Via the Washington Free Beacon, two flavors of stupid. Flavor one: Chuck Todd, the guy she’s talking to here, actually did air the redistribution audio this morning — grudgingly, with disdain for Drudge for posting it, natch. Flavor two: As far as I know, no one, including the White House, has disputed that the voice on the audio is Obama’s or claimed that the clip’s been surreptitiously edited to change his meaning. On the contrary, both Jay Carney and campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt confirmed that it is indeed The One speaking. They’ve barely even tried to spin it; their argument is simply that O’s point had to do with making city government run more efficiently and that the redistribution stuff was a footnote. It’s perfectly fine and appropriate for NBC to have called the White House and the campaign before airing it to see if there was another side to the story, but once there wasn’t, what was the hold-up? Are MSNBC’s standards of what constitutes a “fair attack” on Obama now actually higher than … Obama’s?

Oh, by the way: Why is Jay Carney commenting on this in the first place? The audio was recorded 10 years before Obama was elected president. It’s a campaign football, not a matter for the executive branch. Why is he flacking for candidate Obama instead of simply deferring these questions to LaBolt?