Last updated on April 19th, 2013 at 07:00 pm
The right is freaking out and claiming that President Obama is going to blame the tea party for the Boston bombings because David Axelrod pointed out that yesterday was tax day.
Here is the video of Axelrod on msnbc:
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Transcript via msnbc:
Axelrod: It is. But the fact is that there is a ministerial element to the presidency. People need to hear the President of the United States say we’re doing everything that needs to be done and we’re going to hold the people responsible accountable and what we learned in that incident was, you better do it quickly. Don’t wait. And so there’s the tension between getting the president out there to play that role and the need to gather facts and in this case, facts are slow to come. so I have some sympathy for the position he was in yesterday.
Todd: I got that sense that there was this frustration that he didn’t have more facts at hand and i think, frankly, talk to those investigators in Boston. Everybody is frustrated at how little it seems is known at this point. They seem — i was told that the reason he — they debated whether to use certain words. I know that does matter. And because when the president says terrorist attack, that’s a whole lot bigger than what Dianne Feinstein says it.
Axelrod: Absolutely. And the word has taken on a different meaning since 9/11. You use those words and it means something very specific in people’s mind. I’m sure what was going through the president’s mind is — we really don’t know who did this. It was tax day. You just don’t know. and so I think his attitude is, let’s not put any inference into this. Let’s just make clear that we’re going to get the people responsible.
Axelrod said that the president was being cautious because we don’t know who did this, but The Weekly Standard heard, Axelrod: Obama Thinks Boston Bombings Could Be Related to ‘Tax Day’. Glenn Beck’s The Blaze took The Weekly Standard’s story and turned it into, AXELROD STUNNER: OBAMA MAY HAVE AVOIDED ‘TERROR’ LABEL BECAUSE HE WAS THINKING THE ATTACK WAS POTENTIALLY RELATED TO ‘TAX DAY’
The right wing freakout is already in the process of mushrooming. By the time Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity get a hold of this story it won’t be much of a surprise if they claim that President Obama is blaming the Tea Party.
Nowhere in the transcript does Axelrod actually say that President Obama thinks the attack was related to tax day. He was speculating on what might have been going through the president’s mind. There are many possible motives for what happened. It was wise of the president not to label the bombing an act of domestic or international terrorism.
If the attack was related to tax day, this doesn’t automatically mean that it was carried out by a person/people who are affiliated with the tea party. The right’s Obama paranoia is running wild, and I suspect that they are projecting their deepest fears that whoever did this shares their beliefs.
There are many possible motives. The Boston Marathon is an international event. It was tax day. It was also Patriots’ Day. This week also marks the anniversaries of the end of the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, and today is the sixth anniversary of the Virginia Tech shootings. There could also be an entirely different motive behind the attack.
The right has twisted Axelrod’s words to fit their own twisted persecution fantasies. The Obama haters are freaking out, and the worst is probably yet to come.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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