The missing minutes
Now it’s being reported by William Jacobsen at Legal Insurrection that one or two minutes of the Romney 47% tape is missing, and that the missing portion occurs close to the time of the controversial part where he’s speaking about the 47%. David Corn, the writer at Mother Jones responsible for publicizing the tapes, is saying it was a random camera malfunction.
Jacobson also publishes a correspondence he had with Corn, in which Corn writes:
When we posted the complete tape, we stated there was a gap of one to two minutes, or less, according to the source. That seemed to be the appropriate time to do so. I will note that Romney, who clearly has thought about how to respond to this clip, has not said in the statements he has made since its release, “But then I went on to say”¦.”
This is disingenuous, according to Jacobson. Corn had not posted such a disclosure until Jacobson had written him to complain about the missing audio.
What’s more, Corn’s suggesting that Romney should have remembered his exact words from an unscripted talk he gave four months ago is, to put it bluntly, absurd.
But then, so many things are absurd these days. Perhaps the most absurd thing is that the MSM is a dedicated arm of the Obama campaign. There is so much important news happening in the world—and so much of it damaging to Obama—that the only thing left for the press to do is to ignore and/or distort it, and then to harp on “gotcha” stories of as little consequence as this talk of Romney’s.
We have indeed fallen through the looking glass, and we’re not about to emerge any time soon.
[BONUS POINTS: If you can immediately identify this photo, you’re probably at least as old as I am. My sympathies:
[ADDENDUM: Andrea Mitchell now says that NBC will not air the Obama “redistribution” tape because it’s not been authenticated.
Otherwise, of course, she would. Just as CBS was oh-so-careful with the Killian memos in September of 2004, and waited till they were completely authenticated to…
And then there’s the commendable reluctance of the exceptionally careful LA Times, which has been keeping from the public the Rashid Khalidi tape, said to be damaging to Obama, for well-nigh these long four years. What commendable restraint!:
Why is the Los Angeles Times sitting on a videotape of the 2003 farewell bash in Chicago at which Barack Obama lavished praise on the guest of honor, Rashid Khalidi ”” former mouthpiece for master terrorist Yasser Arafat?
At the time Khalidi, a PLO adviser turned University of Chicago professor, was headed east to Columbia. There he would take over the University’s Middle East-studies program (which he has since maintained as a bubbling cauldron of anti-Semitism) and assume the professorship endowed in honor of Edward Sayyid, another notorious terror apologist.
The party featured encomiums by many of Khalidi’s allies, colleagues, and friends, including Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator, and Bill Ayers, the terrorist turned education professor. It was sponsored by the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), which had been founded by Khalidi and his wife, Mona, formerly a top English translator for Arafat’s press agency.
Is there just a teeny-weenie chance that this was an evening of Israel-bashing Obama would find very difficult to explain? Could it be that the Times, a pillar of the Obamedia, is covering for its guy?
The sad thing is that, in the four years since this story first appeared, it has become more and more clear that even the release of such a tape might do nothing to hurt Obama’s support. I wonder if there’s anything that could surface about him that could matter at this point.]
[ADDENDUM II: A commenter at Ace’s adds:
The missing minutes will show up in late October. In them, Mitt dances on the backs of the poor in an overcoat and top hat, prodding them with his cruel platinum tipped cane. Then he cackles for a while. Then shares with the crowd how to be a billionaire and pay no taxes. Then some weird Mormon ritual involving the blood of real Christians.
Then he goes back behind the podium andstarts talking truthfully and sensibly about boring foreign policy crap like China and Palestinians.]
Miss Woods, Nixons secretary demonstrating how she accidently ‘erased’ 18 1/2 minutes. Sheesh, I am old as dirt as I knew instantly who that was. I’ve said long and loudly this administration has taken lessons from Nixon, I just failed to include our media in that group. Remember those days? Nixon couldn’t utter a breath without the media being all over him, looking for anything at all to further disclose. I sort of miss those days. sigh
You beat me to it, Dustoffmom! I remember those days, all right. I was involved with an Impeach Nixon group in Leonia NJ, where I lived at the time. That was the last time I “danced in a circle.”
Dustoffmom, I was going to mention merely the 18.5 minuted contortion so others could continue guessing.
Regarding Nixon’s words being scrutinized, he brought that on himself with his absurd cover up. And, that’s assuming he or his very close aides were not involved in the Watergate burglary. Heck, that administration included as vice president a man who pleaded no contest to bribe taking.
I have never quite understood why Nixon himself recorded the incriminating information in the first place. I know he wanted a historical record, but what a way to do it!
But here’s Nixon on why they weren’t destroyed. Make of it what you will.
slight ‘rebuke’ taken Ira….yes, I should not have given the ‘entire’ answer. Mea culpas offered. 🙂 As to the similarities, I offer Fast and Furious…..recently reread Woodward/Bernsteins book and amazed at how many things mirror each other nowadays.
I remember that quite vividly. I also remember this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/January-28-1974-NEWSWEEK-Magazine-Watergate-Tapes-Symbionese-Liberation-Army-/380368739468?pt=Magazines&hash=item588fbe5c8c
A funny sideline (for me, at least) is that the only Republican that my yellow dog Democrat father (God rest his soul) ever voted for was Nixon!
“David Corn, the writer at Mother Jones responsible for publicizing the tapes, is saying it was a random camera malfunction. ”
Though I wonder how he would know for certain, I am sure we can trust him.
But then David Corn does have a somewhat dubious history of …
Well, some will recall this, for example:
“BLOG | Posted 07/16/2003 @ 4:13pm
A White House Smear
David Corn
Did senior Bush officials blow the cover of a US intelligence officer working covertly in a field of vital importance to national security–and break the law–in order to strike at a Bush administration critic and intimidate others?
It sure looks that way, if conservative journalist Bob Novak can be trusted …
Soon after Wilson disclosed his trip in the media and made the White House look bad. the payback came …
Wilson caused problems for the White House, and his wife was outed as an undercover CIA officer. …
The Wilson smear was a thuggish act. Bush and his crew abused and misused intelligence to make their case for war. Now there is evidence Bushies used classified information and put the nation’s counter-proliferation efforts at risk merely to settle a score. It is a sign that with this gang politics trumps national security. ”
Turned out eventually that the State Department “gossip” and Colin Powell underling Richard Armitage had “leaked” the information to Novak; possibly to show he was a man in the know – rather than it being done by a revenge seeking Darth Cheney.
Corn went on three years later to write a book on the matter with Michael Isikoff, wherein Armitage was acknowledged as Novak’s “primary source” for Valerie Plame’s identity and her marital connection to former ambassador and ever-bearing fabulist Joe Wilson.
I haven’t read the Corn/Isikoff book, but I am sure that in it Corn was direct and profuse in his apologies for having misrepresented the motivations and suspected identities of those involved in the Plame story [ titled “A White House Smear”] , and has gone on record as retracting his accusatory and vastly misleading column.
Yeah, I think I am sure. After all, history has shown that you can trust the journalistic integrity and fair mindedness of David Corn.
Something of interest in that area appeared to have lingered … http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/03/AR2010120306298.html
There does seem to be a pattern here.
A part of a video or audio tape involving a figure on the Right is leaked (never on the Left–thus, for instance, Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC has said that that network will not air the recently discovered 2008 tape of Obama saying that he is in favor of redistribution of wealth, “because they cannot “authenticate it””–whatever that means), and the MSM looks no further and immediately assumes it to be true, declares it to be an extremely revealing, monumental campaign or career killing gaffe and runs with it, with breathless 24/7 coverage. And it is only later that we find out that the tape has been edited/doctored or that when the full statement and the context of the quote is looked at, what had been reported as this monumental gaffe is much less that it had been touted to be by the MSM.
But by then, of course, the damage has been done, the impression made and set, and any later retractions or modifications of the story by the MSM–usually reported with far less prominence than the initial story, if at all–can hardly overcome the initial impression that was deliberately created and hyped.
To me, the equivalent of the sleazy lawyer’s trick of asking what he knows to be an extremely prejudicial (and forbidden) question of a witness in front of the jury, knowing that, although the judge will rule the question out of bounds and will instruction the jury to “disregard it,” the jury cannot so easily just wipe this question out of its minds and totally disregard it.
I’m probably at least as old as you are, Neo.:-) I recognized it at a glance.
Neo…
Every president since FDR had some recording device running…
LBJs tapes are now of public record.
RMN’s tapes are the first to bring down a president.
He also had the most extensive system… which picked up on LBJ’s.
I didn’t know who she was. 🙂
Let me be the one to ask the dumb question: Based on what we’ve already heard, what could Romney have said in those missing couple of minutes that would make this any better for him? Unless there’s something in the missing tape along the lines of “sorry guys, that was the beer talking” I think its still bad for Mitt.
In any case I don’t think conservatives will have much luck convincing people the tape doesn’t say what the tape says. Best to just move on.
Baltimoron: I have no idea what he could say that would change things, except to give a slightly fuller explanation that might introduce the idea of degree–for example, something to counter the implication that he means that ALL 47% are slackers. Or something like that.
The leaked “47%” tape is not going to hurt the R&R campaign. Romney is using it as a means to discuss the real two Americas, to borrow a phrase from Pretty Boy Edwards. So lets talk about those who favor centralized command and control, and those who believe in individual initiative and state and local control.
blert: yes, I know, but it was my impression (and correct me if I’m wrong) that they didn’t have tapes running all the time. They could turn them off if they wanted. Nixon’s seem to have run all the time. Strange, if that was the case. He says that in the link I provided in my comment above.
A commenter at Ace’s adds:
Nature’s first green is gold
And you and I see it
To wit, that first bold gold
Wrests from death its target
We’re made to know splendor
In the mucking green grass
Our live all together,
Outshines we think the past.
We ask, Is the life done
Where curtains bleakly hung
Shield eyes but not the song
From soul that’s just begun?
There’s another interesting point about that video: the view framed in the two segments does not change, from one side of the break to the other: it’s exactly the same.
See it for yourself – and note the technical discussion in the comments: http://not-yet-europe.com/2012/09/19/romney-tape-gap-not-recording-error/
Now, the only way to restart a camera that is concealed under a dinner napkin is to move it. What are the odds it was replaced in exactly the same orientation on the table, all surreptitiously?
The only logical explanation is that it was simply spliced.
The other interesting point: the break occurs Right After Mitt said that bit about the 47%. In fact, it cuts off the end of that sentence. The second segment? he’s talking about China.
What are the odds? I want to know what they spliced out.
I have read a couple msm headlines that seemed to play the issue straight (it was reported but not spun to make Romney look bad…)… thats said, yeah. For the most part it is just that bias thing.