Reply #134: CTV, far from standing behind story, is rapidly backing away from it [View All]

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

CTV may not be backing down, but instead are revising their story, and it is still a smear job.

Anatomy of a smear: Obama and NAFTA

February 28, 2008 Posted by Mark Kleiman at The Reality-Based Community

....Just one thing, though: the story reeks of fish, and CTV, far from standing behind it, is rapidly backing away from it. The original account vaguely mentions "Canadian sources." The follow-up, which includes denials from Obama and from the Ambassador, gets a little more specific: now the source is said to be "a high-ranking member of the Canadian embassy." But suddenly that source isn't so sure he had it right in the first place: "He has since suggested it was perhaps a miscommunication."

Swiftly switching gears, CTV now claims to be pursuing, not a conversation between a senior Obama staffer and the Canadian Ambassador, but a phone call between Austan Goolsbee — not a staffer but an academic at the University of Chicago who has been advising Obama — and someone (unnamed, of course) in the Canadian Consulate-General in Chicago.

Since we have no evidence for any of this save the word of CTV, and since CTV can't get its story straight, anyone who claims to believe the story — that is, McCain and his odd bedfellows Marsh and Johnson — ought to be presumed to be in bad faith. It might be true, but there's no reason for any fair-minded person to believe that it's true.

Is it possible that Goolsbee — like most economists, a free trader by instinct — tried to say something calming to someone he knew at the Consulate General in Chicago? Sure. But so what?

more at the link