On the March 24 edition of NBC's Today, NBC News correspondent John Yang claimed that "[o]n Friday, [former President] Bill Clinton made comments that some interpreted as questioning [Sen. Barack] Obama's patriotism." Yang then played a portion of Clinton's March 21 statement at a VFW hall in North Carolina in which Clinton asserted, “And I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who love this country and were devoted to the interest of this country.” But Yang left out the rest of the sentence (in bold): “I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who love this country, and were devoted to the interest of this country, and people could actually ask themselves, who's right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics.” Yang also failed to provide the Clinton campaign's explanation of the quote, in which it denied “questioning any candidate's patriotism.”

In a March 21 post on the Fact Hub page of Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign website, Bill Clinton's spokesman, Matt McKenna, said of the comments: “Actually, as is indicated by the quote itself, President Clinton was talking about the need to talk about issues, rather than falsely questioning any candidate's patriotism.”

A March 23 article by Jeff Zeleny of The New York Times similarly cropped the quote, asserting that Clinton “said 'it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country.' ” The article said that Sen. Clinton's communications director, Howard Wolfson, “said the remarks by Mr. Clinton had nothing to do with Mr. Obama and were merely meant to underscore the need to keep the presidential race focused on issues.”

Previously, Media Matters for America noted that, after airing Bill Clinton's full quote on the March 21 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, host Chris Matthews asserted: “There's only one way to read that. He's saying that if you pick these two people you get two people who love their country. If you don't, you don't get two people who love their country.” Media Matters noted that in fact several others have offered a different “way to read that,” including syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, who wrote in a post on National Review Online's blog The Corner that she “was present” when Clinton made the remarks and said: “In no way did I interpret Clinton's remarks as questioning Obama's patriotism. Clinton was making the case for his wife's electability against McCain, who last time I checked is the presumptive Republican nominee and her challenger should she win the Democratic nomination.”

In his March 21 comments, Clinton said:

John McCain is an honorable man, and as all of you know, he has paid the highest price you can pay for the United States short of giving your life. And he and Hillary are friends. They like and respect each other. They have big disagreements on foreign policy and economic policy. They have taken reluctant Republican senators all over the world to prove that global warming is real but there is a way to deal with it that grows the economy and doesn't shrink it. And we now have a bipartisan majority in the Senate to do something about this.

That's the kind of leadership this country needs. And I think it'd be a great thing if we had an election where you had two people who love this country and were devoted to the interests of the country, and people could actually ask themselves, who's right on these issues, instead of all this other stuff that always seems to intrude itself on our politics.

From the March 24 edition of NBC's Today:

YANG: On Friday, Bill Clinton made comments that some interpreted as questioning Obama's patriotism.

CLINTON [video clip]: And I think it would be a great thing if we had an election where you had two people who love this country and were devoted to the interest of the country.

YANG: That didn't sit well with Obama adviser General Merrill McPeak, who likened Bill Clinton to a 1950s anti-communist demagogue.

McPEAK [video clip]: It sounds more like [Sen. Joseph] McCarthy. You know, I grew up -- I was going to college when Joe McCarthy was accusing good Americans of being traitors, so I've had enough of that.

YANG: As this intra-party civil war rages on, a new poll suggests the bitterness is spreading to the voters.

From the March 23 article in The New York Times:

As Senator Barack Obama folded his arms and looked on, a retired Air Force general who is one of his leading military advisers forcefully defended Mr. Obama's patriotism Saturday and accused former President Bill Clinton of trying to use “divisive attacks” to promote his wife's candidacy.

Mr. Clinton, in a speech to voters on Friday in North Carolina, said “it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country.”