Axelrod Lies About Hillary's Response During 60 Minutes Interview

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Obama Camp's False Description Of Hillary's 60 Minutes Statement
By Big Tent Democrat, Section Elections 2008
Posted on Tue Mar 11, 2008 at 03:06:49 PM EST

Obama chief campaign strategist David Axelrod is making stuff up. Today he said:

"This has been a pattern that we've seen throughout the campaign, whether it was the Bill Shaheen incident, the Bob Johnson incident, Sen. Clinton's own inexplicable unwillingness to make a direct statement on '60 Minutes' about Sen. Obama's Christianity, even though they've shared prayer groups together in Congress. All of it is part of an insidious pattern that needs to be addressed."

Politics is politics. And false outrage is false outrage. But Axelrod has dipped into flat out falsehood here. Forget that Bill Shaheen was fired. Forget that Bob Johnson was forced to apologize.

Axelrod is simply making a deliberate false statement when he accuses Hillary of being unwilling to to make a direct statement about Obama's Christianity on 60 Minutes. She did make such a statment.

Axelrod is making stuff up here.

http://www.talkleft.com/story/2008/3/11/16649/9376

More from http://mediamatters.org/columns/200803110002 :

Eric Boehlert writes about Tweety and Hillary's 60 Minute Moment:

Less than one second. That's how long it took Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to answer, "Of course not," to Steve Kroft's question on 60 Minutes about whether she thought Sen. Barack Obama was a Muslim. You can time it yourself by watching the clip at YouTube.

Still, that didn't stop MSNBC's Chris Matthews from complaining on-air last week that it took Clinton "the longest time" to answer Kroft's question.

Lots of eager, tsk-tsking pundits and reporters agreed. They said Clinton was guilty of "hemming and hawing" in response to Kroft's peculiar, repeated insistence that she make some sort of declarative statement about her opponents religious beliefs. And then when she did, Kroft asked that she do it again. That's when Clinton, looking befuddled by the multiple requests, added some qualifiers to her response, including "as far as I know." What stood out in the exchange was not Clinton's responses, but Kroft's weird persistence in asking a question that Clinton addressed unequivocally the first time, as though he was trying to draw out something she was not saying. . . .

http://mediamatters.org/columns/200803110002