CNN's Political Ticker Blog showed us some gymnastics worthy of the Olympics -- or more correctly a contortionist -- to turn the words of a terrorist into those of John McCain in their ridiculously titled post, "McCain camp says Hamas wants Obama."
John McCain’s campaign sent supporters a fundraising e-mail Friday that claims Hamas approves of Democrat Barack Obama’s foreign policy vision, and is hoping for his victory this fall.
Oh, CNN is all aghast over the nasty McCain camp. There's high dudgeon galore.
“Proving once again that the Straight Talk Express has lost its wheels, John McCain is repeating tired and divisive attacks about Barack Obama that he knows are flat out untrue,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton. “Barack Obama disagreed with President Carter's meeting with Hamas and has said so repeatedly, and we look forward to John McCain's clarification and apology for his latest false political attack.”
In an update, they even got some more reaction from the Obama camp in the person of "Obama supporter Rep. Robert Wexler."
Obama supporter Rep. Robert Wexler responded to the McCain fundraising e-mail. "John McCain likes to talk about the civil campaign he plans to run, and yet today he has engaged in a shameful, divisive, and cynical kind of politics that he pretends to reject — all in reckless pursuit of campaign dollars," said Wexler, calling the message "empty tough talk and divisive fear mongering."
"We call on Senator McCain to reject this embarrassing and outrageous tone, and to join with Barack Obama in calling for an America that is united in its determination to isolate Hamas and support our ally Israel," he said.
But, here is one tiny bit of the story that CNN seems to have overlooked. On April 16th, Ahmed Yousef, chief political adviser to the Prime Minister of Hamas, did indeed endorse Barack Obama in an interview on WABC radio.
Our friends over at Powerline posted the audio of the interview where the Hamas operative expressed his admiration for Obama and his hopes that Obama wins the upcoming election.
On Sunday, Aaron Klein and John Batchelor interviewed Ahmed Yousef, chief political adviser to the Prime Minister of Hamas, on WABC radio. The interview produced a scoop which, for some reason, has not been widely publicized: Hamas has endorsed Barack Obama for President. Yousef said, "We like Mr. Obama and we hope he will win the election." Why? "He has a vision to change America." Maybe Yousef has some insight into what Obama means by all these vague references to "change."
Now, this audio had been out there for three days before CNN wrote their story tsk tsking John McCain for being a meanie. One wonders why they did not note that McCain isn't the one that said Hamas supports Barack Obama? If one were to read only the CNN piece, one would think that McCain is the one who made the allegation.
CNN did try later on the 18th to update the piece to reflect that they were made aware of the WABC interview. However, they didn't make much effort to correct their erroneous take on the story.
It was a pretty cynical attempt to attack McCain when all McCain was doing was highlighting the truth!
(h/t Newsbuster reader Allen)
