December 14, 2007

ABC News spin

An Iowa fifth-grader asked Barack Obama a raw version of a tough question about immigration and terrorism. Instead of discussing what parts of the question the kid got right - and what parts Obama's answer got wrong (pretty much all of it) - ABC News is now covering for Barack Obama and suggesting that the threat of terrorist infiltration doesn't exist [1].

Here's the question:

"When you're elected president, what if like the illegal immigrants start to take action and start bombing and stuff?"

Obama should have differentiated between economic-based illegal aliens, those who are coming here to commit crimes, and those who are coming here for reasons related to terrorism. He did not, and Sunlen Miller of ABC News plays along with his misleading statements:

Obama proceded to give Bowman a social sciences lesson, explaining "Immigrants are coming into the country and not blowing things up. They are usually working in meat packing plants, or working in restaurants or working in agriculture, picking vegetables..."

Someone in the crowd yelled "Mitt Romney," and Obama had his straight line.

"Yeah, they are mowing Mitt Romney's yard. I forgot about ol' Mitt, who's got the gall to running all these ads about illegal immigrants."

The crowd roared in laughter but Obama stopped himself there and went on. "We've got a problem with terrorists who are trying to kill us... That's a separate problem from immigrants," Obama assured Bowman.

He didn't give him a lesson, he misled the kid. He also demagogued a non sequitur about Romney and gave an advertisement for illegal activity. And, not just the audience but ABC News ate it up.

The first report as well as the fuller "news" report [2] from Miller as well as Teddy Davis and Nancy Flores both try to trace this back to ads from Tom Tancredo and others.

What would make me extremely happy is if someone in the audience had pointed out all the ways that Obama was being misleading, and had then posted that to video sharing sites. That would have an impact not just on Obama's poll numbers, but the MSM as well.

[1] blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2007/12/obama-ol-mitt-h.html
[2] abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=4003240

Posted to Immigration2007b at December 14, 2007 08:39 PM