re: #239 klys

So did I with my quote there.

No, you didn’t. Obama didn’t say anything close to your quote.

I don’t think “it doesn’t” was a verbal slip.

Yet it clearly was.

Good practice in quoting is that if you do omit things, you should at least indicate that with […] where you are eliminating words.

True, it’s a good practice, which is, however, not always followed when dealing with grammar mistakes and slips of tongue, unless they change the meaning of what was said. In this instance omitting the verbal slip doesn’t change the meaning.

Also, direct has a very different meaning than great.

Sure. Of course, we don’t know exactly which version is correct at this moment.

If you have to add all the caveats before you can say that the author quoted exactly what Obama said, I would posit that …he didn’t.

Aside from the one-word difference (for the simple reason that we don’t know which word should be there), he did. And if it turns out that the author misheard the word, it would only indicate a mundane mistake, not some sort of conspiratorial twisting of words.