Just the sound of Maddow’s shrill voice sends me scrambling for the remote or mute button.
Via Politico:
Last night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow attributed statements to Mitt Romney that he did not make.
In a segment pegged, ironically, to White House criticism of the Washington press corps, Maddow attempted to rise to the White House’s challenge by calling out Romney for holding President Obama to a higher standard on the unemployment rate than he did himself.
Maddow first ran footage of Romney’s interview with Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin yesterday, in which the former governor of Massachussets said that over a period of four years his administration could get the unemployment rate “down to 6 percent, or maybe lower.” She then ran footage from a May 4 speech in which Romney, dismissing celebration of an 8.1 percent unemployment rate, said “anything over 8 percent, anything near 8 percent, anything over 4 percent is not cause for celebration.”
Paraphrasing Romney’s remarks from the May 4 speech, Maddow then said: “Sure, President Obama has brought unemployment down, but anything over 4 percent is an Obama failure.”
Then, speaking for herself, Maddow said: “Mitt Romney says anything over 4 percent is a failure of the Obama administration, then two-and-a-half weeks later says his own goal is 6 percent unemployment.”
That is incorrect — which is to say, false. Mitt Romney did not say that unemployment over 4 percent is a failure of the Obama administration. He said it was not cause for celebration. Furthermore, in his interview with Halperin, Romney did not say that his own goal of 6 percent unemployment would be cause for celebration either. He merely said that that was his own goal. Maddow is simply tying together two different statements to create and attribute a statement that was never actually made.
The irony is that Maddow pegged her criticism of Romney to White House spokesman Jay Carney’s own criticism of the Washington press corps.