Showing posts with label bob woodward. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bob woodward. Show all posts

Friday, March 1, 2013

Threat Level Midnight ~ Bob Woodward Afraid of Coded Threat from White House

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From New York Mag
Woodard reiterated that he never said he felt threatened, and resisted Sean Hannity's efforts to get him to say that the White House is lying, or accusing him of being a liar. "I'm not going to use words like that," said Woodward.
However, he went on to explain that he still thinks there was something sinister about Sperling's apologetic note. "The problem I have with the Gene Sperling email — and this comes after a shouting match, lot's of people shout at me — he's says I'm going to 'regret.' That goes into the coded, 'you better watch out,'" Woodward said. But to be clear, he still hasn't uttered the word "threat."



From Business Insider: David Axelrod Versus Woodward on Morning Joe
"I know what intimidation is. And Bob, the headline in the Washington Post, your newspaper, was that 'Woodward said he was threatened by the White House,'" Axelrod said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" today. "... But when the full emails came out, they were as cordial as can be. His email was cordial, and your response was cordial."

"So if you felt threatened," Axelrod continued, "why didn't you say to Gene, 'Don't threaten me?'"



"No, I did not feel threatened," Woodward responded. "What I have said, David — come on, you are putting words in my mouth. I said I don't think this is the way to operate. And you and I have had many discussions. You've never said to me, 'Oh, you're going to regret doing that.' Am I correct?"

Axelrod said that Sperling and Woodward were having a "specific discussion about a specific point."

"And by the way, I'm not putting words in your mouth, Bob. It's your newspaper that said you said you were threatened," Axelrod said.

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Good evening, I was threatened. Well, not threatened. I felt threatened. I mean, I could have felt threatened. At first I didn't feel threatened, then I did, but I don't know why.
~ Craig2 on Huff Post

-Was he trying to give the GOP cover on the sequestor?
-Was he trying to insert himself into the story?
-Was he trying to create a mini-gate to become more relevant?
-Was he playing partisan whiny politics?
-Was he playing victim?
-Was he trying to give himself cover for claiming the President initiated the sequestor?
The answer is yes.
~ HolyCowBatman on Huff Post

He tweeks his story just a little bit everyday. It seems to have gone from a hostile threat, to a warning and then to coded language. By next week it will have turned into an invitation to play a couple of rounds of golf.
~ nikki717 on Huff Post

Woodward was trying to create some excitement for himself. Most people want to end their career on a high note, looks like he's determined to take the fool's road.
~ Texian Life on Huff Post

Bob is the old Guy who keeps talking about the 3 touchdowns he scored in the High School Homecoming game.
~ LabRodent on Wonkette

I was threatened by a sign I saw today that said "Caution: Wet Floor"
What? Wet with my blood? Why do I have to be cautious? Is that a threat?
Finally somebody had to pull me away from the sign.
~ Iburl on Wonkette

Woodward hit the journalistic version of the Life Call button too many times.
"My career has fallen and it can't get up!"
~ John Birf Society on Wonkette

If you’ve been keeping up with The Perils of Bobline, when we last left Bob Woodward, he was tied up and left on the railroad tracks by the evil Snidely Obama who threatened him that if he didn’t pay the mortgage, he would foreclose on his publishing house and let the train run over him.
In response, Bobline cried out in a high pitch, “Help! Help! Oh please, someone help poor little growing irrelevant me!”
But it was too late, the train of media opinion ran over the melodramatic Bobline and his professional credibility was killed.
~ PlanetPOV.com

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Thursday, February 28, 2013

GOP Hack Bob Woodward Self-Destructs While Jumping the Shark ~ UPDATED with Debunkery

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Related Post:
Snark Amendment: Republican Hack Bob Woodward Blames Obama for the Sequester

UPDATES:

The full text of the e-mail exchange has been leaked and is available at Politico. Word for word, it is loyal to Woodward’s recitation. But its tone is toothless. Sperling closes this way: “My apologies again for raising my voice on the call with you. Feel bad about that and truly apologize.” Woodward pings back: “Gene: You do not ever have to apologize to me. You get wound up because you are making your points and you believe them.”
So much for the White House “threatening” Woodward, as the Internet would have us believe. Nor does the you-will-regret-this language look like part of a communications policy on part of the White House. It looks like a reporter and a source disagreeing on some really tedious, really important policy points.
~ Eric Wemple on Washington Post

Bob Woodward trolled us (and we got played)
Bob Woodward revealed that White House official had warned him he would “regret” saying Obama had moved the goal posts on sequestration.
Predictably, conservatives latched onto this, as it confirmed our suspicion about the Obama Administration’s “Chicago-style” of politics. A lot of mainstream journalists bought into this, too — reflexively believing anything the great Bob Woodward says.
Of course, Woodward (who was expert at trolling for publicity before the internet even existed), benefits greatly from the publicity (nothing sells books like controversy).
But today, things look different. P0litico has posted the exclusive email from Gene Sperling to Woodward. It begins, “I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today.”
(Frightening, I know!)
~ Daily Caller



















~~~~~~~~~~~~Original Post Below~~~~~~~~~~~~

From Business Insider
The Washington Post's Bob Woodward ripped into President Barack Obama on "Morning Joe" today, saying he's exhibiting a "kind of madness I haven't seen in a long time" for a decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf because of budget concerns.

"Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying, 'Oh, by the way, I can't do this because of some budget document?'" Woodward said.

"Or George W. Bush saying, 'You know, I'm not going to invade Iraq because I can't get the aircraft carriers I need?'" Or even Bill Clinton saying, 'You know, I'm not going to attack Saddam Hussein's intelligence headquarters,' ... because of some budget document?"

. . . "Under the Constitution, the President is commander-in-chief and employs the force. And so we now have the President going out because of this piece of paper and this agreement. 'I can’t do what I need to do to protect the country,'" Woodward said.

"That’s a kind of madness that I haven't seen in a long time," he said.



CNN Transcript Wed. 2-27-2013, Woodward and Wolf Blitzer
BLITZER: It's getting pretty nasty. Take us behind the scenes a little bit. The allegations being hurled against you right now.
WOODWARD: Well, I mean...
BLITZER: You're used to this kind of stuff, but...
WOODWARD: I am.

BLITZER: ... share with our viewers what's going on between you and the White House.

WOODWARD: Well, they're -- they're not happy at all, and some people kind of, you know, said, "Look, we don't see eye to eye on this."
They never really said, though, afterwards -- they've said that this is factually wrong, and they -- and it was said to me in an e- mail by a top...

BLITZER: What was -- what was said?
WOODWARD: It was -- it was said very clearly, "You will regret doing this."
BLITZER: Who sent that e-mail to you?
WOODWARD: Well, I'm not going to say.

BLITZER: Was it a senior person at the White House?

WOODWARD: A very senior person. And just as a matter -- I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, "You're going to regret doing something that you believe in, and even though we don't look at it that way, you do look at it that way."
And it's, I think if Barack Obama knew that was part of the communication's strategy -- let's hope it's not a strategy, that it's a tactic that somebody's employed -- and said, look, we don't go around trying to say to reporters, "If you, in an honest way, present something we don't like, that, you know, you're going to regret this." And just -- it's Mickey Mouse.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~


The White House official whom Bob Woodward charged had crosssed a line by saying he would "regret" printing his version of a set of Washington negotiations was Gene Sperling, the director of the White House Economic Council, a source familiar with the exchange told BuzzFeed Wednesday.
. . . The aide "yelled at me for about a half hour," Woodward said, and then sent a follow-up email that read, in part: "You're focusing on a few specific trees that give a very wrong impression of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here. … I think you will regret staking out that claim."
Officials often threaten reporters that they will "regret" printing something that is untrue, but Woodward took the remark as a threat.
~ Ben Smith on Buzzfeed

Sperling wasn't even saying that Woodward would "regret" publishing whatever he planned to publish because Sperling would get him back for it later. He was saying Woodward would regret it because Woodward would be proven wrong.
~ Henry Blodget on Business Insider

Inside the Woodward Fainting Couch!
So was Sperling threatening to sic the black helicopters on Woodward and like fully take him out? The blog and twitter-hordes of the right think so. And they’re circling round Woodward tonight in a glorious defense.
The White House denies it. A White House official tells us: “Of course no threat was intended. As Mr. Woodward noted, the email from the aide was sent to apologize for voices being raised in their previous conversation. The note suggested that Mr. Woodward would regret the observation he made regarding the sequester because that observation was inaccurate, nothing more. And Mr. Woodward responded to this aide’s email in a friendly manner.”
~ Josh Marshall on Talking Points Memo

Bob Woodward is officially shaming himself trying to prove that the sequester standoff is President Obama’s fault. First he blamed Obama for the failed debt ceiling deal of July 2011, proclaiming in his incredibly biased book: “[P]residents work their will—or should work their will—on the important matters of national business. Obama has not.” How the president could have worked his will on the crackpot Tea Party GOP caucus, he doesn’t say.
. . . Now he’s claiming the president alone has the power to avert disaster by ignoring the sequester, particularly its steep defense cuts, and doing … I don’t know what.
. . . There is madness afoot here, but it’s Woodward’s.
~ Joan Walsh on Salon





























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Monday, February 25, 2013

Republican Hack Bob Woodward Blames Obama for Sequester

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Republican Bob Woodward in The Washington Post
Misunderstanding, misstatements and all the classic contortions of partisan message management surround the sequester, the term for the $85 billion in ugly and largely irrational federal spending cuts set by law to begin Friday.

What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? Who is responsible? What really happened?

. . . Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

Nabors has told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid. A mandatory sequester was the only action-forcing mechanism they could devise. Nabors has said, “We didn’t actually think it would be that hard to convince them” — Reid and the Republicans — to adopt the sequester. “It really was the only thing we had. There was not a lot of other options left on the table.”

. . . So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts. His call for a balanced approach is reasonable, and he makes a strong case that those in the top income brackets could and should pay more. But that was not the deal he made.





The White House pushback is a classic case of distortion and confusion. We unfortunately have seen this too often in recent presidential history. First, the White House spent months denying paternity for the sequester. To Jay Carney's credit, he acknowledged [Tuesday] it was their ‘idea.’ [Carney: ‘The sequester was something that was discussed, and as has been reported, it was an idea that the White House put forward because it was put forward by Republican Senator Gramm and Rudman back in the ‘80s as part of the Gramm-Rudman deal -- there is a history here to this.’] But they do not want to talk about that now. The rest of the White House statement reflects a confusion of chronology. I do not think it is willful. They are just mixed up, surprisingly so.
~ Bob Woodward in an email to Politico



The argument is silly.
You can't start a discussion about the sequester without starting with the broader context. The sequester was offered during the GOP's unprecedented threat to not raise the debt ceiling, potentially putting the U.S. into default.
If offering spending cuts two years down the road is the only way to avoid such a calamity then a U.S. President should offer that 100 times out of 100. But is it really Obama's "fault"? The sequester wouldn't even be a term anyone knows if it weren't for the debt ceiling nonsense.
~ Joe Wiesenthal on Business Insider



To argue that the White House is "moving the goal posts" when it now asks for revenue in a sequestration replacement, you have to toss out the fact that the White House always wanted revenue in the supercommittee's sequestration replacement. This isn't confusing unless reporters make it confusing.
~ David Weigel on Slate







I don’t agree with my colleague Bob Woodward, who says the Obama administration is “moving the goalposts” when they insist on a sequester replacement that includes revenues. I remember talking to both members of the Obama administration and the Republican leadership in 2011, and everyone was perfectly clear that Democrats were going to pursue tax increases in any sequester replacement, and Republicans were going to oppose tax increases in any sequester replacement. What no one knew was who would win.
. . . Here in DC, we can get a bit buried in Beltway minutia. The ongoing blame game over who concocted the sequester is an excellent example. But it’s worth remembering that the goalposts in American politics aren’t set in backroom deals between politicians. They’re set in elections. And in the 2012 election, the American people were very clear on where they wanted the goalposts moved to.
~ Ezra Klein on Washington Post



. . . in this case Woodward is just dead wrong. Obama and Democrats have always insisted that a balanced mix of spending cuts and higher taxes replace sequestration. It’s true that John Boehner wouldn’t agree to include new taxes in the enforcement mechanism itself, and thus that the enforcement mechanism he and Obama settled upon — sequestration — is composed exclusively of spending cuts. But the entire purpose of an enforcement mechanism is to make sure that the enforcement mechanism is never triggered. The key question is what action it was designed to compel. And on that score, the Budget Control Act is unambiguous.
First: “Unless a joint committee bill achieving an amount greater than $1,200,000,000,000 in deficit reduction as provided in section 401(b)(3)(B)(i)(II) of the Budget Control Act of 2011 is enacted by January 15, 2012, the discretionary spending limits listed in section 251(c) shall be revised, and discretionary appropriations and direct spending shall be reduced.”
Key words: “deficit reduction.” Not “spending cuts.” If Republicans wanted to make sure sequestration would be replaced with spending cuts only, that would have been the place to make a stand. Some of them certainly tried. But that’s not what ultimately won the day.
~ Brian Beutler on Talking Points Memo















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