By Steve Hynd
Nico Pitney of Huffington Post has been far and away one of the best blogging sources on the Iran elections. Like FDL owned the Scooter Libby trial or TPM owned the AG firings, Nico. alongside Robert Mackay at The Lede, has been there first and mostest with news and views, often from Iranians as well as Western sources, as the Iranian election protests and crackdown have unfolded.
So, Obama's staff noticed Nico's coverage and contacted him to say they'd like for him to maybe ask a question of the President at today's presser. He was duly called, and didn't ask a softball question.
�Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of the � of what the demonstrators there are working towards?�
Obama replied:
Well look, we didn't have international observers on the ground, we can't say definitively what exactly happened at polling places throughout the country. What we know is that a sizeable percentage of the Iranian people themselves, spanning Iranian society, considered this election illegitimate. It's not an isolated instance, a little grumbling here or there. There [are] significant questions about the legitimacy of the election. And so ultimately, the most important thing for the Iranian government to consider is legitimacy in the eyes of its own people, not in the eyes of the United States. And that's why I've been very clear, ultimately this is up to the Iranian people to decide who their leadership is going to be and the structure of their government. What we can do is to say unequivocally that there are sets of international norms and principles about violence, about dealing with peaceful dissent, that spans cultures, spans borders, and what we've been seeing over the Internet and what we've been seeing in news reports, violates those norms and violates those principles. I think it is not too late for the Iranian government to recognize that there is a peaceful path that will lead to stability and legitimacy and prosperity for the Iranian people. We hope they take it.
Good for Nico. Kudos! I wish there were many more, just like him, working for mainstream outlets. But...
Cue a bunch of puffed up drunken popinjays with their veinous noses out of joint (you don't get nose vein breakout like that from Diet Coke, folks) because the White House didn't follow the established order of things and called upon an unwashed blogger type before the guy from Reuters.
Cue Michael Calderone at Politico, who manages to get not one but two posts out of the ridiculous premise that Nico and the WH "coordinated" their exchange so that Obama knew what question was coming.
And Cue a slew of slavering rightwing conpiracy believers jumping on Calderone's black helicopter for a ride.
Ridiculous. "Gotcha" kindergarten games of the lowest level.
Update: Dana Milbank of the WaPo gets in line for that helicopter too, in a really dishonest bit of reporting. At no point does he actually quote Nico's question, simply writing that:
Pitney asked his arranged question. Reporters looked at one another in amazement at the stagecraft they were witnessing. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel grinned at the surprised TV correspondents in the first row.
Then adding:
As if to compensate for the prepackaged Huffington Post question, Obama went quickly to Fox News for a predictably hostile question from Major Garrett. "In your opening remarks, sir, you said about Iran that you were appalled and outraged," Garrett said. "What took you so long?
"I don't think that's accurate," Obama volleyed testily, calling his toughening statements on Iran "entirely consistent."
Thus giving the impression that Nico's question was a tough one without actually quoting it so that his readers could decide for themselves if asking about a possible betrayal of the demonstrators was a softball for Obama.
D-day already posted this You-Tube today in a post that wasn't about this snit in a teacup:
And writes:
I don't think you can find a more perfect summation of the traditional media inside Washington than this - Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza dressed like fops in bowties and smoking jackets - or more likely, dressed like their own mental projection of themselves - smugly discoursing, with CHAMBER MUSIC in the background, about Beltway gossip.
...I think at this point, we can stop asking "If only the media would cover such-and-such story in THIS way..." For that to be successful, we would have to get such a story covered by someone like these two. That's just not going to happen.
Who does Dana Milbank think he is? This guy?
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