Here’s the headline from Fox News:
“Seizing on Good Week, Obama Takes Another Vacation Despite GOP Criticisms”
Another vacation? For anyone keeping track, Obama has taken about 65 vacation days since assuming office. By this point in his first term George W. Bush had taken twice as much time off (120 days). And that was in the midst of our nation still responding to 9/11.
The story Fox News ran was attributed to their own Wendell Goler and the Associated Press. Goler lifted most of the details from the AP, including the Obamas’ bike rides and stops for ice cream. However, he neglected to include the information on Bush’s vacations, which was in the AP’s article. That’s a pretty egregious failure to provide relevant context for a column whose title was so deliberately biased.
This omission cannot be explained away as an editorial decision to focus on Obama and leave former presidents out of it, because Goler did include Bush in the article by way of interviewing his former deputy press secretary, Scott Stanzel. Stanzel’s contribution to the story was to criticize Obama for taking his vacation in Maine rather than in Gulf Coast (where Obama has already been at least four times). Stanzel further defended Bush’s many excursions to Crawford, Texas, as being appropriate because he still got work done there. Although there was no similar defense of Obama who, like all presidents, is working 24/7.
Goler also went out of his way to lie about one occasion when Bush was vacationing in Crawford and a hurricane happened to nearly destroy New Orleans. Goler said that Bush cut his vacation short, but the truth is that he extended it to play guitar with a country singer and to visit John McCain in Phoenix to celebrate his birthday.
You don’t get many better examples of deliberate bias than this. Goler based his reporting on an article from the AP that was actually pretty fair and balanced. But for Fox News it had to be altered to eliminate any context that might reflect favorably on Obama, while adding fiction that whitewashed Bush’s failures.
More proof that Fox News is the enemy of fairness and the defiler of balance.
So they’re all bent out of shape because somebody takes a vacation in summertime. Of course Dub had to take that much publisized 5 weeks in August 2001 being all fatigued from cutting all those pesky taxes. Here in Texas we got a double dose of it. George with brush hog, George with cowboy hat, George with chainsaw. That dirt ranch needed some looking after. Too bad he didn’t work in a little time to read the PDB of August 6, 2001.
I wonder if FOX will have anything to say about Republican Boehner’s idea:
“I think having a moratorium on new federal regulations is a great idea it sends a wonderful signal to the private sector that they’re going to have some breathing room,” he said, according to Greg Sargent.
He’s proposing a year long moratorium of bills and regs, which would end the process of financial reform and the health care bill. In essence, what the top Repub in the House is saying is he doesn’t want Congress to actually do anything for a year. Obama takes a vacation and gets reemed, Boehner goes unnoticed.