One Gaffe, Two Realities

The issue of President Obama trying to hold his latest pronouncement on jobs (in between his vacations) at the same time as the prescheduled Republican debate on MSNBC is an interesting demonstration on how one event can be differently interpreted depending on your worldview.

So let's look at the chronology as noted by Instapundit (with lots of links to others commenting on the issue in detail):

1. The Republicans set a date for a debate to be covered on MSNBC and Politco.

2. Obama and the White House, aware of the Republican event, then decide to upstage them by holding Obama's talk in the House of Representatives at the same time and request the Republicans cancel their event.

3. Republicans say no, Democrat partisans are aghast at their temerity.

So the Detroit Free Press, being aghast at such effrontery, blames the Republicans for the conflict.

The Detroit Free Press: Why Americans hate Washington

Just hours after President Barack Obama announced his plans to address Congress next Wednesday on a new initiative to jump-start the stagnant jobs market, House Speaker John Boehner countered with a request that the president postpone his speech until Thursday, so as not to cannibalize the potential TV audience for a Wednesday debate among the Republicans vying for the chance to oppose Obama in the 2012 election.

Although superficially courteous, Boehner's suggestion bore some distinctly unfriendly implications: first, that a debate among Republicans was more urgent than anything the Democratic president had to say, and second, that the White House had selected its favored date in a calculated attempt to detract from the GOP's event.

Interesting. So the Freep's view is the Republicans should roll over and cancel their event so they can act as props and background to the President's latest and greatest pronouncement blaming Republicans for the economy and how his latest jobs plan (its coming! any day now!) will rectify the mess he's made worse.

Got it.

The Free Press then goes on to snidely state it would have been content to just watch snippets of the Republican debate later to make way for the much more important White house pronouncement:

We have no way of knowing whether the White House was consciously attempting to preempt the Republican debate or simply failed to recognize the GOP's previously scheduled event as a significant calendar conflict. (For the record, we were among the majority of Americans who would have been satisfied to see taped highlights of the debate the next day.)

The Freep however doesn't seem like it could have similarly held off to see "taped highlights" of Obama's speech. The Freep couldn't wait breathlessly for one more day for his speech to be aired (even the editors at the Freep need to breathe on occasion). Come on now Freep, how often do you really need to watch Obama's head do the giraffe-watching-tennis-thing between the teleprompters and hear him say "I", and "let me be clear" yet again?

The Detroit Free Press, yet another "objective" member of the Media well and truly in the tank for Obama and ready to interpret every event for his benefit.