Making it up: What Obama didn't say

Obama says he would turn his back on genocide

That's McBride's headline on a blog item, which she supports by using only one paragraph of a wire story:

SUNAPEE, N.H. (AP) -- Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn't a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

She doesn't link to the article so anyone can read it, but commenter "John Foust" does. We'll let him handle it:

Here's a link to the original article. If we read the very next two sentences in the article, they say: ' "Well, look, if that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven't done," Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press. "We would be deploying unilaterally and occupying the Sudan, which we haven't done. Those of us who care about Darfur don't think it would be a good idea," he said.'

He continues later: "When you have civil conflict like this, military efforts and protective forces can play an important role, especially if they're under an international mandate as opposed to simply a U.S. mandate. But you can't solve the underlying problem at the end of a barrel of a gun," he said. "There's got to be a deliberate and constant diplomatic effort to get the various factions to recognize that they are better off arriving at a peaceful resolution of their conflicts."

McBride must rue the day she finally decided to allow comments. In another post on Iraq, Foust and Jay Bullock deconstruct her claim that those hated liberals have flip-flopped on Al Qaeda.

UPDATE: Bullock explains McBride Math on his folkbum blog.