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Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair have both picked up on a report that Barack Obama’s visit with troops in Iraq was stage-managed. They are both careful to issue caveats about the source:
BOLT: This is only a claim by an anonymous source, but …
BLAIR: but in this case, the accusations may – may – turn out to be accurate. Let’s wait and see.
It’s interesting that a single blog post quoting an anonymous source is considered worth reporting at all – until you consider how readily it fits into the existing narrative these columnists have attempted to create about Obama. The aim of this kind of post seems pretty clear – it is to let their readers use this vague and unconfirmed report to confirm their existing opinions of Obama:
Who the hell did the yanks elect? Kim Jong-Obama?
…
So we now have spin and Communist-era like staged demonstrations of approval to shore up Obama.
…
It wouldn’t surprise me if the story turned out to be accurate. Obama has shown definite signs of a pathological need for approval, and his posse show no scruples in arranging it for him.
…That whole Obama meets the troops scene in Iraq looked odd. Now we know why. Obama’s earlier meetings with soldiers were notably cold. You could sense very few saw the man as commander in chief. The footage of glum faced soldiers contrasted with the warmth shown in the presence of Bush (and indeed, nearly every one of his predecessors).
The problem with Obama’s Iraq scene was that the grins were too big, the cheering to exuberant – not unlike a TV studio audience responding to a prompt. Initially, I thought it was due to the disproportionate number of black faces, the exaggerated behaviour an African-American cultural trait.
It turns out to be a plastic turkey.
But Bolt is not content to stop at throwing a shaky allegation at his readers – instead, he needs to inject his own observations:
… it may also explain the marked racial profile of the soldiers lined up behind Obama as a happy-TV backdrop.
Once again, visually identifiable ethnicity seems to be a crucial factor in Bolt’s interpretation of events. The notion that the US military is ethnically and culturally diverse doesn’t even seem to occur to him. It must be stage-management.
But then Bolt draws on another source to take another dig at Obama, pointing to this polling trend in Rasmussen’s tracking poll:
It’s interesting that Bolt drew on the Rasmussen data but makes no mention of the Gallup tracking poll:
Both polls show a similar trend in Obama’s rising disapproval ratings – perhaps not surprisingly, given that there was little to disapprove of before he took office and started making enacting policy – but they started from a very different point so that the net approval-disapproval picture looks very different across pollsters. Without detailed information about the question wording and polling methodology, it is hard to tell exactly why the poll sources might differ in their results, although this comment from Nate Silver about stimulus package polling might be relevant:
Why the stark difference between Rasmussen and, say, Democracy Corps? Both are applying a likely voter methodology, whereas Gallup and most of the other polls on the stimulus are surveying all adults. I understand the argument that likely voters are the ones who matter from the standpoint of electoral politics — but determining who is and who isn’t a likely voter when there is no election at hand is a little abstract for my tastes. (Are these people who are likely to vote 2010? In 2012? People who were likely to have voted in 2008? Or what?)
But it seems Bolt has no problem with picking tidbits from an anonymous source, then coupling it with data from one polling source while ignoring discrepant results from another pollster. Not when he can use it to feed his existing spin about Barack Obama, anyway.
Damm you did beat me to it Tobias, you did miss the bit in the linked story about the Iraq visit about how all the cameras looked similar, the intimation being the chosen ones had been given cameras as an incentive to cheer Obahma. More likely is they all bought their cameras from the PX (or what ever it’s called these days) store which probably only has a limited range.
Maybe you should rename Pure Poisin “Storm in a Teacup” !
I’m still waiting for the boys to out Bo Obama as a secret Muslim terrierist. I am certain he is tearing up the whitehouse furniture right now.
Why can’t Bolt accept that Obama is popular amongst blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics and across the religious divide not because of his skin but because he is a good man and an astute politician?
In the background of the photo that Bolt shows is a group of soldiers. Bolt sees some kind of conspiracy in their ethnic makeup. I see a group of American soldiers. Why must everything be about race with Bolt? Play the race card enough and assertions will be made.
And while we’re on the subject of Bolt (still). Notice how today he is saying how piracy is an embarrassment to the west? This has been going for a few years now. Funny how it wasn’t an embarassment before Obama came to power.
Why must everything be about race with Bolt?
I’ve noticed that too, that he seems to developed this obsession with skin colour since obama’s election. weird.
as for the credence given to anonymous blog post, catherine deveny anyone?
Rasmussen polling was a continual source of comfort to these dopes throughout the US election, as it was the only one that gave McCain/Palin any glimmer of a chance; this despite the fact that their polls were of people who voted in the previous election, and their telephone surveys used only landlines and not mobiles. Gallup continually gave Obama/Biden the lead….and we know what happened next.
Bolt can’t let Obama be President in his own right: everything must be ritually filtered through the myopic spectacles of skin colour. It’s a sad little world for some, isn’t it……
He’s been obsessed with race for a long time now. In his his infamous post entitled “Europe’s Changing Face”, he contradicts his repeated refrain that all he wants is that we see ourselves as Australian instead of focussing on race or skin tone as a distinction. But in this particular post, he refuses to see France’s soccer team as simply French and instead insists on focusing on their skin tone as if that determines their Frenchness! The hypocrisy of this man!
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/europes_changing_face/P0/
funny, i remember Tim having a go at any article that printed the allegations that Sarah Palin had used a racial slur because it had come from an anonymous source. I guess anonymous sources are only credible when they trash people Andy and Tim dont like.
Everything is about race, but he’s not a racist. But…..
Ah here it is.
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/they_believe/
Imagine if that 1st graphic was a depiction of a global warming trend, whilst the one not presented depicted none. Bolt would be birthing kittens like a sausage machine…
All that needs to be said about this irredeemably pathetic beat-up by AB/TB is that neither of them saw fit to make the obvious mocking observation, which people all around the world did at the time, about the stage-managed toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in front of a rent-a-crowd no bigger than you’d find in a pub on a Friday night. The comments about race are a statement of the bleeding obvious; most of the cannon fodder infantry in the US Army is black or poor or both. Bolt can’t get much lower than that.
Anyone who knows anything about the US military, which is of course not Bolt or Blair who crib the knowledge from the back of a righty cereal box, knows that African Americans are over-represented in the US military compared to general population.
See this link here to a DOD slide. 19.3% of the US military. 13.5% of US population.
I believe in the gulf war I (1991) around 30% of soldiers in theatre were African American.
Of course facts don’t seem to matter when the game is supposition and inference.
Oh and the right are the last ones who should be complaining about politicization of the military considering the shameful propaganda use Bush et al but the US military to.
Mission Accomplished anyone? Let alone the hijacking of numerous US troops as a forced audience at Cheney Bush events.
I’ve noticed though, that Bolt’s “Obamessiah” posts have started consistently attracting the fewest comments. And most of those comments are from our erstwhile far-right American buddies, presently or god help us perhaps permanently resident here (who knew there so many of these buggers?)
So maybe even his own nitwits are getting a bit antsy about this little obsess?
Is it just me, or does it seem like TB actually has an emotional investment in this little would-be ‘gotcha’? Bolt, on the other hand, is just making his usual hit and run on the President.
Anyway, the soldiers beside Obama on that podium were either chosen because they just looked enthusiastic or because they might be from Illinois and were posted to Iraq while he was still their senator. And either way they might have been picked out by Army PR officers–just as that ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner in 2003 was prepared by USN publicity officers, a fact I’m sure the two Bs have stressed over and over again when reminded of Dubya’s most embarrassing appearance evah…
Talking about the popularity stakes of American commanders in chief, here’s something interesting from James Fallows of the Atlantic. And it’s not anonymous, either, just second hand:
cosmicjester @ 8, good find. Interesting that TB thinks it’s plausible that the Obama administration would ask GIs in a combat zone, “Did you vote for us?”, while he’d previously stated that anyone who believes it possible Sarah Palin once made an off-the-cuff statement about the Democrat being a ‘sambo’ is mentally ill (“These people should be confined.”)
Tim is big on the mentally incapacity of us Leftards, no?
Ahh, thanks cj. I was looking for that as well, but didn’t have enough time (or patience). I knew I’d seen tim Blair blogging recently about this kind of thing.
Such a hypocrite!
Apparently, tim doesn’t expect his own writing for News Ltd to live up to the same standards he expects of Fairfax. Interesting.
Bolt on his ‘SNIPS’:
I edit comments only for legal reasons, abuse, racism and the like, and also for length. When I do so, I indicate with a SNIP.
I’m waiting for the Bolt post that begins with:
SNIP
The Editor
I won’t hold my breath.
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