In a week where the wheels came off the Bush Boom, we received proof from the John Yoo memos that this administration is the most lawless group of reprobates ever to sully the halls of government and that a 5-year war that costs thousands of US soldiers, hundreds of thousands if civilians and trillions of dollars rages on unabated, Blackwater’s contract with the State Department is renewed and we reflected on a man who 40 years ago was assassinated because his message of peace was intolerable to the government machine, and what does our media tell us is most important?
Barack Obama is a shitty bowler, proving he’s an elitist freak unworthy to be President, the Clintons made some serious money over the last 8 years proving they are elitist freaks unworthy to be President, and polar bears are still Godless Killing Machines, nominally proving they are elitist freaks unworthy to be President either.
Luckily our liberal media has shown us that we have Straight-Talkin’ Saint McCain to save us all from the non-bowling $109 million dollar elitist liberal freaks.
Candidates usually try to cast their lives in a glossy sheen, and set their speeches before friendly audiences. But the Arizona senator spent the past few days frequently doing the opposite.
He was barely audible at the King event, over a driving rain and murmuring crowd. His speaking style was staid compared with the other speakers, giving his appearance an awkward quality.
“Martin Luther King Jr. was not a man to flinch from harsh truth, and the same is required of all who come here to see where he was in the last hours of his life,” Sen. McCain said, standing beneath the balcony at the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King was shot 40 years ago Friday. “We look up to that balcony, we remember that night, and we are still left with a feeling of loss.”
As he left the stage, there was a mixture of applause, booing and shouts of “End the war now!” and “No justice, no peace!”
“His words didn’t carry the tone and passion that we’re accustomed to hearing,” said Earl McKinney, 51 years old, an architect born and raised in Memphis. Still, he said, he appreciated the appearance of Sen. McCain, who has said he will compete for African-American votes, normally unfriendly terrain for Republicans. “That shows interest,” Mr. McKinney said. “You have to give him something for that.”
No doubt barbecue was involved.
But the problem with the media, as members of the media will tell you, is that after pounding on Obama for his pastor and bowling handicap for a month, the real issue is that the too soft on the Democrats.
But from the mainstream media? As National Review’s Byron York has pointed out, when Clinton supporter Lanny Davis said on CNN that it is “legitimate” for her to have remarked “that she personally would not put up with somebody who says that 9/11 are chickens who come home to roost” or the kind of “generic comments (Wright) made about white America,” Anderson Cooper, the show’s host and alleged moderator, interjected that since “we all know what the (Wright) comments were,” he found it “amazing” and “funny” that Davis should “feel the need to repeat them over and over again.”
Davis protested, “It’s appropriate.” Time magazine’s Joe Klein promptly smacked Davis down with “Lanny, Lanny, you’re spreading the — you’re spreading the poison right now,” and then suggested that an “honorable person” would “stay away from this stuff.”
Amazing. We’ve gone beyond moral equivalence to moral inversion. It is now dishonorable to even make note of Wright’s bigotry and ask how any man — let alone a man on the threshold of the presidency — could associate himself for 20 years with the purveyor of such hate.
Watching such a display, you get a full appreciation of Hillary’s challenge. The mainstream media are back in the tank. The “Saturday Night Live” skits parodying media obsequiousness toward Obama, followed closely by the revelation of the Wright tapes, temporarily forced the media to subject Obama to normal scrutiny. But after the “speech” and Tuzla, they have reverted to form as protectors of the myth of Obama.
The hagiographic treatment of a newly emerged Democratic leader is a recurring theme in American journalism. At the dawning of the age of Clinton 15 years ago, the cover of The New York Times Magazine featured a woman dressed entirely in white. The heading read: “Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Politics of Virtue.”
Inside, under the title “Saint Hillary,” the late Michael Kelly wrote a brilliantly detached, coolly ironic deconstruction of his celestial subject. Saint Obama awaits his Michael Kelly.
Never mind the GOP’s stealth campaign connecting Obama to everything from the Black Panthers to Osama Bin Laden. Never mind the press totally ignoring McCain breaking his own campaign finance laws. The press is clearly in Obama’s pocket, it’s not even okay to call him a racist hatemonger anymore!
I mean let’s face it, after all Obama’s the racist here, not the GOP’s John McCain.
But you can see where all this is going. If Obama is the Democratic nominee, the liberal message will be that a vote for McCain is a vote for racism. Our guess it that this will not be a winning campaign strategy: Most nonblack voters will be put off by this kind of crude moral intimidation.
If McCain wins, liberal mythmakers will insist it is because America is a racist country, and their logic will be as airtight as Stoller’s and Yglesias’s. Whether for political reasons or out of their own moral vanity, those who claim they want “racial reconciliation” are all too eager to practice divisive, if stupid, politics.
Why wait for the general campaign? Play the racist card now, and then dare the liberals to call you on it, because Obama’s a secret racist, just like Hillary’s a secret misogynist.
And it’s a good thing we’ve gotten that straightened out too because really, all Democrats hate America.
Patriotism Paranoia
Democrats’ patriotism problem.
by Fred Barnes
04/14/2008, Volume 013, Issue 29During an appearance in Philadelphia last month, Hillary Clinton introduced a controversial couple as part of her presidential campaign. She defended them as victims of smear attacks. “Valerie and Joe have had their patriotism questioned,” she insisted. “They have been maligned as un-American because they believed that President Bush was waging a preemptive war that was not in America’s interests and now because we believe our troops should not police Iraq’s civil war.”
Of course this wasn’t true. Both Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson were accused of being untruthful (and shameless self-promoters), not unpatriotic. Plame was a CIA official who blamed the Bush White House for revealing her identity to the media in retaliation against her husband. Wilson claimed the president lied about Saddam Hussein’s efforts to obtain uranium in Africa. Actually, Bush was correct. Saddam had sought uranium in Africa. And Plame’s identity had been leaked not by vengeful Bush aides but by a State Department official who was an Iraq war skeptic like Plame and Wilson.
The episode had a familiar ring, the ring of patriotism paranoia. When criticized for being soft or wrong on national security, Democrats routinely respond that their patriotism is being questioned. In fact, they’re rarely if ever accused of being unpatriotic. But to the paranoid, that’s immaterial.
John Kerry went so far in 2004 as to insist he knew how the Bush crowd would respond even before he delivered a foreign policy speech. “I know what the Bush apologists will say to this–that it is unpatriotic to question, to criticize, or to call for change,” he said. Of course, Bush and his allies said nothing of the kind.
There’s method in the Democrats’ paranoia. They’ve figured out how to use it to their advantage: Blame someone for calling you unpatriotic, and you may blow off their legitimate criticism, even stigmatize them as smear artists, while you’re seen responding more in sorrow than in anger.
Now Barack Obama has picked up the I’m-being-called-unpatriotic theme. Practically no one has questioned his patriotism, aside from a few bloggers and a stray TV commentator or two. Nonetheless, he declared after the Texas and Ohio primaries, “In this campaign, we will not stand for the politics that uses religion as a wedge and patriotism as a bludgeon.” A few weeks later, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe chimed in: “Questioning patriotism is something we don’t think has a place in this campaign.”
Obama has taken what he calls “the patriotism thing” a step further. He’s suggested the patriotism of his political opponents pales in contrast with his “true patriotism.” At least that was how he explained his decision to remove his American flag lapel pin.
“You know, the truth is that right after 9/11, I had a pin,” Obama said. “Shortly after 9/11, particularly because as we’re talking about the Iraq war, that became a substitute for I think true patriotism, which is speaking out on issues that are of importance to our national security, I decided I won’t wear that pin on my chest.” In effect, Obama turned the patriotism issue on its head. If anyone was unpatriotic, it was his critics and foes, certainly not Obama.
The patriotism issue has also spread to liberal commentators. Kirsten Powers, writing in the New York Post, offered the conventional (paranoid) wisdom among Democrats. Insinuations of a lack of patriotism are what “the Obama campaign can expect in the future.” It’s the Republican way of campaigning.
There’s a difference–a significant one–between being falsely called unpatriotic and having what Joe Klein of Time defines as a problem with patriotism. “Patriotism is, sadly, a crucial challenge for Obama now,” Klein wrote. Why? Not because of Republicans, but because the Jeremiah Wright flap and Michelle Obama’s comments and the flag pin incident “have fed a scurrilous undercurrent of doubt about whether he is ‘American’ enough.” Absent the “scurrilous undercurrent” bit and Klein’s silly notion that the “liberal message” is more patriotic than the “innate” pessimism of conservatism, Klein is on to something.
And it’s not just Obama who has a problem with patriotism. “This is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right,” Klein said. Blaming Republicans is not the cure, especially since you’ve got to be paranoid to believe they’re the problem in the first place.
Why worry about the Democrats having legitimate problems with this style of campaigning when you can simply paint all of them as America-hating douchebags who can’t beat your 96-year old grandmother at Wii Sports bowling?
That whole John Yoo war criminal thing? McCain breaking the law? Silly people, lawbreaking is for the GOP. Then accuse the Dems of it and force them to prove they aren’t doing everything you’re already doing!
It’s the Village way.