As a conservative, it's somewhat amusing, and a pleasant change, to watch Hillary and Obama and their respective media apparatus go at one another with all the lies, distortions, deceptions and acrimony they usually reserve for... us.

(And later, of course, the negative press and words will counted to show that the media was critical of Hillary and/or Obama, and thus prove the press is objective, not partisan.)

The New York Times (currently Obama territory) recently spun Hillary's words in a classic New-York-Timesy fashion -- where the author inserts his own interpretation of the target's thoughts and motives between adjacent words of an "enemy" politician's sentence:

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Mrs. Clinton, who was locked in a running exchange with Senator Barack Obama, a rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, over the meaning of the legacies of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., tried to make a point about presidential leadership.

“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Mrs. Clinton said in trying to make the case that her experience should mean more to voters than the uplifting words of Mr. Obama. “It took a president to get it done.”

(The reader can't be trusted to decide such things for him or herself, so the author gives us unsubtle hints about how we should understand the politician. Poor Hillary, she's had to endure a few days' worth of the same treatment Bush has gotten, day in and day out, since well before he took office. Mean, isn't it?)

Media Matters -- a Soros operation (and thus, backing Hillary) quickly struck back, charging that the Times had (by some amazing co-incidence!) omitted a crucial part of the sentence which changed the tone:

I would, and I would point to the fact that that Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality.

Looking at this quote, the sense is that Hillary was talking about getting a bill through Congress, not MLK's "dream" of a society with less racial discrimination.

Of course, they're both right. The Times DID repeatedly omit crucial words in a manner which increased the offensiveness of Hillary's statements.

But, on the other hand, that also was the general jist of what Hillary was saying, contrary to Media Matter's deceptive harrumphing. The preceding context (which Media Matters also helpfully omitted) was, in fact, a question about "Barack Obama’s dismissal of her claim that he represents 'false hope'". In that context, her answer clearly implies seasoned political players are required to effect real change -- that the speeches and the marches aren't as important, and are just "false hope" in comparison. She's drawing a parallel between the "false hope" of Obama's speeches, and that false hope that MLK's marches would have been (in her narrative) if LBJ hadn't caught wind of the times and finally told his fellow Democrats to stop opposing civil rights for blacks.

These groups -- who spin and mislead while pretending to objective allies of the American public -- deserve each other. Too bad they'll be unleashed against the rest of us once the primaries are over.

Oh well, it's fun to watch while it lasts.