From DailyKos.com…
Fresh off of breaking the “story” that a McCain volunteer was “mutilated” (er, scratched) by a big, bad black man (er, herself, really), Drudge continues his descent into the absurd and the McCain campaign is again willing to join him in the nosedive down the rabbit hole.
Today’s false story of choice? Drudge claims this:
2001 OBAMA: TRAGEDY THAT ‘REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH’ NOT PURSUED BY SUPREME COURT
The “headline” links to a YouTube video of a seven year old radio interview which, as was expected, reflects the complete opposite of the screeching headline.
In the interview, Obama actually states the following:
Obama said “one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement, was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways we still stuffer from that.”
The “tragedy” wasn’t that the Supreme Court did not, as Drudge screeches, pursue the “redistribution of wealth.” In fact, he states that the “tragedy” was that the civil rights movement, in seeking equalizing policies, focused too much on courts and not enough on political and community organizing.
In other words, the Drudge/McCain/Fox “News” hype of this story is as painfully desperate and transparently faux as a backwards “B” scratched into the face of a McCain volunteer by her own hand.
The legal minds over at the Volokh Conspiracy agree:
[Obama] seems to think that it was a huge error for activists to try to achieve more general redistribution through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (In the waning days of the Warren Court, there was a movement to try to constitutionalize a right to a minimum income.) Co-interviewee Dennis Hutchison even suggests that in pre-interview conversation, Obama agreed with him that Goldberg v. Kelley, establishing procedural protections for welfare recipients, was wrongly decided, or at least promised much more than it could possibly achieve.
And Cass Sunstein sets the record straight, pointing out that not only was Obama arguing the exact opposite of what the smear claims, but that “redistributive” doesn’t mean what most people think it means in this narrow legal context:
Sunstein argued that Obama is discussing redistribution in a relatively narrow legal context: The discussion in the 1970s of whether the Supreme Court would create the right to a social safety net — to things like education and welfare. He also noted that in the interview, Obama appears to express support for the court’s rejection of that line of argument, saying instead that the civil rights movement should aim for the same goals through legislative action.
“What the critics are missing is that the term ‘redistribution’ didn’t man in the Constitutional context equalized wealth or anything like that. It meant some positive rights, most prominently the right to education, and also the right to a lawyer,” Sunstein said. “What he’s saying – this is the irony of it – he’s basically taking the side of the conservatives then and now against the liberals.”
Meanwhile the Obama campaign responds to the faux outrage de jour:
“This is a fake news controversy drummed up by the all too common alliance of Fox News, the Drudge Report and John McCain, who apparently decided to close out his campaign with the same false, desperate attacks that have failed for months. In this seven year old interview, Senator Obama did not say that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth at all. Americans know that the real choice in this election is between four more years of Bush-McCain policies that redistribute billions to billionaires and big corporations and Barack Obama’s plan to help the middle class by giving tax relief to 95% of workers and companies that create new jobs here in America. That’s the change we need, and no amount of eleventh-hour distractions from the McCain campaign will change that.”
**EDIT**
See a screenshot of the Drudge Report’s extremely unethical misleading headline (as of 10/27/08 at 11:31 p.m.):
Click to see Drudge's misleading and unethical smear headline
NEW YORK (AP) — The Associated Press, following criticism from bloggers over an AP assertion of copyright, plans to meet this week with a bloggers’ group to help form guidelines under which AP news stories could be quoted online.
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