Obama Misspells "Respect" (RSPECT); CNN's Palace Guard Immediately Begins Making Excuses

Of course.

“When Aretha first told us what R-S-P-E-C-T meant to her,” Obama said to the general laughter of the audience....

CNN was quick to cover for Obama’s misspelling. Ashley Banfield said Obama just “wanted to throw us all, see if we were actually all paying attention.”

John Berman then said, “I get hot flashes whenever people spell on TV because I can’t spell. I would misspell ‘respect,’ so I have sympathy for him.”

Berman asked if people would “be making a bigger deal out of this than we are,” if it were, say, Dan Quayle who misspelled a word. “Is this liberal media bias?” he said.

No, not at all.

Ashleigh Banfield's defense is preposterous. If Obama were making some kind of joke, he'd elide the second e in "respect" (because that's the one Aretha Franklin famously elides with the p, doing a combined pee-ee sound), not the first.

But the High Exalted Precious must be defended against all slurs against his potency.

Of course, this is not the most egregious media story of the day. It's not even close.

IThe image showed a group of young boys gathered in a circle with their hands raised at an unusual angle. The AP’s original caption on the photo said they were reciting the organization’s “creed” during a meeting in North Richland Hills, Texas.

It took the AP several days to acknowledge their error. But by then, the unfortunate comparison to Nazi Germany had spread on the Internet faster than Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

“New Trail Life scouting group excludes gay kids & they do a ‘Sieg Heil! Style salute,” tweeted Cathy Lynn Grossman of Religion News Service.

And that’s exactly what it looked like.

“It looks like some kind of German salute that was used during the Nazi period,” Stemberger told me in a telephone interview.

The photograph ran last Sunday in newspapers across the nation and generated hundreds of angry emails and some threatening telephone calls to Trail Life headquarters.

But it turns out that the boys were not saluting Hitler and contrary to the first Associated Press caption, they were not reciting a creed. The boys were singing “Taps,” a longtime Boy Scout tradition that the Texas Trail USA troop had adapted as their own.

The boys had gathered in a circle with their hands raised straight into the air. They gradually lowered their hands as they sang the song. It concludes with their hands flush against their side.

“It really misrepresented what was going on,” Stemberger told me. “There are children involved and that made it more outrageous. They were exploited and misunderstood.”

So AP caught a group of kids slowly lowering their arms from straight up to down by their side, shot the picture in the mid-point, knowing it looked like the Sieg Heil Salute -- and also knowing it wasn't that at all -- and then took days to delete the deceptive photo.

Good God. They just framed kids as Nazis and then defended their doing such.

They claimed to the WaPo's Eric Wemple that the picture was accurate enough, by AP's standards.

All because Trail Life doesn't permit gay scouts.

#greatestladyEVER:

Are You Going to Believe the White House Reporter Pool or Your Lying Eyes?

posted by Ace at 02:06 PM

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