PBS alters transcript to hide Obama gaffe.
All of the usual Red Blogistan outlets - Instapundit, Malkin, Hot Air, Human Events, even the usually sane Jonathan Adler at the usually sane Volokh Conspiracy - were all over the story like a cheap suit, and Memeorandum headlined it.
Only, there wasn’t any altered transcript: the NPR story was the text as prepared, while the supposed “gaffe” was in the speech as delivered.
And there wasn’t any “gaffe,” either: Obama referred to Lincoln as “founder of the Republican party.” Perfectly conventional, and historically defensible: Lincoln was a leader of the outcry about the Kansas-Nebraska act that led to the formation of the Republican party, and led the Clay Whigs out of the dying Whig Party and into coalition with the Free Soilers under the Republican banner. The meeting at Ripon where the word “Republican” was first used didn’t found a national party: there was no national Republican convention until 1856. Lincoln was the headliner at the Decatur meeting that organized the Illinois Republicans, and headed the slate of Fremont electors in Illinois in that year.
OK. This sort of thing can happen, especially if you’re not very bright, very trapped in your echo chamber, and conspiratorially minded. But what’s striking - and a contrast to the way things are handled in Blue Blogistan - not a single one of the Red bloggers taken in by this nonsense has manned up and retracted. Not one.
You might almost think they didn’t mind spreading a little bit of misinformation in a bad cause.
Tags: cover-up, founder, gaffe, Lincoln, NPR, Republican Party
Perfectly defensible BS. He wasn’t even the Republican party’s first Presidential candidate. Lincoln simply, unambiguously, was not the founder of the GOP. It’s not even close. “One of” the founders of a state branch, maybe, at most.
Look, the point here isn’t that there’s no way to rationalize this as kinda, sorta, vaguely similar to right, in a not insanely wrong sense, if you’re determined to, and squint really hard. The point is that the media do not routinely so squint for Republican politicians. It’s the double standard Mr. 57 states benefits from that grates.
Mark -
I never accused NPR of editing the transcript to hide the claim, and I specifically noted in an update that the original text distributed to the media did not contain the Lincoln reference, and that this explained why some media outlets had a different version of the speech from what was delivered and posted on the White House website. If you had provided a link, readers would have been able to see for themselves. The post is here.
The point of my post was not any alleged “cover-up” but that if we spend our time searching for mistakes, factual errors, etc. in the speeches and statements of politicians, we’ll find them. As I wrote in the comments: “I think the bigger point is that any politician or public figure can be found to make mistakes and misstatements. Whether they garnet more attention is less a function of the statement than whether the mistake fits or confirms a broader, established narrative about the public figure.”
As for the substance, I stand by the claim that Lincoln was not “founder of the Republican Party.” The Republican Party was founded in 1854. In that year, Lincoln ran for the Senate as a Whig. He was not even the first Republican Presidential candidate. That was John Fremont. It’s one thing to say the GOP is the “party of Lincoln,” like it’s the “Party of Teddy Roosevelt” or “Party of Reagan” (and just like the Democratic Party is the “Party of FDR”). But Lincoln was not a founder. That GOP leaders have at time made the same error — and many have — does not make it less of an error.
JHA
I actually think Brett has the better of this argument. But, really, who cares? If the Republicans don’t want the man widely regarded by historians as perhaps the greatest president in our history to be considered as having been the founder of their party, well, it’s their party.