Jack Kelly Sunday

This week, Post-Gazette columnist Jack Kelly continued his commentary on the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the world's reaction to it.

As usual, he's laughingly wrong as he spins, distorts and misinforms you, his reading public.

But let's get the big stuff out of the way.  This is about President Obama's non-attendance at this rally:

Something the White House has already addressed:

The White House, facing a storm of criticism for President Obama’s absence from Sunday’s peace march in Paris, said Monday that his team erred in failing to dispatch a high-ranking American official to join the show of solidarity against terrorism. But French officials quickly rejected the idea that Mr. Obama had snubbed the event.

Huh.  Well there's something Jack didn't tell you.  Nor did he tell you this:

President François Hollande of France let it be known on Monday that he was not among those offended.

Huh. But Jack's a partisan ideologue who's not particularly interested in presenting you with enough nuance for you to make your own decisions. He IS interested in getting you just enough nuance for you to simply agree with him. And that's all.

So his omissions, while not at all journalisticly acceptable, are certainly understandable.

So let's move on.

Jack's running commentary is reflected in the title of the column: "Obama is weak against terror."

Can someone please leave a copy of this column by P-G columnist Jack Kelly at Jack's desk on Monday?  It's the one where Jack calls the killing of Osama bin Laden the "greatest success of Barack Obama's presidency."

Osama bin Laden.  9/11.  Yea, that guy.  And they got him on Obama's watch.  So y'know, he's OBVIOUSLY weak on terror.

I do have to reiterate, though, that while Jack does praise (if only inadvertently) Obama for the killing of bin Laden, he of course gets the part about waterboarding and torture wrong.  But hey, what's a good partisan smear if it can't ignore reality every now and then??

Let's fill in some of the omissions of information that Jack Kelly (I suppose) hopes you didn't notice.

Like this one:

He’s “the only Western leader who has refused to call this attack Islamic terrorism,” noted Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen, though, when pressed, the president’s spokesman talked of “violent extremism in which individuals invoke the name of Islam.”

Interesting that Jack would write this when only last week he wrote:

The Obama administration won’t seriously confront Islamist terror. Nor will the president of France, the chancellor of Germany, the prime minister of Britain. One world leader is.

More despicable than their unwillingness to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons was the news media’s virtual blackout of the remarkable speech Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi made at al-Azar University in Cairo on New Year’s Eve.

Is it just me or is Jack saying that only Egypt is seriously confronting Islamist terror?  And Egypt is such a bastion of journalistic freedom, isn't it?  I mean since that's what we're discussing here, right?  The freedom of Charlie Hebdo to publish whatever satirical cartoons it wants to, right?  From the Guardian:

The Egyptian regime's lack of justice was illustrated by the jailing of three innocent Al-Jazeera journalists this week.

But there are other cases deserving of attention too, such as that of Egyptian photojournalist Mahmoud Abou Zeid, known professionally as Shawkan.

He has been held in an Egyptian prison without charge for more than 10 months after being detained on 14 August 2013. In his most recent court appearance, last Wednesday, his detention was extended for a further 45 days.

Perhaps that's being tough on terror, to Jack.

Anyway, I don't want to skip over Jack's most glaring omission of fact in that paragraph.  The phrase, "Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen."

By that description how many of you would guess that Douglas Schoen is a Fox News contributor?  Or that Fox News includes this in its description of him:

Douglas E. Schoen has served as a pollster for President Bill Clinton. He has more than 30 years experience as a pollster and political consultant. He is also a Fox News contributor and co-host of "Fox News Insiders" Sundays on Fox News Channel and Mondays at 10:30 am ET on FoxNews.com Live.

Or that he wrote for the conservative Newsmax until at least last August.

Or that he urged Obama not to seek reelection in 2012.

So he's hardly your run of the mill "Democratic pollster" is he?  But you wouldn't know any of that by Jack's description of him, would you?

If he's willing to hide such easily found information just to make a point ("Hey, even Democrat Pollsters think Obama's weak on terror!") what else is Jack Kelly spinning?

And then there's this from his opening paragraph:

Secretary of State John Kerry was in India (where it’s been unseasonably cold), to give a speech on global warming.

Did you catch the attempt at snarky sarcasm? It's a speech about global warming in a place that's unseasonably cold.  He just couldn't help himself.

Guess what?  Take a look at this:

It's a chart showing how its been getting warmer in India.

Guess where I found that?  It's a report out of the Indian Meteorological Society talking about, you guessed it, climate change in India.  Where it's happening just like it's happening everywhere else.

Even when Jack Kelly tries to be snarky, he gets it wrong.