Liberals on "You Didn't Build That" Controversy: 'The President Didn't Say the Thing He Said'

Geniuses. From the dumbasses at Talking Points Memo:

Friday evening, it was a paragraph in President Obama’s speech at Roanoke Fire Station #1 in Virginia. By Tuesday, it was a full-fledged fundraising line for the Romney campaign.

But that wasn’t because the Romney campaign’s opposition research shop immediately seized on the president’s remarks. In fact, it would be three-and-a-half days before the Romney campaign itself made any mention of them. In the interim, what transpired was a textbook case of how a distortion can emerge from right-wing online media, get laundered by Fox News, and go mainstream as a major line of attack by the Republican nominee for President.

The Obama speech that started it all was on Friday evening, after the political press had shifted into weekend mode. Referring to large-scale infrastructure investments like bridges and highways and the Internet, Obama recycled a line he has used often on the stump but with a slight variation: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

The next day was panning out as a slow-news Saturday for Jazz Shaw, who carries the title of weekend editor at the conservative Hot Air site. But then he got a tip from a reader, he later told TPM, pointing to the line in Obama’s speech. “Huzzah,” Shaw tweeted at 1:29 p.m. ET. “Just finally found something else to write about,” Shaw tweeted again a few minutes later. At 4:01 p.m. ET Shaw published his post highlighting what he called the “gem” of the president’s quote.

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