Byron York notes that the White House is making deliberate efforts to handle yesterday’s incident better than the Fort Hood shootings. After Fort Hood, the president was disengaged and dismissive of the possibility that the shooting were an act of terrorism. After Flight 253, the White House has been working the press to emphasize that the president (who is vacationing in Hawaii) is fully briefed.
There’s not much for the president to do in relation to this incident (yet, anyway), so I guess there’s no problem with the White House making positive press coverage its top priority. But John Hinderaker noticed something odd. Here’s the AP, reporting what the White House told the press:
President Barack Obama’s Christmas Day began with a briefing about a botched attack on an airliner in Detriot and ended with a visit to a dining hall for members of the military. . . Obama’s military aide told the president about an incident aboard a plane as it was landing in Detroit just after 9 a.m. here. The president phoned his homeland security adviser and the chief of staff to the National Security Council for a briefing.
(Emphasis mine.)
Okay, so the president was briefed at 9 am (Alaska-Hawaii standard time). The plane landed at 12:01 pm Eastern time, which is 7:01 am in Hawaii. So the president wasn’t briefed until two hours after the plane landed. So maybe it wasn’t quite the priority the White House is now making it out to be.
Now, let’s return to the sentence from the AP story. There are two ways to read it. One parse says the briefing took place as the plane was landing. This is the grammatically correct reading, but it doesn’t match the facts. The other parse, which makes “just after 9 a.m. here” into a dangling participle, says the incident happened as the plane was landing, and the briefing happened just after 9 a.m. This parse has the advantage of matching the facts.
So is this bad grammar from the AP, or did they intend the first parse? If it’s the latter, that probably means that the White House lied in an effort to make the president look better. There’s no way to know. I would note that AP writers write sentences for a living, and politicians lie for a living. On the other hand, the AP writer did misspell Detroit.
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