I’m going to start with the conclusion:
The public image of Obama as an idealistic, post-race, post-partisan, well-spoken and honest young man with the wisdom and courage befitting a great national leader is a confection spun by a willing conspiracy of Obama, his publicist (David Axelrod) and most of the senior editors, producers and reporters of the national media.
Perhaps that is why the National Journal’s respected correspondent Stuart Taylor wrote, “The media can no longer be trusted to provide accurate and fair campaign reporting and analysis.”
That conspiracy not only has Photoshopped out all of Obama’s imperfections (and dirtied up his opponent McCain’s image) but also has put most of his questionable history down the memory hole.
It’s the conclusion of Tony Blankley’s latest on RCP, “The Man Who Never Was”, an allusion to the WWII-espionage classic (and true story) in which British intelligence sent dropped a corpse wtih a completely fictional identity and a stack of faked war plans ashore in occupied France to deceive the Germans.
The media must think we’re the Germans:
They consciously have ignored whole years of his life and have shown a lack of curiosity about such gaps, which bespeaks a lack of journalistic instinct.
Thus, the public image of Obama is of a “man who never was.”
…The mainstream media ruthlessly and endlessly repeat any McCain gaffes while ignoring Obama gaffes. You have to go to weird little Web sites to see all the stammering and stuttering that Obama needs before getting out a sentence fragment or two. But all you see on the networks is an eventually clear sentence from Obama. You don’t see Obama’s ludicrous gaffe that Iran is a tiny country and no threat to us. Nor his 57 American states gaffe. Nor his forgetting, if he ever knew, that Russia has a veto in the U.N. Nor his whining and puerile “come on” when he is being challenged. This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels’ disciples, not Cronkite’s.
And it’s not just building a fictional person; they’re trying to tear down a real one:
More appalling, a skit on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” last weekend suggested that Gov. Palin’s husband had sex with his own daughters. That show was written with the assistance of Al Franken, Democratic Party candidate in Minnesota for the U.S. Senate. Talk about incest.
Where have we seen that before?
And of course, the real deception:
But worse than all the unfair and distorted reporting and image projecting are the shocking gaps in Obama’s life that are not reported at all. The major media simply have not reported on Obama’s two years at New York’s Columbia University, where, among other things, he lived a mere quarter-mile from former terrorist Bill Ayers. Later, they both ended up as neighbors and associates in Chicago. Obama denies more than a passing relationship with Ayers. Should the media be curious? In only two weeks, the media have focused on all the colleges Gov. Palin has attended, her husband’s driving habits 20 years ago, and the close criticism of the political opponents Gov. Palin had when she was mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.
But in two years, they haven’t bothered to see how close Obama was with the terrorist Ayers.
Go read the whole thing.
And ask your friendly local media “what’s the weather like in that bag, there?”
I’ll get a jump on you right here, Peev. I AM in the bag for Mac and Sarah. Totally. I will do whatever I honestly can to help them win. I’ll use my tiny little bully pulpit to pull for them with everything I’ve got. Dang skippy.
I’ve never said that I, or this blog or my show, were anything but biased and pushed a point of view.
So yes, I DO have nine fingers pointing back at me and the kettle is black and whatever other of your tiny bag of cliches you pull from over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again that you were going to say about that.
There. You can get a little more work done now.
Confession is good for the soul, Mitch.
I did watch the SNL sketch. It wasn’t an attack on the Palins, actually — it was one (and a pretty funny one, IMHO) on MSM (NYTimes) reporters; folks so ignorant and East Coast provincial that they’d confidently proclaim that a snowmobile was a baptizing machine or a Nordic track, or that a shotgun was an assault rifle, or that a reporter’s off-the-cuff bigoted speculation –“You know he’s doing those daughters. I mean, come on. It’s Alaska” — of Todd Palin having sex with his daughters were worth investigating. Repeatedly. Reminded me of the Vicky Iseman nonstory, and I don’t think that was accidental.
Good taste? Nah. But Blankley’s missing the point of the sketch that he’s attacking: the East Coast MSM types don’t have a clue about folks who aren’t part of their circle.
I can’t imagine that either he or you disagree with that. Am I wrong?
One of the reporters in the sketch is obsessed with the possibility of being attacked by a polar bear; in the epilogue he — the guy who wins the award for the investigative story on the unproven/undisproven Palin incest story — is killed by a snowmobile driven by a polar bear. Kind of heavy-handed poetic justice, but . . .
It was a shot at the MSM and their buying any nonsense about folks who don’t come from Around There; it’s a safe bet, for that reason alone, that Al Franken had nothing to do with that sketch.
There. You can get a little more work done now.
Peev’s employer and company IT department thank you!
And yet, Peev has failed to grasp any of those points for three years or more. All that spittle-flecked rage he’s sputtered endlessly here, fulminating against a blog that’s not his. It’s been a perplexing and sad window into Web-based psychosis.
Seriously, some people just aren’t mentally equipped to handle the Internet. Peev is “some people.”
In May, when Obama was in the thick of the primary race against a feminist opponent, He dismissively calls a female reporter ‘sweetie’, on camera:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Juy9NwI8_i0
McCain has been in the public eye since the late 60’s. He’s been in congress for over a quarter of a century and has made a strong run for the presidency once before this year. There is very little new that the press can tell us about McCain. We may not like what we see, but we know who this man is.
Yet despite having a thin political resume the press has never seriously questioned Obama’s credentials or his background.
Obama’s claim that he was raised by a single mother on food stamps is deceptive. Obama was raised primarily by his liberal, privileged white grandparents while his mother attended grad school.
His randparents sent Obama to an exclusive private prep school on Oahu. He did not, as far as I’ve been able to determine, so much as set foot on the United States mainland until he was adult. In the US he attended white, privileged colleges in urban settings. There is nothing in his resume that suggests a connection with typical working class or black values; indeed the early suspicion among blacks that he “wasn’t really one of them” seemed only to vanish when the Jeremiah Wright scandal broke, when they closed ranks around him in a typical racial fashion.
Obama’s work as community organizer in Chicago was fruitless — accept for the fact that he was able to register 200,000 new voters. This drew the attention of the Chicago/Illinois political machine.
He won his first political office by default after getting his opponent removed from the ballot. He won his senate seat against an out-of-state opponent who had been placed on the ballot at the last minute. He was an early opponent of the Iraq War when his opinion had no political consequences.
The prees reporting on Obama’s past has been negligent. We know all about McCain’s divorce from his first wife, about his current wife’s family business, and we know all about Whitewater and the Rose Law firm, but there has been virtually no big-time media coverage of contemporary events in Obama’s biography — even though he has written a pair of autobiographies.
When Hillary made her famous remark that Obama wasn’t a muslim ‘As far as I know’, I don’t think that her words were meant to be a strike against Obama, but against the press. It was supposed to be their job to do elementary, basic research on a candidate, not hers. By being in the tank for O they had pushed her into the position of being the bad guy.
“dropped a corpse wtih a completely fictional identity and a stack of faked war plans ashore in occupied France to deceive the Germans.”
Actually it was Spain.
For what it’s worth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
Actually it was Spain.
Which is like france with cheaper wine and dustier streets.
No, you’re right.
The media can no longer be trusted to provide accurate and fair campaign reporting and analysis.”
Yes, their soft-balling for Bush on the run up to the Iraq War, and for two years afterward proved that beyond ALL doubt, but then again, that includes you.
Wow, a mere quarter mile from Bill Ayers? In Manhattan??? Shocking. Think Angryclown musta lived within a quarter mile from Bill Ayers then, like about 250,000 other people. Bet that’s the guy I stole a cab from that time.
Hey, here’s a hot tip. During the Viet Nam war, no American lived closer to Ho Chi Minh than John McCain. Makes you wonder.
“Yes, their soft-balling for Bush on the run up to the Iraq War, and for two years afterward”
Unlike now, when their reporting on the Iraq War is perfectly accurate . . . because pev agrees with it!
Seriously, if you believe that the NYT was in the tank for the Iraq War & the Bush administration in 2002, why in the Hell should you believe them now?