The Media: Camp Followers For Barack Obama

Perhaps the only institution in America whose approval rating is
beneath that of Congress is the

media.

Both have won their reputations the
hard way. They earned them.

Consider the fawning indulgence
shown insider

Joe Biden with the

dripping contempt visited on outsider Sarah Palin.

Twice last weekend,

Biden grimly warned at closed-door meetings that a
great crisis is coming early in the term of President
Obama:

"Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack
Obama like they did John Kennedy. … Remember I said it
standing here if you don`t remember anything else I said
… we`re gonna have an international crisis, a generated
crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

A
"generated
crisis"? By whom?

Moscow?
Beijing?

Teheran?

This is an astonishing statement
from a chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who
has access to the same intelligence as George Bush. Joe
was warning of a crisis like the

Berlin Wall of July 1961, where

JFK called for a tripling of the draft and ordered a
call-up of reserves, or the
missile crisis where U.S. pilots like John McCain
were minutes away from bombing nuclear missile sites in
Cuba and killing the Russians manning them.

Is
Russia
about to move on the Crimea?
Is Israel about to
launch air strikes on
Iran“s nuclear sites?
What is Joe talking about?

If one assumes Joe is a serious
man, we have a right to know.

Instead, what we got was Obama`s
airy dismissal of Joe`s words as a
"rhetorical
flourish" and a media—rather than demanding that Joe
hold a press conference—acting as Obama surrogates
parroting the talking points that Joe was just saying
that new presidents always face tests.

Had John McCain made that
hair-raising statement, he would have been accused of
fear mongering about a new 9/11. The media would have
run with the story rather than have smothered it.

Contrasting McCain with his hero,
Joe

declared a few weeks back,
"When the stock
market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the
television and … said, `Look, here`s what happened.`"

Nice historical reference. Except
when the market crashed in 1929,
Hoover was president, and there
was no television.

Can one imagine what the press
would have done to Sarah Palin had she exhibited such
ignorance of history. Or Dan Quayle?

Joe gets a pass because everybody
likes Joe.

Fine. But Joe also has a record of
36 years in the Senate.

Has anyone ever asked Joe about

his own and his party`s role in

cutting off aid to

South Vietnam, leading to the greatest strategic
defeat in U.S. history and
the Cambodian holocaust? Has anyone ever asked Joe about
the role he and his party played in working to block
Reagan`s deployment of

Pershing missiles in Europe, and SDI, which
Gorbachev concedes broke the Soviets and won the Cold
War?

In the most crucial vote he ever
cast—to give Bush a blank check for war in
Iraq—Joe concedes he
got it wrong.

Is Joe`s record of having been
wrong on Vietnam, wrong in the Cold War, wrong on the
Iraq War, less important than whether Sarah Palin tried
to get fired a rogue-cop brother-in-law who Tasered her
10-year old nephew to
"teach him a
lesson"?

"I`ve forgotten more about foreign policy than most of
my colleagues know," says Joe humbly. Given his
record, it is understandable Joe has forgotten so much
of it.

Saturday, the
New York Times did a

takeout on Cindy McCain that

delved back into her problem with prescription
pills. Yet when Hillary`s campaign manager, Mark Penn,

brought up Obama`s cocaine use on
"Hardball,"
he was savaged by folks for whom the Times is the
gold standard.

The people apparently had a
"right to know" of Bush`s old DUI arrest a week before the 2000
election, but no right to know about how and when Obama
was engaged in the criminal use of cocaine.

The media cannot get enough of the
"Saturday Night Live" impersonations of Palin as a bubblehead. News
shows pick up the Tina Fey clips and run them and run
them to the merriment of all.

Can one imagine
"Saturday Night
Live" doing weekly send-ups of

Michelle Obama and her
"I`ve
never been proud" of my country, this


"just downright mean"
America, using a
black comedienne to mimic and mock her voice and accent?

"Saturday Night
Live" would be facing hate crime charges.

How do we know? When the
New Yorker ran
a
cartoon of Michelle in an Angela-Davis afro with an
AK-47 slung over her shoulder,
New Yorker
editors had to go on national television to swear
they were not mocking Michelle, but the
conservatives who have so caricatured Michelle and The
Messiah.

Is there a media double standard?
You betcha.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan
needs

no introduction to VDARE.COM readers;
his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book
is Churchill,
Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its
Empire and the West Lost the World,
reviewed

here by

Paul Craig Roberts.