Why Is the MSM Still Ignoring Obama's Radical Past?

Why Is the MSM Still Ignoring Obama's Radical Past?
Diana West
Thursday, June 10, 2010

The first response to publicist Maria Sliwa's e-mail queries to news organizations about whether they would like to receive a review copy of "The Manchurian President: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists" came back from a reporter at the Christian Science Monitor.

The answer was "no." But it wasn't just "no." The reporter called the book by journalist-author-WABC radio host Aaron Klein and researcher Brenda J. Elliott -- at the time embargoed and thus unread -- a name for toilet paper I'd rather not print. Reflexively, Sliwa hit the delete button (thus losing the reporter's name for posterity). But when other e-mails started coming back with similarly visceral (and even similarly scatological) responses, she started saving them, realizing the reactions themselves were a story.

And so they are. Again, these e-mails, some of which appear below, are responding to the prospect of a new book by a journalist known for groundbreaking work as the Jerusalem-based correspondent for the popular conservative news site Worldnetdaily.com. Klein was also the journalist who first put the Bill Ayers-Barack Obama story together in February 2008 -- 5,000 miles from the United States.

"Ridiculous crap," wrote John Oswald, news editor of the New York Daily News.

"Never, ever contact me again," wrote Time Magazine senior writer Jeffrey Kluger.

"Absolute crap," wrote Evelyn Leopold, former U.N. bureau chief for Reuters.

"Seriously, get a life," wrote David Knowles, AOL's political writer.

"This is sensational rubbish that is of no interest to any legitimate publication," wrote Newsweek deputy editor Rana Foroohar.

Such attitudes help explain why Newsweek is on the block, and why mainstream media (MSM) in general are hurting. But the mindset itself remains mysterious. These ladies and gents of the Fourth Estate didn't just want to ignore the Klein-Elliott book about Barack Obama's radical ties, they wanted to denigrate it, and some quite angrily, which is an out-of-sync reaction to a book that last week debuted on the New York Times bestseller list at No. 10. Somehow, the book was personally or even existentially offensive to these MSMers' most cherished convictions. Whether such convictions balance on a halo affixed to Barack Obama (threatened by the book's revelations), or rest on their own sorry credentials as news professionals (ditto), or something else, I don't know. But this rejectionist reflex, which characterized the abysmal 2008 Obama campaign coverage, is why we now have a president who poses a danger to the future of the republic.

Unfortunately, conservative media, too, are relatively AWOL on this book. Even Fox News, which has indeed hosted Klein, hasn't built on the book's newsiest chunks, the ones that make it stunningly clear that Obama's radical-filled past was, as they say, merely prologue. From Obama's participation in the socialist New Party in the mid-1990s, to his connections to communist-terrorist Bill Ayers, it's all relevant today. How? For example, some of the same anti-American, anti-capitalist revolutionaries from those bad old days now help craft republic-changing legislation.

Take Obama's 2009 stimulus package that launched the outraged Tea Party Movement. As the authors report, a radical group with a Marx-inspired agenda called the Apollo Alliance strongly influenced the legislation -- as the group repeatedly brags at its website (apolloalliance.org), charting similarities between the stimulus bill and Apollo's recommendations, and citing Senate House Majority Leader Harry Reid's tribute to Apollo as an "important factor." Among Apollo's Leftist founders is Joel Rogers, who co-founded the socialist New Party. Jeff Jones, who co-founded the Weather Underground with Bill Ayers and Mark Rudd, is the director of Apollo's New York office. The authors further explain why it is that, as a project of the secretive Tides Center - on whose board sits Wade Rathke, founder of ACORN and former member of Weather Underground's parent group, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) -- the Apollo Alliance's financial sources are effectively impossible to trace.

All of this isn't "guilt by association." It's association, a key to understanding how the radicalism of Obama's past today shapes the policy dictating our future. And it cries out for further journalistic digging. Consumers of New Media - blogs, talk radio -- already know some of the story, while The Manchurian President's brisk sales guarantee a wide audience. But the MSM? Clueless. Which wouldn't much matter if it still weren't the case that only the MSM cover the president. Or do they cover-up the president?
____________________________________________________

MSM Reveal Own Bias in Bias Allegations
David Limbaugh
Friday, June 11, 2010

I don't know which is more pathetic, President Barack Obama's TV threat to "kick ass" or Time magazine senior political analyst Mark Halperin's suggestion that Matt Drudge's provocative headline concerning the threat intentionally played to the alleged racism of his readers.

As much as I'd like to lampoon Obama for talking tough against oil spillers to compensate for his grossly negligent aloofness on the matter, I'll go with the sanctimonious Halperin, who needs to remove his blinding liberal filter.

Obama's exact words in explaining why he consults government experts concerning the oil spill were, "We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers so I know whose ass to kick."

Unfortunately, neither black nor white liberals will let Obama's comment or certain reactions to it pass without turning it into an incident with racial implications. The Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart wrote, "African American men are taught at very young ages (or learn the hard way) to keep our emotions in check, to not lose our cool, lest we be perceived as dangerous or menacing."

Similarly, Halperin got exercised over Drudge's headline "Obama goes street: seeking 'ass to kick,'" which, according to Halperin, "includes this photo of an angry-looking Barack Obama. I think it's all pretty clear to all of us what's going on."

I suppose that depends on who "us" is. If it means skin pigment-obsessed, psychologically projecting liberal hand-wringers, then I might agree, though I would hope that not too great a percentage of liberals are pigment-obsessed, psychologically projecting hand-wringers.

In the first place, the Drudge photo was tame compared with many Obama pix I've seen. I would describe Obama's expression as more contemplative than menacing. Maybe Halperin is projecting here, too. Do you think he instinctively regards Obama's cerebral pose as menacing? Did someone whip Mark's fanny growing up?

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think of Drudge's headline in racial terms at all -- even the use of the term "street." What that word does bring to mind is thuggish Chicago street politics in the style of the very white Saul Alinsky, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod -- maybe even Bill Ayers.

Halperin said, "If you're an African-American man in this country and you're trying to get political leadership, you can't get angry in public without having it play symbiotically in a bad way." "Symbiotically"? I watched the video and read the transcript, and that's the word he used. I'll assume Halperin meant "symbolically" but was injecting reverse street language. But I regress; I mean "digress."

What possible evidence does Halperin have for this assertion, other than his own distorted biases -- biases against black men and white conservatives? Personally, I loved it when Clarence Thomas showed a little righteous indignation in the face of his "high-tech lynching" by Senate Democrats who were bigoted against black conservatives.

Show me a black man (or a white man or even a turquoise man) expressing anger at Obama's destructive policies and I'll show you a uniformly positive reaction among all conservatives, for whom race is wholly irrelevant. But we can't expect the preprogrammed Halperin to comprehend such counterintuitive ideas as colorblindness inheres in conservatism, which brings me to the most troubling of Halperin's regrettable lines.

In assessing Drudge's headline, Halperin said: "(Drudge) thought it would be cool and hip, but he knew full well that it was provocative and racial. I'm not saying that that makes Matt Drudge a racist. What I'm saying is Matt Drudge knows how to tap into the sentiments of a lot of his readers."

Don't gloss over Halperin's revolting charge here. Who does Halperin mean by Drudge's "readers"? He isn't talking about himself or his fellow liberal journalists, who visit Drudge as the CIA would surveil domestic terrorist cells. He means -- plain as day -- conservatives.

And what is he saying about us conservatives? Simply that as the bigots he thinks we are, we are ripe to be roused to racially charged fear and anger and other forms of disapproval against Obama if we observe him displaying anger.

What abject and offensive absurdity! Speak for yourself, Mark, my boy. We don't need anyone telling us how or what to think. To begin with, your entire premise is wrong. Obama isn't even close to being angry. He's feigning anger for political purposes, and anyone with half a wit, including us right-wing Cro-Magnons, can tell the difference.

I don't deny that Obama scares me and evokes other negative sentiments in me and millions of others. But not one of those sentiments has anything to do with his skin. They have to do with his destructive agenda.

Mark: Your unwarranted leap into racial hysteria is simply a reflection of your own warped sentiments. You should holster that wagging finger and refrain from fomenting racial discord that you only pretend to decry.