According to ABC correspondent Claire Shipman, the botched Olympic bid by Barack
Obama is actually a "good" thing for the President. Writing an online
column [1] for True/Slant, Shipman (see file photo at right) bizarrely spun, "It
would have been great had he come home a winner. Great for all of us. But maybe
not so much for him. Why? Because then he would have then [sic] really irked his
critics."
Continuing this theory that a loss by Obama will calm some sort of seething
rage, the Good Morning America reporter added, "They're [critics] already
secretly and not so secretly peeved that he's been voted the world's prom
king. Another victory would have just started a wave of dangerous,
uncontrollable seething." [Emphasis added.]
Who voted him the world's prom king? Could it be journalists such as Shipman
who, in January of 2007, referred to Obama's campaigning as "fluid poetry [2]?" So, it's not
surprising that she would try to find some silver lining for the President.
Additionally, her husband is Jay Carney, the Communications Director to Vice
President Joe Biden. Shipman raised this point in the column, even as she tried
to see the upside to Obama's embarrassing failure at Copenhagen:
The Chicago loss is actually a win? I know. It's hard to wrap your head around it. I got a sense of this as I test-drove my counter-intuitive (yet brilliant) theory by my baffled and distracted husband over the weekend. I figured he'd surely see the logic. After all, he's now a spin doctor himself-Communications Director for VP Biden.
Towards the end of the piece, Shipman cooed that Obama's inability to win the
Olympics for Chicago somehow makes him more likable and his critics less:
It's an especially good thing because it punctures his detractors ballooning and poisonous envy. Opponents, gleeful about their rivals' embarrasement [sic], become a bit less hazardous. In the meantime, everyone else can empathize, which sometimes makes the heart grow-more sympathetic.
The website True/Slant [3]
describes itself as "an original content news network tailored to both the
'Entrepreneurial Journalist' and marketers who want a more effective way to
engage with digital audiences." With columns such as this one by Shipman, it
seems as though it's simply another outlet for liberal media spin.
-Scott Whitlock is a news analyst for the Media Research
Center.