March 23rd, 2010 was a Tuesday. It was also the day that this supposedly happened in the White House:
[Obama] immediately presented Mr. Netanyahu with a list of 13 demands designed both to the end the feud with his administration and to build Palestinian confidence ahead of the resumption of peace talks. Key among those demands was a previously-made call to halt all new settlement construction in east Jerusalem.
When the Israeli prime minister stalled, Mr Obama rose from his seat declaring: “I’m going to the residential wing to have dinner with Michelle and the girls.”
As he left, Mr Netanyahu was told to consider the error of his ways. “I’m still around,” Mr Obama is quoted by Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper as having said. “Let me know if there is anything new.”
It’s also the day that this actually did happen:
First lady Michelle Obama took daughters Malia, 11, and Sasha, 8, mother Marian Robinson and some pals to New York for a spring break trip where they hit Broadway shows, toured the Empire State Building and visited Harlem and Brooklyn…
…• Tuesday. Harlem was a focus. The Obama group toured the Studio Theater and the famous Apollo Theater. Mrs. Obama and friends dine at Aquavit, owned by Marcus Samuelsson, the guest chef at White House first state dinner for the Prime Minister of India. She ordered the tasting menu.
You can see that Michelle, Malia, and Sasha also spent Wednesday the 24th in the city, visiting the Sesame Street studios and the Brooklyn Bridge Park, and stopping for pizza and ice cream.
So, you know, it wasn’t actually possible that President Obama told Netanyahu to cool his heels and consider the errors of his ways while he had dinner with his family.
Why?
Because he was in the White House in Washington DC and his family was in New York City having dinner at Aquavit.
So, probably, Alexander Bolton could have been a little more definitive about this incident in his piece in The Hill:
The [Obama-Netanyahu] relationship hit a low point in March of 2010, when Obama interrupted negotiations and left the Israeli leader cooling his heels in a White House waiting room while he had dinner with the first lady, according to news reports at the time.
The White House later disputed those reports by asserting Michelle Obama was in New York that evening.
The alleged snub was seen as payback for Netanyahu’s approval of a controversial Jewish construction project in East Jerusalem.
How does a relationship reach a low point based on erroneous “news reports at the time”? Didn’t the White House do more than “dispute” those reports? Didn’t they completely disprove them?
And how about this next bit from Bolton?
Netanyahu poked Obama earlier this week, when he declared just before the Israeli elections that he no longer supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a goal that has long served as the basis of American-brokered peace talks.
Shall we list the ways in which “poked” is the wrong verb here?
[Cross-posted at Progress Pond]
Another MSU School of Journalism graduate.
Guess the tabloids and Faux didn’t have any openings.
“Poked Obama”? For the love of all that’s holy, IT’S NOT ALWAYS ABOUT US!!!!
Isn’t The Hill just Drudgico before Drudgico came along? Or am I getting that confused with Roll Call?
Thought The Hill was better than that — but I too get them all confused. Maybe it’s okay on major current happenings on the Hill — but anything goes for slow news days’ fillers.
Did I miss an announcement about Progress Pond?
When the story of the media in the Obama administration is written, they will need a term for which I propose “Britwashing”, to describe how you run a false story about Obama in The Telegraph first to launder it before sending it back to the US conservative noise machine.
Don’t you remember the 90s and how the media treated Bill Clinton with similar Britwashing methods? Only with Obama, not nearly as often and not remotely with as much traction in the MSM.
O has had it easy in comparison, during his presidency and in both campaigns. Rather mild media treatment. But 15-20 yrs ago, the Clintons were always fair game for media distortions and outright lies. Al Gore was treated equally dishonestly.
Wake me when one of these tiny lies about O gets picked up and run with for weeks and months in scandalmongering fashion. Not much of a media-driven faux scandal rap sheet to report wrt the Big O. The worst one I can think of during his 6 years is Ben Ghazi — and as we know that fell on Hillary’s shoulders of course.
In the ’90s, didn’t they first mostly appear in that Pittsburgh rag and Drudge?
I had in mind that scandalmongering Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the London Telegraph.
But did he lead on those reports or was he picking them up from the other two leaders?
Whether he originated any of the stories or did his own peculiar investigation and added to the original bogus story, I wouldn’t know, but it doesn’t matter if he was playing a prominent role in keeping the scandalmongering alive. And by most objective accounts, he played an important role in fanning the media flames.
I’m sure the GOP has continued to use the laundry services of the NYTimes and WaPo.
Uh its possible that’s exactly what happened. A reason was offerred that was transparently false but got the point across and deprived Netanyahoo of doing any bitching about it. Then it was just denied because its just hardball diplomacy and not that unusual.
Thank you. My sentiments exactly. Followed by another dimension: It was a veiled insult that Obama lied to him, one that would soon come out either through real reporting or White House news managing.
Could be…diplomacy is almost entirely the art of lying, you know.
AG
So, did anyone besides someone from the EU, Obama, and Putin publicly report they called and congratulated Bibi?
If the writers sit inside the Beltway, the likelihood of this sort of drivel increases.
If the writers aspire to being inside-the-Beltway cocktail-party-weinie-gnoshers, the likelihood of this sort of drivel increases exponentially.
It’s not that sad because of the limits of The Hill’s audience. Wasn’t The Hill always sort of a DeeCee gossip sheet for the Village?
This shows the extent to which the Village wanted very much to become the GOP Village again. The Congressional election gave them their excuse.