Big Correction: Newsmax Claim of Obama Nodding Along To Wright Sermon Appears Erroneous

And "erroneous" is the most charitable characterization.

Allah discusses the shrewdness of Obama.

Here's a possible bit of shrewdness: It could well be that Obama and Wright had an agreement that Wright wouldn't talk about conspiracies and Hiroshima and God damn America when Obama was present. He might have warned him in advance of... interesting sermons.

So it's possible we'll never catch him in the church when Uncle Jerry is going off. As if that matters. And yet, of course, it denies us the smoking gun evidence of a lie.

I haven't linked a NewsMax generated story in forever, and now I'm remembering why. I suppose it's possible this is a fairly innocent error -- story right, date wrong -- but I'm having trouble imagining how a reporter could get something as basic as the dateline wrong.

As Tom Maguire notes, it's still possible that NewsMax is right; but based on Obama's itinerary, it seems a stretch.

NewsMax now says it stands by the story but also allows the date may be wrong:

The church holds services three times every Sunday at 7:30 and 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. Central time (with weekly praise/prayers starting 15 minutes previous to those times). While both the early morning and evening service allowed Sen. Obama to attend the service and still give a speech in Miami, Mr. Davis stands by his story that during one of the services he attended during the month of July, Senator Obama was present and sat through the sermon given by Rev. Wright as described in the story. Mr. Davis said Secret Service were also present in the church during Senator Obama's attendance.

Um, that's not good enough. If something as simple as the date was wrong, why should anyone believe anything else in the story? Further, if the date's wrong, how do we match the content of the sermon to the "nodding"? For all we know Obama was caught nodding along to a statement like "Jesus saves."

There may be something to this, but NewsMax has to provide something more than its not-particularly-convincing institutional competency to back it up. The MSM does that all the time, and they're also usually full of shit.

PS, it's ludicrous that in this day and age, with almost everyone carrying a frickin' cellphone with a camera, that this guy can't produce a picture.

posted by Ace at 11:08 AM

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