On Good Morning America, Diane Sawyer took a pair of soundbites, uttered nearly a week apart, to make it appear that Rush Limbaugh’s animosity towards Barack Obama is based upon race. In doing so, she took them out of context – and ignored words that made it clear that ideology, not ethnicity, were at the heart of his opposition to Obama.

On Monday morning, ABC’s “Good Morning America” gave Limbaugh’s “I hope he fails” comment a racial slant by editing it in a deliberately misleading way. In an interview with Sen. John McCain on Monday, anchor Diane Sawyer described Limbaugh’s “I hope he fails” comment as “another big issue in the news.”

She then tossed to a sound bite comprised of two separate comments made five days apart, which ABC joined together. The edited comment made it sound like Limbaugh wants Obama to fail because he’s black.

Here’s the ABC version of Limbaugh’s comment:

Limbaugh: “I don’t need 400 words. I need four. I hope he fails.”
[Edit]
“We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, because his father was black, because this is the first black president, we’ve got to accept this.”

Looks damning – until one notes that the entire monologue from which the first snippet was pulled dealt with the policy implications of the Obamist platform, and why he views it as bad for America. Indeed, the words which followed indicated that “ideas and policies are what count for me, not his skin color, not his past, not whatever ties he doesn't have to being down with the struggle, all of that's irrelevant to me.” That certainly undercuts the racial argument raised by the creative editing job – which is why those words were left on the cutting room floor.