The Tweet That Got Away: Obama Calls Kanye West a “Jackass”

In the rush to tweet the news by leading networks, journalists can sometimes find that technology moves a bit faster than editors. It appears that President Barack Obama made an off-the-record comment that called Kanye West a “Jackass.” It ran on a twitter from ABC’s Terry Moran and appears to have led to a ballistic response by the White House. Now, there is the video below of the President’s unguarded moment.

Here is the tweet:
ABC’s TerryMoran: “Pres. Obama just called Kanye a “jackass” for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won..”

Here is the video of the incident:

ABC released the following statement:

“In the process of reporting on remarks by President Obama that were made during a CNBC interview, ABC News employees prematurely tweeted a portion of those remarks that turned out to be from an off-the-record portion of the interview. This was done before our editorial process had been completed. That was wrong. We apologize to the White House and CNBC and are taking steps to ensure that it will not happen again.”

Of course, Lyndon Johnson could use Jackass as a verb, noun, and adverb.

The use of “Jackass”, as I have previously noted, is something of a slight to the good people who live in Jackass, Arizona. The White House may want to issue a statement that the President that actually suggesting that West acts like a citizen of the Arizona community, though that might not play well in the next campaign.

My only complaint about this comment was not its obvious accuracy, but the fact that it was made off-the-record.

For the audio, click here.
For the story, click here.