We Connive, You Decide

Here we go again. How many times does this have to happen before our collective response is, “…yawn…”?

At yesterday’s Labor Day presidential event, Teamsters President James Hoffa Jr. spoke about the need to vote Republicans out of office in 2012. Of course, Fox News had a completely different take on what Hoffa “meant” through selective editing.

As Media Matters reports, Fox edited video of Hoffa’s money quote to suggest, actually to just flat out lie and say that he was urging violence against Tea Party activists.

...fuller context included in other Fox segments makes clear that Hoffa wasn't calling for violence but was actually urging the crowd to vote out Republican members of Congress. During the segment that the bloggers have latched onto, Fox edited out the bolded portion of Hoffa's comments:

HOFFA: Everybody here's got to vote. If we go back and keep the eye on the prize, let's take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong! Thank you very much!

Everyone jumped on the bandwagon including Andrew “ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, Planned Parenthood” Breitbart, and hacky tweets from Dana Loesch demanded that President Obama condemn Hoffa’s remarks and “sanctioning violence against fellow Americans” if he doesn’t. This after the fact that it was Fox’s Ed Henry who initially reported correctly on their own network that Hoffa as referring to voting Republicans out, and is on record with his tweet just 20 minutes after his report. Why tweet? Because he KNEW it was going to be taken out of context.

Now the pushback of course will be, or already has been that the left took Sarah Palin's "Don't retreat, RELOAD!" comment out of context as well. But I'm willing to wager that if you head over to the Teamsters' website, or any site associated with James Hoffa, you're not going to find a map with crosshairs targeting Republican districts. Just another day at Fox News.

We connive, you decide.