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Monday, February 16, 2015

Matthew Yglesias's Gaffe

I learn from this wonderfully titled wonderful post "Randomgate is why politicians are so boring" that Obama's gaffe in which he said the attack on the Kosher supermarket in Paris was "random" violence when it was (as the Obama administration has said many times) anti semitic violence was an answer to a question asked by Matt Yglesias in the huge Klein Yglesias Obama interview (which I haven't watched). So Yglesias was right there. He complains that the gaffe he quoted was blown out of proportion. This sort of complaint (more ususally made by the person who uttered the gaffe not the one who reported it without noticing its gaffosity) is generally quite possible the most boring content of serious news. The media have to report the complaint to be fair, but the complaint usually is based on treating "quoted out of context" to mean "quoted." Strangely, Yglesias's post is absolutely brilliant. Read it. Yglesias fans will recognize some of his favorite themes, so the post is not a wildly original addition to the Yglesias literature, but the whole post is a devastating critique of political journalism made by someone right in the eye of the storm.

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