Major Fail for Jake Tapper

As regular readers know, I've become rather fond of Jake Tapper. For an MSM guy, he's really been trying to be more responsible in his journalism and to break the he said/she said model of reporting. So it was enormously disappointing to see him deliver this ridiculous post today on his ABC blog.

Three days after he decried the lack of civility in American politics, President Obama is quoted in a new book about his presidency referring to the Tea Party movement using a derogatory term with sexual connotations.

In Jonathan Alter’s “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” President Obama is quoted in an interview saying that the unanimous vote of House Republicans vote against the stimulus bills “set the tenor for the whole year ... That helped to create the tea-baggers and empowered that whole wing of the Republican Party to where it now controls the agenda for the Republicans.”

Tea Party activists loath the term “tea baggers,” which has emerged in liberal media outlets and elsewhere as a method of mocking the activists and their concerns.

As Jake notes in a weasel-worded update, "some liberal bloggers" pointed out he was missing the key context that the teabaggers named themselves and apparently thinks because some anchors on competing stations used it to mock the tea party people, that excuses his failure to put the President's quote in context. He always fails to mention what relevance other commentators actions have on a single remark made by Obama.

John Cole has more and also reminds Mr. Tapper that Obama's statement was true.

Even more offensive is that lost in the attempt to manufacture a gotcha moment (I’m sure this accusation of Obama’s incivility will fly up memeorandum and generate lots of traffic, so “Mission Accomplished!” with that), it is lost that what Obama said is absolutely correct and the GOP is the source of a lot of the actual poisonous rhetoric in our current political climate. It WAS the Republican behavior that set the tenor for everything this year. You’d think that observation would be important.

Yeah you would think that, if you weren't just looking for a "clever" way to slam Obama. Further as Josh notes, teabaggers was the standard group ID in the beginning. However once the teabaggers realized how stupid the name was and decided to take offense at being called what they named themselves, many of us began to refer to them as tea partiers. While it's true some on the left still use the term in a derogatory fashion, I seriously doubt President Obama used it mockingly then or has even used the term since that interview.

In any event, Tapper's disappointing excuse to take a dig at our President is his post was simply dishonest. The genesis of the term was entirely relevant to the context and Jake offers no evidence that Obama used it in a mocking tone at the time. It's a major failure to inform and a transparent attempt to tar the President's integrity. Sadly it provides more evidence that the White House Press Corps is simply, if subtly, punishing the President for taking away their keys as gatekeepers to the White House. Sadly, lame hit pieces like Tapper's will only hasten their irrelevance and lose any support they might have among lefties like me.

[More posts daily at The Detroit News]