COKIE

I THINK ARGUMENTS of "media bias" are almost always a pointless, joyless hedge maze to enter.

HOWEVER, I CONFESS to fuming frequently at my Tivoli radio while listening to NPR this year (I live in Park Slope) whenever Cokie Roberts came on to casually, Kristen Wiig-ily undermine Obama.

SUCH IS HER RIGHT. I trust she calls them as she sees them. But as Josh Marshall suggests this morning, on the issue of BOSNIAKS, she seems to be wrong.

BEGIN QUOTED TEXT

Watching the debate I noticed that Biden referred to the Muslim population of Bosnia and Herzegovina as "Bosniaks". This is actually the correct term, though in English people often say simply Bosnian Muslims. When he said it, the first thing I though was, I wonder how many right-wingers would jump on this as a gaffe on the model of candidate George W. Bush's reference to 'Grecians.'

I don't know who else exposed their own ignorance by falling into this trap. But Cokie Roberts did.

--Josh Marshall/TPM

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WATCH BELOW as Cokie attempts to weave a false equivalency between Biden's using an actual, legitimate term and Palin's FORGETTING THE NAME OF OUR COMMANDER IN AFGHANISTAN--confusing General McKiernan with "General McClellan."

(ALSO WATCH for a great Doris Kearns Goodwin cameo. She catches Palin's error right away, but I think that's because she knew McClellan personally. Lincoln introduced them).



LOOK, I don't know the Bosniaks. Maybe Josh Marshall is wrong on this one. But I think Cokie's smirking-with-intent is obvious here, and if Marshall's intel is correct, she owes Biden an apology.

OR ELSE: I'm just lost in the hedge maze.

That is all.

UPDATE: To be fair, I guess she COULD have picked on him for not knowing that Katie's, a Delaware restaurant he mentioned, closed decades ago.