Needlenose

If you thought AP Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier would be a bit chastened by the reaction to his laughably biased criticism of Barack Obama’s VP pick the other day — you know, the article that launched letter-writing protest campaigns by MoveOn.org and Firedoglake — you’d better guess again.

Here he is tonight, spitting reflecting on Hillary Clinton’s speech to the Democratic convention:

Clinton had to somehow convince people that she honestly thought Obama was ready for the presidency. But something stood in her way: Her words.

– Dec. 3, 2007: “So you decide which makes more sense: Entrust our country to someone who is ready on Day One … or to put America in the hands of someone with little national or international experience, who started running for president the day he arrived in the U.S. Senate.”

– March 2008. “I know Sen. McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.“

I know, I know — you’re shocked that a now-famed McCainiac like Fournier found a way to work some out-of-context “praise” for John McCain in reporting on a speech that focused on all the things Clinton and Barack Obama are for, but McCain is against (as Hillary herself repeatedly pointed out during the primaries, even as she competed against Obama). For example, Clinton said:

We need to elect Barack Obama because we need a President who understands that America can’t compete in a global economy by padding the pockets of energy speculators, while ignoring the workers whose jobs have been shipped overseas. We need a President who understands that we can’t solve the problems of global warming by giving windfall profits to the oil companies while ignoring opportunities to invest in new technologies that will build a green economy.

But those weren’t the words Ron Fournier was interested in — he cared much more about stray remarks from six or eight months ago. Not once in his article, in fact, does Fournier concede that Obama and Clinton favor many of the same policies… in other words, that she might back Obama not merely because he defeated her but because they both sought to achieve the same goals for this country.

Because what Clinton and Obama actually believe isn’t important to Fournier, any more than he gave a flying fig about Clinton’s actual speech last night. His intention is to distract readers from what she said, to disrupt what Clinton and Obama are seeking to achieve by imposing his previously-formed opinions on the event.

In a “news” story. For the once-famously objective Associated Press.

But if Fournier has to take them down, too, along the way, he will. After all, he’s got a candidate to get elected.

(“Ron Fournier’s Notebook” image above by yours truly. Thanks to Ego-Box for the hand-drawn hearts.)