When Caesar's Wife Gets a Pass

What would you think if I told you that the press had detailed information that Todd Palin, spouse of the former governor of Alaska, had over a course of years: been involved in several public fistfights, had drawn national attention for throwing adolescent tantrums that disrupted public meetings, had insulted a government official over being a cancer patient, insulted another, a widow, because she "needed to get a man," told members of the public they had no right to petition the government because their race was different from his, had been charged and pleaded guilty to taking bribes to influence the awarding of government contracts and other favors, and pilfered mored than $21,000 in computers and other electronic equipment from government offices?

Love her or hate her, you couldn't help but think, Sarah Palin is toast.

I believe it's safe to say the media fireball would not die down until some time in 2012. Or should that be 2112?

Sarah Palin would finally meet the total career--and perhaps personal--destruction her many bitter enemies have been casting spells for lo these many months. (They'd pray for it, but that sounds like something Her Hateableness would do. EEEEeeeeeww?). And it would all be a result of the media rejecting every benefit of any doubt that Todd's misdeeds could have been unknown, and unconsented to, by his famous wife, the Governor, Sarah Palin.

Besides, Caesar's wife must be above reproach. Especially if Caesar belongs to the GOP.

Do you think the same folks who criticized Palin for not forcing her daughter to get an abortion (because a daughter who's an unwed mother would obviously ruin Palin's vice presidential campaign), would cut her any slack for not kicking Todd to the curb? Hell, they condemned her for not getting rid of Trig just because he's going to make them feel lousy for slaying their hale and healthy babies. The same folks could be counted on to condemn her for not denouncing Todd loudly, and leaving Todd flat, rather than let him wreck her political career.

Todd didn't do any of those things.

But with that in mind, notice how every new story we hear in Detroit about Monica Conyers's misdeeds is loaded with silence about her husband, Congressman John Conyers?

Typical is a report in the Free Press today about how Monica swiped $21,000 worth of electronic toys from her City-Council Building office before she left. It wasn't even spite. She'd been stealing this stuff for years.

But as for her husband, that pharisee Inspector Javert hounding Bush and Cheney until his dying breath (Conyers was born during the Johnson administration: the first Johnson administration), he enjoys Teflon, Teflon II, and Scotchguard protection against that Republican-seeking word, "hypocrite."

The Freep story, and it isn't atypical, mentions only that Monica is "wife of U.S. Rep. John Conyers, a Democrat from Detroit," in paragraph 20 of a story about Monica's kleptomaniacal approach to public service. The national press doesn't even know Conyers's wife pleaded guilty and faces five years in the joint for selling her votes.

Thus the blanket of immunity thrown over the Left by the media. Its advantages can't be underestimated.

Prepare for Some Serious Liberal Busting of Your Moral Ball Bearings

As someone who’s been opposed to legalized abortion for so long, I’m pretty resistant to liberals posturing that they’re more compassionate than the rest of us, or care more about preventing suffering in others. They aren’t. They don’t. Their sermons to me about how much they care about the poorest of the poor are wasted, when their most heartfelt battle-cry is for the unrestricted right of a strong, healthy mother to slaughter her far poorer and weaker child simply for being unwanted.

The current outrage about the way Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and Abu Zubaydah were interrogated has nothing to do with liberals’ profound compassion for these terrorists as fellow human beings. Nor does it prove they walk a higher moral road than the rest of us, in spite of President Obama’s breathtaking charge that before he came along the country had lost its “moral bearings.”

Saddam Hussein ran one of the world’s cruelest torture regimes right up until the end, and the closest the Left ever came to taking that seriously was when they sponsored American youths to go there as human shields to protect Saddam, Uday, and Qsay from being stopped. When fellow human beings are in the way of what they want, the Left can be as icy, cold, and heartless as their worst feverish fantasies about poor Dick Cheney. Whether it’s the murder of Terri Schiavo, or the rape of South Vietnam in 1975, or the present-day abuse of women (and girls) in Muslim countries, or the slaughter in Rwanda, or the stealing away of the educations of a few poor kids in Washington, D.C., or the forced abortions in China, or the heinous infanticides of George Tiller in present-day Kansas, or the celebration of the murdering police state of Fidel Castro, there isn’t a moral bearing left in the liberals’ tool kit.

Like all participants in political struggles, the Left makes its decisions based on a balancing of interests, always wanting the scales heaviest on the side they’re most committed to protect. That’s why the President, when an Illinois senator, could justify keeping legal the practice of denying a newborn survivor of a botched abortion “health care” and letting it be discarded to die in a trash bin. It’s not that Obama hated babies. It’s just that in his political calculus, he valued so much more the love and political support of pro-abortion radicals, who do happen to hate babies, (or anyone else who might stand between them and their rights under Roe v. Wade).

You may just happen to agree with Obama on that calculus. But if you do, don’t try telling me it’s because you love humanity more than I do.

It’s going to be more of the same with what the leftist media is already referring to as the “torture memos.” (For a short history of media accuracy in naming things, see the “Duke rape case.”)

Opposition to the Bush administration “torture policy,” just like opposition to “domestic spying,” “Bush’s war in Iraq,” “outing Valerie Plame”, “the so-called war on terror,” “tax cuts for the rich,” and on and on, wasn’t really being driven by the exquisitely sensitive conscience of liberals, even though they’ve sickened half the country with their smugness. Those decisions were made by the cold political calculation that a weakened, or better yet, failed, Bush presidency would better guarantee them a return of the White House, in 2004 or 2008.

Okay, so I guess that’s politics. As one of those quotable sorts said once, politics ain’t beanbag. But at the same time, it ain’t Sunday School, either, and I wish the Left would stop acting as if they were Elijah and John the Baptist, Now With Religion.

When history handed to George W. Bush America’s first chance to make a proportional response against jihadist provocation in 200 years, America was united for about six weeks. That ‘s all the time it took before Democrats figured out that Bush and the Republicans would be unstoppable if America saw them actually roll back global Islamic jihadism.

That made the number one mission of the Democrats to do everything in their power to keep that from happening—from marshaling the media to undermine morale at home, to hamstringing our efforts abroad, to criminalizing military and intelligence advisers doing their best to stay within the rules while protecting the country.

It isn’t exactly that the liberals wanted the terrorists to win. It’s that they wanted the party most identified with fighting the terrorists to lose. If success in that resulted in terrorists winning, that’s not their fault. They’re only doing God’s work. Similarly, it’s not that Obama is trying to destroy the free market system in America and wreck the economy. It’s that he feels empowered to fix things so that highly successful Wall Street-CEO-Industry types aren’t making too much money. If that mission results in capitalism being crippled, don't blame him--blame his magnificently lofty principles.

It ought to be apparent by now that when liberals demand “action,” and “change,” they don’t sweat too much about the consequences of those actions or that change.

Witness that tea party exchange with CNN Susan Roesgen, where she acts so dismayed that a citizen could scorn the tax rebate Obama was giving him for the sake of some gun-nut fantasy that his liberty was at stake. (You’d give up $400 for liberty?!) And when Obama was asked if he still planned to raise the capital gains tax even knowing it would reduce government revenues, he said yes, because it would be fair.

There's a reason fairness is the appropriate scale of morality in the schoolyard: children haven't had enough experience to deal with the heavy work of right and wrong in a grown-up world. Fairness was the criteria Solomon pretended to apply when he offered to cut that baby in half. You’ll recall the false mother was enthusiastically in favor of it. Better a dead baby than tolerate a disparity between the maternal haves and the have-nots.

Now Obama’s running a foreign policy apparently no more “nuanced” than just to do the opposite of whatever his evil predecessor did. If that results in America becoming weaker and our enemies stronger, that’s not his fault. Bin Ladin only attacked us anyway because we were “arrogant”--and now we’re not. Besides, people like us better this way.

Surveys by both Gallup and Rasmussen surveys show that bestowing Geneva Convention protections on captured Al Qaeda killers polls particularly well among women who support late-term abortions and life-long college students driving 1989 Subarus with “Mean People Suck” bumper stickers.

We can all expect a hurricane of Democratic self-righteousness now of Katrina proportions. They will try to get as much mileage as they can out of this issue, mugging for all they're worth on each other’s programs about how incomprehensible it is that America could have sunk to this low level.

Meanwhile, the next most heinous crime the Left will go after is that of a Miss USA contestant for not thinking gay marriage is such a great idea.

The Obama Honeymoon: Can We Still Go Home to Mother?

I think I was doing okay with the transition. But once Inauguration Day got here, what with the triumphalism of the media coverage, the bad grace and mediocrity of the inaugural address, the booing of Bush and Cheney by jamulks who have now achieved representative status as “the people of this country,” the second wind liberals got to resume their attack on the now concluded Bush administration, and so on, and so on—well, I’m in a right foul mood.

Larry Elder wrote today that when someone asked him when President Obama’s media honeymoon will end, he answered:

. . . It won’t.

Oh, sure, every relationship experiences peaks and valleys. But the "mainstream media" wanted Obama to win, and helped him do so. If Obama were a stock, the media would be "fully invested."

During the Bush administration, we saw many "Big Stories" of "Bad Actions." Let's liken these stories to crimes. If Bush committed no crime, they reported an infraction. If he committed an infraction, they reported a misdemeanor. If he committed a misdemeanor, they reported a felony. If he committed a felony, they reported a capital offense. With Obama, the media reverse the procedure. Any future capital offense will get reported as a regular felony, a felony as a misdemeanor and so forth. (“Obama: The Endless Honeymoon?”).

I may also add that even when Bush committed no infractions, they still managed to report a capital offense.

Be that as it may, the historical evidence for an endless honeymoon is strong. We saw it during the Clinton years. The media were also fully invested in him, even if their boy forced them—simply forced them by his antics--to occasionally report his more scandalous behavior.

Still, the media never lost its loyalty for Clinton. Almost. The press loved Clinton--until Obama was revealed from on high and they dumped the First Black President. And then it became clear that the media’s puppy love for Clinton was nothing compared with the media's man-sized love for Barack Obama.

Remember that Romeo first was ga-ga for the cold Rosaline, whom he forgot the instant he glommed Juliet, and then it was: “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!/It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night/Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear.”

And then as Alvy said in Annie Hall when Annie asked if he loved her: “love is too weak a word. . .I luurv you.”

The media’s love for Clinton was merely earthly, as Clinton himself, after all, was only a man (but O what a man!). That wasn’t really a media honeymoon, more of a liason, more of a shack-up.

This thing with Obama is a Sacrament.

Unlike Clinton, Obama is no man. He is certainly supernatural, probably immortal, and he’s got half the atheist reporters at NPR paying off bar bets that there was no proof for the existence of a Supreme Being. This isn’t love, it’s Luurv.

Which means President Obama will be unchecked by the two institutions most necessary to slow up a runaway executive: Congress, and especially, the press.

Since Election Day a lot of optimistic folks on our side have been saying the media loves Obama now, but just wait until the economy falls apart, or terrorist attacks grow worse, or the new health care plan turns out to be a mess—No! Not going to happen. They may as well say, “maybe the cops didn’t show up when your car was stolen, but just wait till you call in a home invasion with armed robbers and shots fired, then they’ll do their job!”

None of that will matter. The media aren’t going to do their job later because they’ve already been given new jobs. The media wasn't just reporting uncritically all Obama’s rhetoric about hope and change, even as they were exaggerating every flaw in every one of his opponents: (“Brian, is it just me, or have you ever noticed that Hillary Clinton is a cold, ambitious bitch?”). They were amplifying Obama’s rhetoric a thousand times by repating it as their own rhetoric. They didn’t just report his victorious campaign, they worked for his victorious campaign; and when he won, they cheered for him like all the rest of his volunteers.

Which is why they can never turn on him. That would require turning on themselves, and they aren’t going to do that. They haven’t just “lost objectivity,” like some shine has come off their skills. They’ve lost objectivity the way a vampire’s victim loses blood—to the very last drop. And that means the only function they can serve now is to put all that Pulitzer-prize talent to work broadcasting propaganda.

Even when he treats them like this, and like this.

And because President Obama, as he showed us last Tuesday in his unworthy inaugural address, and this week in his appeasement talk on Arab TV, and when he told the Republican leaders “I won,” and when he sneered at believers with his talk of restoring “science to its proper place”--because, I say, he is not going to pleasantly surprise all of us that he is wiser, classier, or more principled than we believed during the campaign—I’m in a pessimistic mood.

As Elder writes:

The major news media saw former President George W. Bush as a villain and themselves as sheriff. Obama, on the other hand, enjoys their support. To the news media, Obama represents a combination of Martin Luther King, Gandhi and rock star. They will downplay errors, explain away mistakes, and -- if efforts fail to achieve the desired results -- they can always blame Bush.

Exactly.

Media Still Confused About Who the Enemy Is

Jeffrey Imm at Counterterrorism Blog has written about how the refusal of America's free press, like the Washington Post and the New York Times, have failed to define the jihadist enemy in a clear, consistent way, with the result that much of the the public is still confused, six years after 9/11, with whom we're fighting. ("Jihad, Islamism, and the American Free Press").

Without a precise definition of the enemy by American political leadership, major segments of the American free press have made their own foreign policy decisions as to who is and is not an enemy, made their own decisions on what terms like "Islamism" and "Jihad" mean (if they use such terms at all), and provided mostly "isolated incident"-style reporting on such subjects, with the exception of the largely anti-war colored reporting on Iraq.

The result, he writes, is that

instead of much of the American free press being used to largely address and confront enemy anti-freedom ideologies and their adherents, such media has been manipulated by editorial managers, publishers, and Islamist groups to focus their investigative reporting on the American government's reaction to Islamist terrorism. As much of American government actions are based on a reaction without a defined enemy, there has been plenty of source material for press critiques and for press managers to gain political points against an unpopular administration.

But as made clear last week in speeches by leaders of the Washington Post and the Associated Press, the larger issue of "Islamism" itself, its role as the root of "Islamist terrorism" (as defined in the 9/11 Commission Report), and coherent news reporting on the continuing global links between political Islamism and such Islamist terrorism is not even an objective of much of the American free press. The reactive political sniping agenda by much of the American press' reporting not only misses the larger issue, but also fails to understand that anti-freedom ideologies like Islamism are a threat to a free press itself.

Imm explains how basic and definable terms such as "Islamism" and "jihad," terms even Al Jazeerah uses, are unacceptable terms to the media now:

On March 3, Philip Bennett, the Washington Post's managing editor, gave a speech at the University of California Irvine (UCI) on Journalism and Islam, where it was reported that he believes the media is responsible for confusion about Islam, which is due to the lack of Muslims in American newsrooms (in his opinion). The Daily Pilot, a local newspaper, also reported that Washington Post's Philip Bennett stated that the term "Islamist" is something that the Washington Post editors still have not decided whether to add it to their style book. In Mr. Bennett's speech, he didn't even consider to qualify the need to have greater numbers of anti-Islamist Muslims represented in American newsrooms, because he and his Washington Post editors have not even decided whether to recognize political Islamism as a term they can use, let alone an anti-freedom ideology to be confronted.

Apparently, the Washington Post editors have not yet read the 2004-released 9/11 Commission Report where "Islamist Terrorism" is defined as a component of "Islamism". In 2008, nearly four years later, the Washington Post is still considering whether the very term "Islamist" is acceptable. Even Al Jazeera uses the term "Islamism", but over six years after the 9/11 attacks, the Washington Post is still thinking about it. Rather than being embarrassed by such mental paralysis in news reporting, the Washington Post's managing editor is proud of this failure and discusses this failure in speeches to universities. Moreover, when real investigative groups such as The Investigative Project challenge Islamist individuals and groups, the Washington Post's response is exemplified by its reporting on Esam Omeish, reporting the accusations of known Stalinists accusing IPT reports on Omeish as those of "right-wing anti-Muslim bigots".

Such deliberate unwillingness among American media to address the ideology of Islamism and its links to Islamist terrorism or Jihad is not limited to the Washington Post. As early as October 2001, the Society of Professional Journalists provided guidelines to the American free press that jihad was to be defined as "to exert oneself for the good of Islam and to better oneself".

This desire by "mainstream media" managers to "filter" and "shape" the news by deliberate ignorance of ideologies, language, and connections between events continues to be an ongoing threat to our free press - one that has largely necessitated the explosion of Internet blogs to simply provide a vehicle to report the news.

Read the rest of this well-researched and excellent analysis here.