Answer: When you want to avoid talking Obama's record or the economy at any cost

Ques­tion: When does a national news­pa­per decide a (dis­cred­ited within 24 hours) “bul­ly­ing inci­dent” from back when Rom­ney was a teenager (I was 2) is worth not only the front page…but 5000 words?

Today on Morn­ing Joe the open­ing 15 minute seg­ment of the show (and a good chunk of what fol­lowed) has been all about the Obama Gay Mar­riage busi­ness and the Mitt Rom­ney: Teenage bully story from the Wash­ing­ton Post.

They gave some lip ser­vice to the ABC follow-​up of the family’s denials but con­sider, the entire open­ing seg­ment is usu­ally repeated at 8 AM. (Note wouldn’t you know today they didn’t since Mika couldn’t come in until 7:45?) It is the big seg­ment of the show. Yet even as this story con­tin­ues to evap­o­rate pretty quick this is what MSNBC decides to go with.

Of course Morn­ing Joe’s atten­tion to this is dwarfed by the sheer non­sense of the Wash­ing­ton Post’s deci­sion to give this story the front page and 5000 words.

As Stacy McCain points out

The typ­i­cal news story is 450 – 750 words. Five thou­sand words is enough copy to fill two entire pages of a newspaper.

and remem­ber this is writ­ing 5000 words of a qual­ity good enough for the front page of one of the most promi­nent papers in the nation:

Indeed. To report a story like that — to track down and inter­view somebody’s high-​school class­mates from a half-​century ago — must have taken many weeks, if not months. The writ­ing and edit­ing of a 5,000-word story is not easy work. If you cranked out a thou­sand words a day (quite a rig­or­ous pace, for orig­i­nal report­ing), that’s a full week just to write the story, once you’d done all the interviews.

To put it in per­spec­tive, I started writ­ing this post at about 6:30 AM EST. It is about 900 words long, and I’m adding this sen­tence over 2 hours later at 8:33 AM EST dur­ing the proof­read­ing process. I didn’t fin­ish till 8:57.

So why does the Wash­ing­ton Post devote the time and effort to a story that blog­gers were not only able to shoot down in a cou­ple of hours but led to yet another excit­ing chap­ter of: Did any­one actu­ally read Obama’s biog­ra­phy?

The above text comes directly from Pres­i­dent Obama’s first mem­oir, “Dreams From My Father” and recounts an inci­dent which occurred while he was in mid­dle school. When our pres­i­dent became the sub­ject of taunts from his fel­low class­mates, he decided to shove a lit­tle girl named Coretta. Although he chron­i­cles his feel­ings of regret, he never does not offer her an apology.

Check out his updates and the twit­ter stream in that post, they are clas­sic, my favorite:

Jim Treacher is hav­ing a really great month:

If you went to grade school with Mitt Rom­ney and he dipped your pig­tails in an inkwell, con­tact David Axel­rod immediately

and now we’ve reached the point where the Wash­ing­ton post is reduced to air­brush­ing bits of their story online.

So what does all this add up to for the cash hem­or­rhag­ing Wash­ing­ton Post and for the Obama Cam­paign ? A suc­cess­ful day! Both the Post and the Obama cam­paign are cheer­ing!.

Say What?

“But DaT­e­chGuy”, you ask, “how can you even think some­thing like that after this story has been such an embar­rass­ment to the left, the Post and the administration?”

Easy, because the goal of those involved is to re-​elect Pres­i­dent Obama. That over­rides every other consideration.

Each moment spent on this story, even it it is to refute it and ridicule it not only means we (the right) are not talk­ing the Econ­omy and the president’s record, but it means the MSM has an excuse to ignore sto­ries like this:

Co-​host of Obama Hol­ly­wood fundraiser under SEC investigation

Pres­i­dent Obama’s record $15 mil­lion fundraiser tonight at the home of actor George Clooney is being co-​hosted by Dream­Works CEO Jef­frey Katzen­berg. In addi­tion to being the largest sin­gle donor to the pro-​Obama Super PAC Pri­or­i­ties USA at $2 mil­lion, Katzenberg’s com­pany is cur­rently under inves­ti­ga­tion by the SEC for allegedly brib­ing Chi­nese officials.

and this:

Some­times Obama For­gets About the Mis­er­able Economy

Pres­i­dent Obama, who is head­ing to a big olé Hol­ly­wood fundraiser hosted by George Clooney tonight, said that he “some­times for­gets” the mag­ni­tude of the recession

and most impor­tant of all this:

Poll: Obama Leads Rom­ney by Four in…Oregon

In 2008, Barack Obama defeated John McCain in Ore­gon by 16 points

What­ever keeps this stuff out of the news cycle is a bless­ing for the left.

Such dan­ger­ous news risks reveal­ing the president’s opti­mistic re-​election pro­jec­tions as one big illu­sion. The only real ques­tion to me is how many in the left and media actu­ally know what’s going on and how many are of them are liv­ing in Pauline Kael Nixon world.

I sub­mit and sug­gest that the true believ­ers out­side of media and pol­i­tics are the Pauline Kaels and the MSM are the Albert Syd­ney John­stons run­ning their bluff as long as they can.

Our left­ist friends on Twit­ter might feel good about this but so do I. If the media is play­ing this kind of card in May it means only one thing:

Ride Right Through them, they’re demor­al­ized as Hell!

This whole elec­tion is look­ing like Scott Brown in 2010 on a national scale. More and more the evi­dence seems to sug­gest the following:

MITT ROM­NEY IS GOING TO WIN THIS ELEC­TION AND IT’S NOT GOING TO BE CLOSE!

Update: The story crashes and burns fur­ther:

What Horowitz has done is some­thing even worse: He has claimed to know the exact words spo­ken by John Lauber — a dead man Horowitz never inter­viewed — in a pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion, based entirely on the word of David Seed. The sub­stance of that alleged con­ver­sa­tion is cru­cial to the accu­sa­tion made by the Wash­ing­ton Post story that Romney’s alleged bul­ly­ing had a life­long neg­a­tive impact on Lauber’s life.

Yet John Lauber is rather con­spic­u­ously unavail­able for com­ment on the alle­ga­tion, unless per­haps the edi­tors of the Wash­ing­ton Post are will­ing to enlist a psy­chic to con­duct a séance.

FIR­ING OFFENSE.

Stacy Stacy Stacy, you are assum­ing this story was a jour­nal­is­tic endeavor. That’s not the case, it is a JournoList-​tic endeavor. So if stan­dards and read­ers are lost it doesn’t mat­ter. The idea is to keep the con­ver­sa­tion off the econ­omy and onto some­thing else, ANY­THING else.

Update 2: Ok I admit it, hav­ing Dick Mor­ris agrees with me is worrysome.

Update 3: The Shiny Object strategy

Update 4: The Wash­ing­ton Post evolves and left­ists famous and unknown try to silence those who call them out.