It wasn't big enough to warrant a CFE post here, but when the Politico wasted three pages of pixels denying that they had any pro-Obama biases - any impression of that was due to a lame McCain campaign according to them - but I tossed in a comment: Headline: POLITICO CHECKS ITSELF FOR BIAS; FINDS NONE. Someone went a little further, as Beldar reported:
It is not our impression that many reporters are rooting for Obama personally. To the contrary, most colleagues on the trail we’ve spoken with seem to find him a distant and undefined figure.
The difference seems clear: Many journalists are not merely observers but participants in the Obama phenomenon.
(Harris only here: As one who has assigned journalists to cover Obama at both Politico and The Washington Post, I have witnessed the phenomenon several times. Some reporters come back and need to go through detox, to cure their swooning over Obama’s political skill. Even VandeHei seemed to have been bitten by the bug after the Iowa caucus.)
(VandeHei only here: There is no doubt reporters are smitten with Obama’s speeches and promises to change politics. I find his speeches, when he’s on, pretty electric myself. It certainly helps his cause that reporters also seem very tired of the Clintons and their paint-by-polls approach to governing.)
All this is hardly the end of the world. Clinton is not behind principally because of media bias; Obama is not ahead principally because of media favoritism. McCain won the GOP nomination mainly through good luck and the infirmities of his opposition. But the fact that lots of reporters personally like the guy — and a few seem to have an open crush — did not hurt.
For a mostly online publication, these guys have not really caught onto that whole “the Internet will fact-check your ass” thing.
I believe the correct term for such a brazen attempt to misreport reality is "chutzpah!"
=================
ADD-ON: I don't want to make a full-blown CFE about this either, but in response to a vacuous article praising Obama's Internet fraud machine fund-raising apparatus which was followed by the same guy pasting poll data that Palin is why McCain's losing - again I ask: why are they trying to help McCain with this supposed advice? (A: They aren't!) - I posted this:
Politico has become indistinguishable from HuffPoo/DailyKos/MSNBC: factually devoid "articles" up top followed by hundreds of copypasta'ed talking points echoing the usual liberal memes - i.e. Palin sucks, McCain sucks, Obama is the Glorious Dear Leader, blah-blah-woof-woof.
The sheer audacity to praise Obama's Internet fundraising operation which has been revealed to be a means for untraceable illegal and foreign contributions to pour in to circumvent the laws shows the Goebbels-like sycophants the Politico has become to Fuhrer Obama. Just as the L.A. Times has sacrificed the last scraps of credibility to cover up the video tape of Obama toasting a Jew-bashing Palestinian terrorist, Politico no longer cares who knows it's biased as long as they get to be stenographers to the power elites of the coming Obama Reich. Pathetic.
Politico really used to be an interesting and varied outfit without glaring biases. No longer. I'd pull them off the blog roll if I'd ever bothered to put them on, but I didn't; so there!
Even though I have a pile of un-blogged items - like a comprehensive post about the jihad Obama's Brownshirts have conducted against Joe the Plumber; despite many references to the situation elsewhere - I see that the post below this one was the 80th of the month, surpassing my previous one-month tally of 79 in August 2005. With a couple days to go, the bar is going to be set quite high, methinks.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson totes up the increasingly creepy (and worrisome) accretion of convenient occurences that have paved The One's path to power:
Individually, the extra-electoral efforts are irrelevant. But in the aggregate, they start to add up. In 1996 Obama goes to court, challenges the petition signatures of mostly African-American voters, and gets all his rivals eliminated from the ballot and so de facto runs unopposed.
In 2004 sealed divorce records were strangely released destroying the chances of his chief Democratic rival Blair Hull; then in the general, lightning again struck, and Republican front-runner Jack Ryan's sealed divorce records were likewise mysteriously released—and he too crashed, in effect, leaving Obama without a serious primary or general election rival.
In this campaign, Acorn galvanizes to register voters and almost immediately runs into serial charges of voter registration fraud. Now an Obama ad runs asking Americans simply to take the day off to help get out the Obama vote: apparently American businesses, universities, and the government all are supposed to sacrifice hundreds of millions of dollars in lost collective work days to subsidize the Obama campaign in order "to change history"?
When one marries all that with the swarming of radio stations when someone like Stanley Kurtz goes on, the threats to go to court to stop ads, or the blacklisting of TV stations who dared to conduct tough interviews, the same old pattern reappears of by any means necessary. And in turn the explanation for all that?
The messianic style—the cosmic tug to "change history", or stop the seas from rising or the planet from heating, juxtaposed with the creepy faux-Greek columns, Michelle's "deign to enter" politics snippet, the fainting at rallies, the Victory Column mass address, the vero possumus presidential seal, and the 'we are the change we've been waiting for' mantra—reflects the omnipresent narcissism: the exalted ends of electing a prophet always justify the often crude and all too mortal means.
If this is considered 'right', I'd rather be wrong with McCain.
Power Line compares Obama to John Gotti as they update on Obama's Ohio governmental Brownshirts who have attempted to smear and destroy Joe the Plumber for daring to ask a simple question that the Dear Leader botched the answer.
Barack Obama reminds me a bit of John Gotti. Obama is no murderer, of course, but here is the analogy: John Gotti (before his incarceration) was a well-dressed, genial, smooth-talking guy. Not a visible threat in sight. But if you crossed him, his thugs were very quickly at your door.
Likewise with Barack Obama. He is always at pains to seem high-minded, but his tactics are anything but. If you cross him, his goons, too, are sure to retaliate, albeit in less deadly fashion than Gotti's.
The case of Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher is an object lesson in how Obama and his supporters try to destroy anyone who even inadvertently gets in their way. Once Wurzelbacher was thrust into the limelight after Obama approached him in his driveway, Democrats swung into action to try to discredit the plumber by ransacking records on file with the State of Ohio. These efforts--the ones that have come to light so far--are recounted in the Columbus Dispatch:
Authorities in Toledo and Cleveland confirmed today that workers accessed Wurzelbacher's driving record and vehicle information through state computer systems in checks uncovered by The Dispatch. ...
The Toledo Police Department announced that a records clerk improperly pulled Wurzelbacher's information on behalf of a reporter for a Toledo television station the day after the Oct. 15 presidential debate. ...
Altogether, the Dispatch identifies four separate violations of Wurzelbacher's privacy by Democrats in Ohio's state bureaucracy who improperly accessed his records, hoping to find information helpful to the Obama campaign. This is the worst one:
Inspector General Thomas P. Charles also is investigating why the director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services approved a check on Wurzelbacher through the state's child-support computer system.
Director Helen Jones-Kelley said that after a "team meeting," she OK'd the check because the department often runs inquiries to check for unpaid child support on people thrust into "the public spotlight."
Is that disgusting, or what? They actually held a "team meeting" to decide to spy on Wurzelbacher on Obama's behalf. As it happens, Wurzelbacher doesn't pay child support, but they apparently thought there was no harm in checking. The Director of the Department of Job and Family Services denies that she was trying to help Obama:
Jones-Kelley said there were no political motivations behind the check. The Democratic appointee has contributed the maximum $2,300 to the Obama campaign this year, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Democrats often purport to be concerned about privacy rights, but those claims are about as credible as their claim to be tax-cutters.
They also claim to be the party of freedom and it's true; we are all free to worship the Obamessiah.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly views Barack Obama's position on Iran as as "utterly immature" and comprised of "formulations empty of all content." Sarkozy is also said to have remarked that it would be "arrogant" for Obama, if he is elected president, to ignore allies like France and open a direct dialogue with Iran without preconditions.
As Emanuele Ottolenghi notes, Sarkozy's use of the term "arrogant" is interesting because Obama's (utterly immature) critique of U.S. foreign policy relies heavily on the notion that we have been "arrogant" in our dealings with the rest of the world. In fact, the reason Obama has advanced for engaging in talks with a series of anti-American dictatorships, not just Iran, is the need to overcome the perception that we are "arrogant."
"Arrogance" may be a useful concept for teenagers when they are explaining why they don't like certain classmates. The real lesson of Sarkozy's reported comments is how foolish it is to permit this concept to play a serious role in making foreign policy decisions.
The Messiah has his duped disciples believing that America will be less-hated with his beneficent awesomeness upon the throne, but with this and his threats to invade Pakistan - along with his and the Dems anti-trade policies - he is already making things much worse for the country than Dubya did, as wrongly maligned as his tenure was.
Going it alone, bullying allies - aren't these the flaws of Dubya's foreign policy The One was supposed to fix?
Alaskan scumbag and Senator Ted "the Internet is a series of tubes" Stevens was convicted of seven counts of public corruption yesterday and the news reports were gleeful that if he wasn't re-elected (as he shouldn't - he should've resigned ages ago) it could lead to their coveted filibuster-proof Democrat-controlled Senate.
What was surprising, though, was the mention that Colin Powell had testified as a character witness during the trial. Considering he was just touting the awesomeness of the Obamessiah last week and his learned wisdom was supposed to assuage any fears people may have that the Fuhrer-in-waiting would be bad for the country (and world), it's odd to see that he gave the same thumbs-up to a crook who a dozen civilians convicted anyway because he was a schnook.
Colin Powell made news last week with his endorsement of Barack Obama for President. The idea, I guess, is that Colin Powell is a great and objective judge of character and we should all listen to him when he says that Obama will do a great job as President. There's no evidence that he's ever done anything that would constitute evidence that he will be a competent chief executive for the country and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, you understand, this is one of those Powell-looked-into-his-soul-and-so-please-trust-his-judgment things.
WASHINGTON - One of the nation's best-known retired Army generals, Colin Powell, described Sen. Ted Stevens in court today as a "trusted individual" and a man with a "sterling" reputation.
"He was someone whose word you could rely on," said Powell, secretary of state in President Bush's first term, who self-deprecatingly described himself as someone who retired as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then "dabbled a bit in diplomacy."
The former secretary of state said he had known Stevens for 25 years, mostly in the senator's role as the top defense appropriator on a Senate defense appropriations committee. In Stevens, "I had a guy who would tell me when I was off base, he would tell me when I had no clothes on, figuratively, that is, and would tell me when I was right and go for it," Powell said. "He's a guy who, as we said in the infantry, we would take on a long patrol."
When asked outside of the courtroom after his testimony whether Stevens asked him personally to testify to his character, Powell said he couldn't recall if it was the senator or one of his lawyers. But he didn't think twice about testifying, Powell said.
"Not at all," he said, snapping his fingers to signify it was a snap decision.
That's right, folks, Obama supporter Colin Powell vouched for the character for truthfulness of a man, less than three weeks before he was convicted of multiple counts of being a criminal liar.
To me, nothing says "trustworthy" and "reliable" like being convicted of seven felony counts of making false statements. It's very strange to me: it appears that 12 jurors heard Colin Powell's testimony about his judgment of Ted Stevens's character and unanimously disregarded it and convicted the guy about whom Powell was testifying of repeatedly lying. In light of this, one wonders why Powell's judgment about Obama's character is worth any of the air time it has been given.
I know I have a lot of liberal readers, so here's another Intellectual Honesty Test for you guys to fail: What would you say if John McCain's supporters looked into the personal governmental records of Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric in retaliation for their ambushes of Sarah Palin? You'd be upset, right? "Invasion of privacy!!!" and blah-blah-woof-woof, right?
Then what say you hypocrites about Ohio's Head of Job and Family Services Approv[ing] a Child-Support Search on Joe Wurzelbacher Immediately After Third Debate? She claims it's something they routinely do whenever someone catches the public spotlight, but if a McCain supporter, who'd given the maximum amount of $2300, pulled these sorts of shenanigans you'd be screeching loud enough to shatter glass in China. Why is it OK to tear apart a private citizen's life for no reason other than he ASKED A QUESTION which your candidate botched the answer?
Press your brown shirts and polish your jackboots to a high shine, guys, cuz you're planning to be very, very busy serving your Fuhrer, aren't you?
Jeez, after all the depressing Obama items, we need some brighter items, so here's Lizzy Caplan, whose topless hippie chick character on "True Blood" has made that schlockfest a little more bearable. I'm sure she'll be gone shortly, but for now, here is a SFW shot:
Mark R. Levin posted this very cogent and sobering commentary Saturday night about how he can't believe how many people, supposedly intelligent and nominally conservative, are supporting what is clearly the most radical and fascist candidate to ever run as a major party candidate.
I've been thinking this for a while so I might as well air it here. I honestly never thought we'd see such a thing in our country - not yet anyway - but I sense what's occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. I can't help but observe that even some conservatives are caught in the moment as their attempts at explaining their support for Barack Obama are unpersuasive and even illogical. And the pull appears to be rather strong. Ken Adelman, Doug Kmiec, and others, reach for the usual platitudes in explaining themselves but are utterly incoherent. Even non-conservatives with significant public policy and real world experiences, such as Colin Powell and Charles Fried, find Obama alluring but can't explain themselves in an intelligent way.
There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama's name on it, which adorns everything from Obama's plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama's name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff.
Even the media are drawn to the allure that is Obama. Yes, the media are liberal. Even so, it is obvious that this election is different. The media are open and brazen in their attempts to influence the outcome of this election. I've never seen anything like it. Virtually all evidence of Obama's past influences and radicalism — from Jeremiah Wright to William Ayers — have been raised by non-traditional news sources. The media's role has been to ignore it as long as possible, then mention it if they must, and finally dismiss it and those who raise it in the first place. It's as if the media use the Obama campaign's talking points — its preposterous assertions that Obama didn't hear Wright from the pulpit railing about black liberation, whites, Jews, etc., that Obama had no idea Ayers was a domestic terrorist despite their close political, social, and working relationship, etc. — to protect Obama from legitimate and routine scrutiny. And because journalists have also become commentators, it is hard to miss their almost uniform admiration for Obama and excitement about an Obama presidency. So in the tank are the media for Obama that for months we've read news stories and opinion pieces insisting that if Obama is not elected president it will be due to white racism. And, of course, while experience is crucial in assessing Sarah Palin's qualifications for vice president, no such standard is applied to Obama's qualifications for president. (No longer is it acceptable to minimize the work of a community organizer.) Charles Gibson and Katie Couric sought to humiliate Palin. They would never and have never tried such an approach with Obama.
But beyond the elites and the media, my greatest concern is whether this election will show a majority of the voters susceptible to the appeal of a charismatic demagogue. This may seem a harsh term to some, and no doubt will to Obama supporters, but it is a perfectly appropriate characterization. Obama's entire campaign is built on class warfare and human envy. The "change" he peddles is not new. We've seen it before. It is change that diminishes individual liberty for the soft authoritarianism of socialism. It is a populist appeal that disguises government mandated wealth redistribution as tax cuts for the middle class, falsely blames capitalism for the social policies and government corruption (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) that led to the current turmoil in our financial markets, fuels contempt for commerce and trade by stigmatizing those who run successful small and large businesses, and exploits human imperfection as a justification for a massive expansion of centralized government. Obama's appeal to the middle class is an appeal to the "the proletariat," as an infamous philosopher once described it, about which a mythology has been created. Rather than pursue the American Dream, he insists that the American Dream has arbitrary limits, limits Obama would set for the rest of us — today it's $250,000 for businesses and even less for individuals. If the individual dares to succeed beyond the limits set by Obama, he is punished for he's now officially "rich." The value of his physical and intellectual labor must be confiscated in greater amounts for the good of the proletariat (the middle class). And so it is that the middle class, the birth-child of capitalism, is both celebrated and enslaved — for its own good and the greater good. The "hope" Obama represents, therefore, is not hope at all. It is the misery of his utopianism imposed on the individual.
Unlike past Democrat presidential candidates, Obama is a hardened ideologue. He's not interested in playing around the edges. He seeks "fundamental change," i.e., to remake society. And if the Democrats control Congress with super-majorities led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, he will get much of what he demands.
The question is whether enough Americans understand what's at stake in this election and, if they do, whether they care. Is the allure of a charismatic demagogue so strong that the usually sober American people are willing to risk an Obama presidency? After all, it ensnared Adelman, Kmiec, Powell, Fried, and numerous others. And while America will certainly survive, it will do so, in many respects, as a different place.
The Treason Media has worked diligently to install this Marxist as our national Fuhrer and fully anticipate receiving the beneficence of the Messiah in return for their loyal service as stenographers to the fascist elites and mythologizers of The One.
That the general public is more focused on who wins "Dancing with the Stars" or "American Idol" is part of the problem, but it's not as if the Treason Media has been putting the facts of the fascism they're being instructed to vote for under the rubric of "CHANGE! HOPE!" The truth is out there in the Blogosphere and on talk radio, but is that enough to balance the vast left-wing media leviathan?
But even with ignorant and apathetic voters brainwashed by a dishonest media, huge swaths of blame must be placed on Dubya and the Stupid Party for their feeble, incoherent, liberal, inarticulate muddling of just about everything in the past 8 years other than cutting taxes (without which we would've already been in a Depression) and defending America (which is the President's f*cking job, not that The One will do it!) The Stupid Party brand is worthless other than standing for a less-liberal, non-fascist flava of government.
The blogger and Hugh Hewitt fill-in has passed away at age 41 from cystic fibrosis. I'm sure Hugh Hewitt will be paying tribute to him tonight. I'll update with any obits when they come in.
I need to sue my teachers. Those nincompoops taught me that there were three co-equal branches of government meant to govern us with checks and balances on each other. According to Obama, in this tape from 2001, this is wrong because the Supreme Court needs to do more to redistribute wealth. Take a listen:
Here's the money part for those without speakers:
If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendancy to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.
Are you getting this? The guy who refused to vote to require medical assistance for abortion survivors thinks that the Supreme Court needs to move past what the Constitution says the government shouldn't do to its citizens to imposing new obligations. The way Roe vs. Wade fabricated the right to abortion out of thin air is the way Obama wants his fascist-Marxist-socialist agenda implemented.
Since all he needs is five Supreme Court justices - and he may get to appoint at least three of them in his first term - to enact his will, all the Fuhrer needs is to put his puppets on the court and hand them his commandments for them to enact. No need for a Congress to fuss about legislation anymore for the big issues, is there? Just let the Congress divvy up the pork and have your irreversible Court make the important laws. Nice. I wonder if the liberals who want Obama to pack the Court with pro-abortion puppets are cool with all the other fascism this setup would bring as well. Probably.
As loudly as the conservative media may try to trumpet this - and WTF is it coming out less than 10 days before an election where people are casting votes?!? - look for the "BFD" tone like the Politico's to rule as they blow it off as mere partisan blah-woof and not a problem they care to risk their Anointed One's prospects with. If you want an in-depth analysis of the terrifying importance of Barry's own words, you're going to have to look elsewhere and see just how epic a fail the Treason Media is:
I happen to know the person who found this audio. It is an individual person, with no more resources than a desire to know everything that he or she can about who might be the next president of the United States and the most powerful man in the world.
I know that this person does not have teams of highly paid professionals, does not work out of a corner office in a skyscraper in New York, does not have access to all of the subtle and hidden conduits of information … who possesses no network television stations, owns no satellite time, does not receive billions in advertising dollars, and has a staff of exactly one.
I do not blame Barack Obama for believing in wealth distribution. That’s his right as an American. I do blame him for lying about what he believes. But his entire life has been applying for the next job at the expense of the current one. He’s at the end of the line now.
I do, however, blame the press for allowing an individual citizen to do the work that they employ standing armies of so-called professionals for. I know they are capable of this kind of investigative journalism: It only took them a day or two to damage Sarah Palin with wild accusations about her baby’s paternity and less time than that to destroy a man who happened to be playing ball when the Messiah decided to roll up looking for a few more votes on the way to the inevitable coronation.
We no longer have an independent, fair, investigative press. That is abundantly clear to everyone — even the press. It is just another of the facts that they refuse to report, because it does not suit them.
Remember this, America: The press did not break this story. A single citizen, on the Internet did.
There is a special hell for you “journalists” out there, a hell made specifically for you narcissists and elitists who think you have the right to determine which information is passed on to the electorate and which is not.
That hell — your own personal hell — is a fiery lake of irrelevance, blinding clouds of obscurity, and burning, everlasting scorn.
You’ve earned it.
I'll bet they'll be too busy toasting their success next Tuesday than soul-searching about the souls they sold to foist this fascist false Messiah upon the nation.
If America’s citizens care to wake up and pay attention before they elect as president a sweet-talking, moderate-posing left-wing ideologue with a history of alliances with anti-American radicals, one of the several matters they ought to think seriously about is the future of the Supreme Court. Simply put, the survival of the historic American experiment in representative government will be in serious jeopardy if Barack Obama is our next president.
Our Constitution establishes a constitutional republic, a system in which, within the broad bounds that the Constitution sets forth, policy issues are to be determined by American citizens through their elected representatives at the state (including local) and national levels. The great battle over the Supreme Court in recent decades is between the proponents of original meaning and judicial restraint, on the one hand, and judicial activists, or advocates of living constitutionalism, on the other. Proponents of original meaning and judicial restraint embrace an interpretive methodology that respects the vast realm of representative government. Advocates of judicial activism and living constitutionalism, by contrast, redefine the Constitution to mean whatever they wish it to mean. They willy-nilly invent rights that aren’t in the Constitution and ignore those that are. Theirs is a philosophy of government by judiciary, with the operations of representative government confined to those matters that the justices aren’t quite ready yet to take charge of or that they think don’t matter very much.
[big snip]
If we look to the future and take seriously the positions and principles that the five living-constitutionalists have already adopted, the Court, as it is now composed, may very well have five votes for, say, the imposition of a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage, five votes for stripping “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance and for complete secularization of the public square, five votes for continuing to abolish the death penalty on the installment plan, five votes for selectively importing into the Court’s interpretation of the American Constitution the favored policies of Europe’s leftist elites, five votes for further judicial micromanagement of the government’s war powers, and five votes for the invention of a constitutional right to human cloning.
[another big snip - go read the whole thing]
With its five living-constitutionalists, the Supreme Court is well to the left of the American public and threatens to engage in yet more wild acts of liberal judicial activism. The Court urgently needs to be transformed into an institution that practices judicial restraint. If Barack Obama is elected president, he will drive the Court further in the wrong direction, and the liberal judicial activists that he appoints will likely serve for two or three decades. Our system of representative government, already under siege, would be lucky to survive an Obama presidency.
Note throughout the piece that the ability of the citizens to influence the direction of law-making via their selections of legistlators is irrelevant because the Supreme Court has granted itself the power to fabricate binding law out of thin air using whatever rationale suits its judicial fiat. Also note that the #1 fear of the Left is that Roe v. Wade could be reversed as easily as it was conjured in the first place and that they play upon the ignorance of the legal system of women who are afraid they may not be able to have that abortion they need to still look good in that cute bikini they picked up in Cabo.
Here's the ad they could run: "John McCain wants you to be fat and pregnant instead of pretty and gassed on Cosmos! I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message because I know you chumps will believe anything I tell you. Unicorns are real! Yes, we can!!!"
Swamped by the fund-raising juggernaut that is the Obama and Dem machines - made easier by jiggering the system to allow bogus donations - the National Republican Congressional Committee is economizing by throwing conservative candidates in tough fights to the wolves.
This image from Malkin's joint says it all:
Every time I see the meme pushed by the Treason Media that the GOP is losing people because they've gotten too conservative, I snort because the truth is the opposite: The Party is rushing to the left in the vain hope that the Treason Media will be nice to them and let them have some scraps of power. Losers.
Michael S. Malone is a long-time tech writer - as in, he was there at the beginning of the Silicon Valley boom - and columnist at ABC News.com, so this must be why this column expressing his distress over the atrocious bias of the Treason Media got into virtual print. I wonder how much longer he'll be allowed to work during an Obama Regime?
The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.
The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.
But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun -- for the first time in my adult life -- to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was "a writer," because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist.
You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I'm cut. I am a fourth-generation newspaperman...So, when I say I'm deeply ashamed right now to be called a "journalist," you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.
Now, of course, there's always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you 10 different ways to color variations of the word "said" -- muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. -- to influence the way a reader will apprehend exactly the same quote. We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.
But what we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against them.
That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can't achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty -- especially in ourselves.
[snip]
Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation's leading newspapers, many of whom I'd written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.
But what really shattered my faith -- and I know the day and place where it happened -- was the war in Lebanon three summers ago...I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel. The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story & but it never happened.
The Presidential Campaign
But nothing, nothing I've seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.
Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass -- no, make that shameless support -- they've gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don't have a free and fair press.
I was one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather -- not because of his phony story, but because he refused to admit his mistake -- but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is one-sided in this election.
No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.
If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.
That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.
Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer -- when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden's endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?
Joe the Plumber
The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.
Middle America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.
Go read the rest, because he makes the case for the editors being the bad guys. I disagree partially, because it's not as if there are reporters in the Treason Media looking to delve into Obama's past (or present) very vigorously, only to be squelched by their bosses. If there were, we'd be seeing the stories leaked to Drudge like the the spiked Clinton-Lewinsky affair story originally was. Editors may not be assigning reporters, but the reporters aren't approaching their editors saying, "Hey, Chief, I've got a lead on a tape showing Obama toasting a PLO terrorist and saying the Supreme Court should redistribute wealth. Can I go after it?"
In the comments of Michelle Malkin's report about the tape of Obama proclaiming that the Supreme Court needs to handle wealth redistribution - silly me, I was taught in school they were to interpret the laws passed by the legislative branch for Constitutionality - was this great comment by a "Wade":
Today on my way to lunch I passed a homeless guy with a sign that read ‘Vote Obama, I need the money.’ I laughed.
Once in the restaurant my server had on a ‘Obama 08′ tie, again I laughed–just imagine the coincidence.
When the bill came I decided not to tip the server and explained to him that I was exploring the Obama redistribution of wealth concept. He stood there in disbelief while I told him that I was going to redistribute his tip to someone who I deemed more in need–the homeless guy outside. The server angrily stormed from my sight.
I went outside, gave the homeless guy $5 and told him to thank the server inside as I decided he could use the money more. The homeless guy was grateful.
At the end of my rather unscientific redistribution experiment I realized the homeless guy was grateful for the money he did not earn, but the waiter was pretty angry that I gave away the money he did earn even though the actual recipient was more in need of the money.
I guess redistribution of wealth is an easier thing to swallow in concept than in practical application
Heh. Indeed. I tipped the barmaid at my gig the other night $1.50 on a $3.50 beer because she was dressed like an anime prostitute and not wearing Obama-supporting garb. If I hit someone like Wade's server, though, I'll give this a try because I know a (literally) starving artist who could use the cash. (I pre-paid a painting I've commissioned cuz she was so strapped.)
Over the weekend, word came out that the L.A. Times has a tape that shows Obama partying and toasting a PLO spokesman at an event described as a "Jew-bash", but isn't going to release it, presumably because it would be detrimental to their Anointed One. Andrew McCarthy calls out the double-standard:
Let’s try a thought experiment. Say John McCain attended a party at which known racists and terror mongers were in attendance. Say testimonials were given, including a glowing one by McCain for the benefit of the guest of honor ... who happened to be a top apologist for terrorists. Say McCain not only gave a speech but stood by, in tacit approval and solidarity, while other racists and terror mongers gave speeches that reeked of hatred for an American ally and rationalizations of terror attacks.
Now let’s say the Los Angeles Times obtained a videotape of the party.
Question: Is there any chance — any chance — the Times would not release the tape and publish front-page story after story about the gory details, with the usual accompanying chorus of sanctimony from the oped commentariat? Is there any chance, if the Times was the least bit reluctant about publishing (remember, we’re pretending here), that the rest of the mainstream media (y’know, the guys who drove Trent Lott out of his leadership position over a birthday-party toast) would not be screaming for the release of the tape?
Do we really have to ask?
So now, let’s leave thought experiments and return to reality: Why is the Los Angeles Times sitting on a videotape of the 2003 farewell bash in Chicago at which Barack Obama lavished praise on the guest of honor, Rashid Khalidi — former mouthpiece for master terrorist Yasser Arafat?
Go read it all, unless you're one of those people for whom inconvenient truths about The One are too inconvenient.
One of the biggest lies of this mythical Obamessiah campaign has been the ludicrous concept that he was "post-racial" due to his enlightened Holiness and his bi-racial parentage. Considering his mother was white you'd think he'd be a little more charitable toward gringos, but he has dealt nothing but race cards to deflect any and all criticisms; not one criticism of The One hasn't been met with cries of "RACISM!!!"; even calling him the socialist he is has been called "code" for his being black. Even the grandmother, whom He is currently visiting in her gravely ill state, got thrown under the bus in his cynical defense of his seething racist mentor Jeremiah Wright - she was the "typical white person." Post-racial, my arse.
With the myth in mind, take a look at some old tape of Obama slurring white people as those who don't want to pay taxes because the money will go to poor black children, and comparing Los Angeles to Bosnia because of all the oppression.
While the terminal White Guilt sufferers won't be dissuaded from their support of The One because they still hope for absolution from their racist guilt, I wonder how many people who think it'd be fun to vote for the "cool guy everyone seems to like" would react if the Treason Media ever actually exposed this material to them. (Thus the reason the TM isn't.) These idiots probably think Obama would be like David Palmer on "24", forgetting that a strong on defense Democrat can only exist in fiction these days. Barry O's appeal has been that he wasn't an obvious race hustling bomb-thrower like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, but as this tape and his decades-long associations with terrorists and black supremacist racists show, The One's "cool" exterior is just a trompe l'oeil veneer masking the same old destructive racial politics.
"Forget the wages of sin / These are the profits of rage" - "Profits of Rage" - Red September
Media coverage of John McCain has been heavily unfavorable since the political conventions, more than three times as negative as the portrayal of Barack Obama, a new study says.
Fifty-seven percent of the print and broadcast stories about the Republican nominee were decidedly negative, the Project for Excellence in Journalism says in a report out today, while 14 percent were positive. The McCain campaign has repeatedly complained that the mainstream media are biased toward the senator from Illinois.
Obama's coverage was more balanced during the six-week period from Sept. 8 through last Thursday, with 36 percent of the stories clearly positive, 35 percent neutral or mixed and 29 percent negative.
McCain has struggled during this period and slipped in the polls, which is one of the reasons for the more negative assessments by the 48 news outlets studied by the Washington-based group. But the imbalance is striking nonetheless.
They try to attenuate the bias by implying that McCain's slippage in the polls is the driving force - no one's fault if there's bad news to report, right? - but that ignores the deliberate attempts to spin and smear McCain and Palin and the active cover-ups of Obama's myriad alliances with radicals, racists, and terrorists. Why is the media digging into Joe the Plumber's life when all he did was ask a question? Is ANYONE allowed to challenge the Obamessiah? If you think the coverage is slanted now, wait until Fuhrer Obama has the power to shut down any media outlet that criticizes him! Can you say "zero percent negative stories about Obama?" I knew you could!
I'm reading Orson Scott Card's sci-fi classic Ender's Game, so it's an timely coincidence that he has called out the reprehensible bias of the Treason Media.
I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.
This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.
It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.
[snip]
This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.
Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)
[snip]
I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."
Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.
As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?": "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."
These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.
Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!
What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?
[snip]
If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.
If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.
There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)
If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.
Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.
But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.
If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.
Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.
[snip]
You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.
This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.
If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.
If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.
You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.
Go read the whole thing as I had to chop a ton of stuff to get it to a too-long length here. BTW, Card is a Democrat. (Not for long with that attitude; they'll surely see to that.)
Yesterday on Dennis Miller's radio show, Mike Allen of the Politico made a Freudian slip and used the word "we're" to describe what the press and Democrats have learned and are going to do. When Dennis asked if he wanted to leave the impression that he was a Democrat, Allen got really huffy and promptly bailed off the show. Dennis was far too contrite and felt he had put Allen on the spot, but Allen was bleating that Politico was "middle of the road", a description of where they were a couple of months ago, not the hard-Left Obama cheering section they are now.
The Treason Media's willingness to act as Goebbels to Obama and the fascist Dems is the untold story of this Election, but they'll never tell it. Why should they? The Big Lie is working, isn't it?
, so it's an timely coincidence that he has called out the reprehensible bias of the Treason Media.
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