By Warner Todd Huston,Red State
How it is that the NYT missed the one thing Obama said that had everyone in a tizzy is anyone’s guess.
All day Friday the newspapers,TV stations,radio,and the Internet were abuzz with Barack Obama’s failed joke about the Special Olympics Thursday night on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. In shades of John Kerry’s failed joke about the unschooled being “stuck in Iraq,” the president’s apologists said he was merely joking and didn’t mean to say anything disparaging about people with developmental challenges. Still,the incident stirred passionate discussion all day Friday. At least it did for everyone but The New York Times’s Helene Cooper. Cooper seemed not to even realize it happened if her review of the show is any indication.
One has to wonder,with the entire country talking about Obama’s Special Olympics quip,how did Cooper miss that part of the story? Why would she not even make a passing notation of the controversy the joke caused?
Was it impolitic? Yes. Impolite? Certainly. Just plain stupid? You betcha. But what ever it was and whatever my own opinion of it,it was news and for Cooper in The New York Times not to mention it even in passing,well,that is just a dereliction of duty.
So,why did Cooper not even mention this incident? She talked about every other aspect of Obama’s appearance. Why leave out just that one little thing,the one thing that caused Obama to look bad to millions of Americans?