mr. Obama said. ''What would I have done? I don't know. What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made.''

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9407E2DF153DF935A15754C0A9629C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2

As should be no surprise to anyone paying attention, Bill Clinton had tried to lie about Obama's possible support of the Iraq War Resolution recently. I personally put both Russert and Bill Clinton in the same level of trustworthy behavior ...which isn't much.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/clinton-obama-war-feud-spills-into-forum/