I agree with you, Bruce, that his soundbite got a little bit torqued. I think I understand why. The critical exchange was when his questioner said "being in Iraq for 50 years" meaning, I think plainly enough, on a war footing, beset by hotspots of ongoing battles between ideological extremists and cultists and clans. When John answered the question, he answered with a totally different context--meaning, a safely based presence similar to our installations in S. Korea, Germany, and so on.

This flipping of context is not unusual in politics, but it is what started the misinterpretation. People kind of expected he would answer the question that was posed, not flip it into a re-definition of terms.

Given that, what he ended up saying is a lot mroe reasonable, from his perpsective, than what it has been portrayed as.

Obama has experienced similar defamation of character, of amuch more deliberate and malicious sort, stemming from the intentionally distorted Wright sound bites.

I think the very term swift-boating came from a similar distortion aimed against John Kerry, far removed fromt he ground truth.

I recall a similar extreme distortion, using audio editing, that was used to make Howard Dean look like a screamer, when the original context was more benign.

SO it seems to me that more lying has been promulgated from the right than from the left. ANd your divisive and somewhat vicious thread title strikes me as a fine example of something Ann Coulter would approve of. Is that where you mean to be?


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