While Newsweek has certainly produced some penetrating reportage and incisive analysis, the opposite has more often been true in this presidential race, as Jim Geraghty reminds us. Newsweek‘s latest pro-Obama work is this hit job on Joe Lieberman. The writers report that during a confrontation between Obama and Lieberman on the floor of the Senate last week, “Obama told Lieberman he was surprised by Lieberman’s personal attacks and his half-hearted denials of the false rumors that Obama is a Muslim.” This claim was sourced to an anonymous Obama aide, and as Mark Hemingway reports, Newsweek never contacted Lieberman’s office for a response to this accusation:
Newsweek never cites an example of Lieberman’s “half-hearted denials” of the “Obama’s a Muslim” rumor. And what makes the story all the more infuriating is that it seems, at least to me, that Obama’s confrontation with Lieberman was a perfect example of the Clintonian triangulation he’s supposed to be above. After pivoting away from his dovish positions on Iran in a speech to AIPAC, Obama then walks onto the floor of the Senate and tells Senator Joe Lieberman to shut up–a not-so-subtle appeal to the Kossack Left.
