Right Wing Nut House

I would have thought by now that the Obama campaign would have figured out how to effectively attack Sarah Palin and bring her down a peg or two. But it appears that rather than take a studied, reflective approach to determining their best strategy for assaulting her, they have continued to flail about wildly, throwing everything against the wall and watching to see if anything sticks.

So far, no dice. They tried the old “smear and fear” approach but only ended up getting so many facts wrong while appearing mean and stupid that Palin skated merrily away, garnering sympathy for having to endure the baseless, outrageous lies and falsehoods about her family from the press and liberal blogs.

Their efforts to paint Palin as an extremist were even less successful. Even FactCheck.org referred to the charges that she cut funds for special needs children, banned books, endorsed Pat Buchanan, and belonged to the secession-minded Alaskan Independence Party as “sliming” Palin. She also does not support teaching creationism in public schools although she’s one of those “let’s allow the kids to debate evolution and creationism” folks that makes me want to throw my copy of Origin of the Species through the wall. And her pastor apparently believes that gay people can be “cured” - of what, I’m not sure except he might want to pray for himself so that God allows him to move forward in time so that he can live in the 19th century.

No word on whether Palin believes the same thing and until someone asks her, we won’t know. But don’t you find it a touch ironic that GOP efforts to tie Obama to his kooky preacher are met with cries of “guilt by association” by the left while it is apparently perfectly alright to make Palin’s preacher and his views fair game?

No matter. The Democrats seem to have realized the backlash created by their smears and have now tried a few other tacks - at least one of which has backfired almost as badly as the smears against her family.

I’m talking about “Troopergate” where Palin apparently pressured the Public Safety Commissioner to fire her state trooper ex-brother in law. The press tried to paint the entire matter as Palin improperly interfering in an internal police matter because she was being vindictive. Unfortunately for the Democrats, the truth came out about her sister’s ex drinking on the job, tasering his 12 year old stepson, and finally threatening her father’s life.

Funny how those details were included in stories about “Troopergate” as insignificant asides - or not included at all. At any rate, Palin may indeed be censured because technically, it appears she exercised influence where she shouldn’t have. The Democrat’s problem is that no one blames her for doing so because of the threats and the beastly behavior of the ex.

I note on Memeorandum that stories of “Troopergate” have disappeared entirely. They have been replaced by articles about how Sarah Palin is lying when she says she fought the “Bridge to Nowhere” which actually was a “Bridge to Somewhere” - specifically an island with 7,500 inhabitants. Palin says wants to use state funds to build it but a couple of years ago, she was singing a different tune:

“We need to come to the defense of Southeast Alaska when proposals are on the table like the bridge,” Gov. Palin said in August 2006, according to the local newspaper, “and not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.” The bridge would have linked Ketchikan to the airport on Gravina Island. Travelers from Ketchikan (pop. 7,500) now rely on ferries.

Apparently, she eventually did kick the residents of Southeast Alaska under the bus and oppose the bridge - but only after conservative bloggers had made it a cause celebre.

OMIGOD STOP THE PRESSES! A politician is exaggerating! Maybe even lying. I would find this a cause for concern if liberal bloggers and the media were one tenth - make that one one hundredth - as interested in Obama’s whoppers and exaggerations as they are Palin’s.

Face it guys. Politicians are liars. They lie for a living. They lie at the drop of a hat and will continue lying because it works. To suddenly acquire religion and decry politicians lying is an absurdity I didn’t think even the left was capable.

Only 12 year old children and liberals believe politicians like Obama which is why they can become so disillusioned with politics. When their heroes are shown to have feet of clay, they don’t blame their own naivete and child like belief in those who seek great power but rather they blame the “system” or they become even more infantile and blame their hero’s opponent for making him something less than what he purports to be. I’ve seen it for nearly 40 years and it never ceases to amaze me.

So the Plain fib about opposing the Bridge to Nowhere is getting them exactly that - nowhere. Josh Marshall is hopeful.

We’ve now had a week of blaring headlines and one-liners about Sarah Palin as the mavericky, pork-busting reformer from Alaska. But we seem to be witnessing the first stirrings of a backlash and a dawning realization that the ‘Sarah Palin’ we’ve heard so much about over the last few days is a fraud of truly comical dimensions.

The McCain camp has made her signature issue shutting down the Bridge to Nowhere. But as The New Republic put it today that’s just “a naked lie.” And pretty much the same thing has been written today in Newsweek, the Washington Post, the AP, the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday even Fox’s Chris Wallace called out Rick Davis on it. (Do send more examples when you find them.)

On earmarks she’s an even bigger crock. On the trail with McCain they’re telling everyone that she’s some kind of earmark slayer when actually, when she was mayor and governor, in both offices, she requested and got more earmarks than virtually any city or state in the country.

As you can tell, Josh has been using the Hadron Collider to split hairs about what constitutes Palin “fraud” and what is revealed as lefty hyperbole. Exaggerating accomplishments and diminishing negatives is a part of politics. Grow up Josh. Or better yet, be a journalist and start listing Obama lies and whoppers on your site. I won’t hold my breath for that.

Nor will I waste my time waiting for Marshall to list our “Change and Hope” candidate’s hundreds of millions in earmarks - some of which went to his political cronies and his wife’s employer. This doesn’t include using his influence while state senator to enrich his patrone, convicted felon Tony Rezko. These items seem to disappear into the ether between Marshall’s claim to be a “journalist” and the rank partisan stench that emanates from his blog.

But Josh has a weird habit of thinking that whatever people inside the beltway believe about an issue or a candidate that the rest of the country shares those attitudes. I daresay he will be greatly disappointed if he thinks that Palin’s convenient dodge about the BTN will resonate with anyone save his fellow lefties.

So far, nothing appears to be sticking to Palin that would destroy her or even lessen her popularity. And despite efforts to paint her otherwise, she appears to be a genuine reformer. And it is an historical fact that she ran against the establishment Republicans and won. The parsing of words, the effort to blow up the most insignificant appearance of impropriety into a major scandal, and the still whispered smears against her and her family have all failed to make a dent in Palin’s shining armor much less throw her off her white charger.

The ghosts of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley can rest easy now.

The two NBC news icons who for years consistently topped CBS and Walter Cronkite in the ratings and set a standard for political coverage unmatched since, no doubt would have been flabbergasted at the idea of a former sportscaster and unabashed liberal screamer being taken seriously as the anchor of the network’s political news coverage. That “experiment” is now over as Olbermann, along with his loudmouthed, ignorant sidekick Chris Matthews, have been tossed from anchoring political coverage on MSNBC.

Thankfully, both men died before Keith Olbermann began to run MSNBC. In this New York Times article, a staffer is quoted as saying what anyone could see; that the inmate was running the asylum; “They have banked the entirety of the network on Keith Olbermann,” said the staffer.

Any network news executive who would build political coverage around that shrill, partisan, conspiratorial-minded boob should first, have their head examined to see if there is any gray matter present and then summarily fired.

God knows what the worst imitator of Edward R. Murrow in history would have made of the wry wit and incisive analysis of a David Brinkley or the authoritative voice of knowledge and experience of a Chet Huntley. No doubt he would have given them short shrift since they wouldn’t have been in the tank enough for Barack Obama. And if he shared the stage with either of those two, he would have been exposed as … well, a former sportscaster who doesn’t know anything about politics.

But Olbermann didn’t need Huntley or Brinkley to reveal his ignorance. He does it on a daily basis all by himself, thank you. It still would have been priceless to see Brinkley - who was known to be brutal in correcting errors of correspondents on air during election night telecasts - throw a few wry observations about the role of a news anchor at the clueless Olbermann.

MSNBC was obviously trying to duplicate the success of Fox News and their sometimes biased news coverage that slants toward conservatives and Republicans. But what MSNBC President Phil Griffin just doesn’t get is that Fox News also does a lot of straight news programming as well with respected journalists like Brit Hume and Chris Wallace playing it pretty much down the middle most of the time. Instead, Griffin believes that all news should have an ideological bent: “In a rapidly changing media environment, this is the great philosophical debate,” he says.

This is pure baloney. There is nothing philosophical in trying to save newspapers or garner more rating point and please don’t insult our intelligence by pretending otherwise. This is a debate about the bottom line and whether it is worth the loss of integrity in order to pander to one side or the other. The idea is tempting because it is the way news used to be disseminated. In the days before radio and TV, newspapers and magazines as a matter of tradition were either Democratic or Republican organs. There were a few independent outlets but they were never as popular as the party rags that waged political war on the front pages of their newspapers. The publishers took great pride in their ability to move people through fear and smear tactics to vote for their preferred candidates.

This was in the day when large cities routinely had at least a dozen or more dailies - both morning and evening editions - and papers fought to sensationalize everything. The more partisan the slant, the more readers. And yet, there was also a healthy dose of straight news reporting as well - mostly on local matters. But very little news from Washington or the state capitol was unbiased.

Then around the turn of the 20th century, that began to change as the progressives sought to make journalism if not unbiased then certainly less partisan. The people responded by rewarding those publications that offered a more balanced view of politics with more success and gradually, the rank partisanship of most news outlets became less obvious and was generally confined to the Op-Ed pages.

The new medium of TV had barely any news programming at all and what there was of it consisted of a news reader sitting at a desk, facing the camera and largely reading wire service copy. Edward R. Murrow at CBS changed that, bringing in his “boys” who revolutionized radio journalism in the 1930’s. Murrow was even more liberal than Olbermann and made no bones of it on his show See it Now.

But Murrow had two things going for him that Keith Olbermann could never dream of having; integrity and an overriding sense of fairness. Where Olbermann was overheard during the convention trying to cut off a GOP strategist Mike Murphy with his “Let’s wrap him up” aside that was caught by a live mike, Murrow made it a point of immense pride that he gave equal time to the targets of his show. He saw the enormous potential power of TV news and felt that too much partisanship would destroy the credibility of the new medium.

But MSNBC’s Griffin thinks that this “great philosophical debate” over whether to throw journalistic integrity to the winds in order to improve the bottom line should be foisted on an unsuspecting public:

Mr. Griffin, MSNBC’s president, denies that it has an ideology. “I think ideology means we think one way, and we don’t,” he said. Rather than label MSNBC’s prime time as left-leaning, he says it has passion and point of view.

But MSNBC is the cable arm of NBC News, the dispassionate news division of NBC Universal. MSNBC, “Today” and “NBC Nightly News” share some staff members, workspace and content. And some critics are claiming they also share a political affiliation.

Indeed, Griffin thinks that simply putting Olbermann in the anchor chair defines the ranting nutcase as “unbiased:”

In May, MSNBC President Phil Griffin said in an interview that during live events Olbermann and Matthews “put on different hats. I think the audience gets it. . . . I see zero problem.”

But NBC News journalists, who often appear on the cable channel, did see a problem, arguing behind the scenes that MSNBC’s move to the left — which includes a new show, debuting tonight, for Air America radio host Rachel Maddow — was tarnishing their reputation for fairness. Tom Brokaw, the interim host of “Meet the Press,” said that at times Olbermann and Matthews went too far.

How an adult can look at Olbermann and see a non-biased observer is a mystery. Jennifer Rubin asks the same thing:

The Left has compared MSNBC to Fox, but the analogy has always fallen on exactly this point: Fox separated talk-show partisans (e.g. Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly) from news anchors and reporters ( e.g. Brit Hume, Chris Wallace) while MSNBC did not. This move is a small but essential corrective step.

From the outside one can easily ask, “What took so long?” But the temptation to give into bullies and to seek some small ratings/monetary advantage is great. It is no easy thing to say “enough” and somebody –or somebodies — at MSNBC/NBC did just that. But whether this is part of a greater course correction, one that will be reflected in more than a shuffling of the anchor chairs on the deck of the MSM Titanic remains to be seen.

When even the sane left agrees that Olbermann as anchor was a loony idea, you realize the titanic blunder made by Griffin and other MSNBC execs. Jeralyn Merritt:

Sure, it was his and Matthews’ abysmal coverage of the primaries that ensured millions of viewers wouldn’t be back. But it’s more than that. Who wants to watch an hour of Keith Olbermann’s opinions, backed up by reporters and pundits selected only because they share his view? It’s no different than watching Laura Ingraham or Lou Dobbs.

Good for MSNBC for recognizing, however belatedly, that news coverage of live events like debates and election night, should be anchored by journalists with an assist from pundits on both sides. They shouldn’t be the main event.

Ron Chusid:

Having Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews anchor political coverage was often more interesting than the other networks, but it was, to be mild, journalistically flawed. This especially proved to be a problem as the reputation of MSNBC also affected the reputation of NBC. The New York Times reports that Olbermann and Matthews are to be removed as anchors for the remainder of the coverage of the election.

Matthews, who at times seemed to be trying to match Olbermann’s partisanship, never belonged on an anchor desk either. But at least he knows something about politics. Watching Olbermann’s painfully amateurish and simple minded “analysis” was actually funny at times. He seemed like a little boy who had wandered by accident into the after dinner gathering of adult men who were smoking cigars and drinking Courvoisier while talking talking politics and world affairs. He was wearing short pants in a long pants world.

David Gregory, who will take over the anchor duties for the debates and election night, is an improvement but hardly someone who has demonstrated fairness in his coverage of the campaigns. But he has an excellent grasp of politics and the issues and should at least give the viewer the benefit of some expert analysis.

Meanwhile, one wonders how MSNBC can get its soul back. A good start would be to fire Griffin and bring in a genuine news executive. After all, Griffin is the man who gave Keith Olbermann his head and allowed him to run the NBC News brand into the toilet. Someone should pay for that or the ghosts of Huntley and Brinkley may haunt the network for eternity.

These are the days that I truly hate the internet and how it has affected our politics.

Don’t get me wrong. The “Jesse Jackson ate Obama’s testicles” story is a lot of fun to write about - as you can tell already. And I make no claim to being above it all when it comes to latching on to an internet feeding frenzy and participating in these Bloggasm memes.

But really now, just what is this story about? Does anyone seriously believe The Good Reverend is going to withdraw his support from Obama or work one whit less energetically to get him elected? Can anyone possibly claim this has any relevance whatsoever to the campaign, any issue of the campaign, or is even tangentially related to presidential politics?

Of course not. This is basically a story about a racialist who sees an ascendant Obama as a threat to his little white guilt extortion racket and expressed his frustration at the fact that if Obama is elected, it will be harder to maintain his position in the African American community and hence,  the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed.

Electing Obama will not prove there is no racism in America. But if Obama continues to push themes of personal responsibility for African Americans and if he continues his efforts to alter the cultural bias against obeying the law, staying in school, and getting a good education, the days of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and the rest of the Victimhood Society being able to afford $2000 suits and live high off the hog will be numbered.

Taking responsibility for one’s own life be it accepting the obligations that come with fathering a child or staying away from drugs and the poisonous culture of gangs is a liberating experience - the last thing that the Jacksons and Sharptons of the world want. Absolute dependency on government for African Americans is their ally and any efforts to throw off that oppressive yoke threatens their raison d’être.

But back to Jackson’s mock threat to make a eunuch out of Obama. Or, more accurately, make Obama more of a squish than he already is. Here is Jackson’s colorful sotto voce threat while being filmed by Fox News and, unbeknownst to Jackson, a live mic:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson apologized Wednesday for saying Barack Obama is “talking down to black people” during what Jackson thought was a private conversation before a FOX News interview Sunday.

Jackson was speaking to a guest at the time about Obama’s speeches in black churches and his support for faith-based charities. Jackson added before going live, “I want to cut his nuts off.”

His microphone picked up the remarks.

Here’s a link to the video.

To emphasize “cutting off” the remnants of Obama’s manhood, Jackson actually gave a slight “stick it to ‘em” fist pump as if he relished the idea of taking a rusty blade to said body part. One wonders in more private venues what body parts he would look forward to removing from someone like President Bush or one of the group of writers and reporters who have delved into his personal and professional life to reveal the Good Reverend as nothing more than a philandering bunko artist.

And no one has chronicled the outrageous activities of this charlatan better than Kenneth Timmerman whose unauthorized biography of Jackson revealed shocking facts not only about The Good Reverend, but also his enablers in business and government who were terrified of Jackson’s threats of being branded “racist” for not giving in to his extortion schemes.

Shakedown” chronicles in excruciating detail what Jackson is all about:

As Timmerman’s chronicle makes explicit, there were few if any things that Jackson failed to exploit for monetary value. The book’s title, Shakedown, refers to the process by which Jackson would “shake down” or extort corporations for money, threatening to call for a boycott of their products by black Americans unless they provided a certain number of jobs to minorities and made hefty donations to Jackson’s various non-profit organizations. Fearful of being labeled racists and becoming embroiled in public relations scandals, many corporate CEO’s gladly acquiesced to Jackson’s demands, doling out funds and rewarding Jackson’s business “partners,” usually wealthy black businessmen, with lucrative jobs. Left out of this process were ordinary black men and women, the ones whose collective power to boycott lay behind Jackson’s threats.

One particularly obvious “shakedown” occurred in 1999 when Jackson’s organization Rainbow/PUSH opposed the proposed merger of telecommunications giants AT&T and TCI, claiming that the companies had a “questionable employment record.” AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong instructed his company to donate $425,000 to the Jackson-controlled non-profit group, Citizenship Education Fund [CEF]. Jackson’s opposition to the merger was immediately halted. Then, when the bond deal between the companies was announced, Armstrong personally requested that the small black-owned investment bank, Blaylock & Partners be named co-manager of the record-breaking deal. Blaylock personally benefited to the tune of $1.4 million from the deal, “its biggest deal ever.” Blaylock’s CEO, Ron Blaylock then gave Jackson a $30,000 donation.

While the shakedown of AT&T benefited Jackson and Blaylock, it did nothing for the ordinary men and women on whose behalf Jackson was supposedly acting when he inquired about the “questionable employment record” of AT&T and TCI. “Jesse was brokering deals for a closely knit black elite, and it rankled many black businessmen who never made it into his inner circle-either because they refused to contribute to Jesse Inc. or because they simply weren’t big enough to count,” writes Timmerman.

One can see how an Obama presidency might cut into Jesse’s racketeering by empowering those “little people” beyond anything Jackson has ever delivered. So while Jackson feels a certain obligation to campaign for Obama and place his candidacy in a political/historical context, he doesn’t have to like it. Those “faith based initiatives” would really put a crimp in Jackson’s, Sharpton’s, and others ability to soak corporate American and hold up Congress for funds.

That’s the backstory but where’s the connection to Campaign ‘08? It isn’t there and you won’t find any. The story got legs simply because Jackson used a street metaphor to express his feelings about Obama moving in on his bailiwick by offering an alternative to the African American community on how they can find a seat at the American table.

Jackson and his friends feel the heat. And yet they don’t dare submarine Obama’s candidacy lest they be revealed as the charlatans they truly are. So they hang around the fringes of the Obama campaign until they say something outrageous like Jackson did the other day. Then we get the non-apology for causing a non-distraction at a non-event.

Remind me again why I’m writing about this…?

Last week when the Heller decision came down, Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley suggested that the states should repeal the 2nd amendment.Now those of us fortunate to live in Chicago or its beautiful suburbs and ex-urbs have gotten used to hizzoner’s moods. Daley can be sarcastic in front of reporters and can usually be counted on to deliver at least one colorful quote.

Whether he really means it when he says we shoud tear up the Constitution is suspect. Daley, who came out of the womb a politician (his father Richard J. Daley was Mayor of Chicago for two decades), no doubt realizes it would be political suicide to even suggest such a stupid thing.

Then there’s the Chicago Tribune. While Daley might have as excuse for proposing the wipe out of gun rights in that he was emotional about what will probably happen to a similar law in Chicago, the Trib has no such reason for what they write here under the headline “Repeal the Second Amendment:”

No, we don’t suppose that’s going to happen any time soon. But it should.The 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is evidence that, while the founding fathers were brilliant men, they could have used an editor.

Funny, I was going to say exactly the same thing about the Trib - which makes the rest of their editorial all the more ironic:

Why is it the default position of the anti-gun crowd that allowing law abiding citizens the opportunity to defend themselves will place them in greater danger? The illogic - on its face - of this position is astounding.The gun control crowd readily admits that handgun bans like that struck down in DC and soon to be history in Chicago do not, in the slightest, prevent criminals from getting guns. All the handgun bans do is keep them out of the hands of law abiding citizens who wish to use the weapon for self defense - against criminals who can get guns regardless of what stupid law is passed by idiot politicians.In short, where is the logic in saying citizens who are now able to possess handguns legally are in more danger from criminals who could always get handguns regardless of what law was on the books?

This article originally appeared in The American Thinker

As if awakening from a long, languorous slumber where dreams of the perfect liberal being comfortably ensconced in the White House made it impossible for the press to get up, rub their eyes, and return to the real world, it seems that the American media has finally decided to start treating Barack Obama with a little of the curmudgeonly cynicism that has been the hallmark of political reporting in this country for much of its existence.

The press likes to think of themselves as the “Fourth Estate” - the gatekeepers who protect American democracy from the ravages of crooked pols, greedy businessmen, religious charlatans, and most especially, unqualified presidential candidates.

Of course, many of my fellow conservatives don’t think of the press as the “Fourth Estate” as much as they see the media as a “Fifth Column,” deliberately undermining American policy abroad and either ignoring or savaging conservatives at home.

But that judgment may be too harsh. Overall, the press may hold liberal positions on the issues but their real failure lies in their total insularity from views different than their own.

Bernard Goldberg:

The problem is that there is a bubble that these media elites live in. They live in it in Manhattan & Washington. It’s a very comfortable bubble and they almost never run into people inside it who have differing points of view. They can go through a whole day, a whole week, a whole month, without running into someone who has a differing view on the big social issues of our time…

If you take into consideration how consolidated the media is today and the fact that most local newspapers and TV networks depend on the big boys for national and foreign news reporting, you can see how just a handful of insulated liberals can affect the way news is reported across a wide swath of the American media landscape.

So it is not surprising that the glowing, almost worshipful coverage of the Obama campaign would have powered the Illinois senator through the primaries to a now virtual lock on the Democratic nomination.

But as Howard Kurtz points out, the dynamic of press coverage has now changed:

After more than a year of mostly glowing coverage, Barack Obama is having to defend his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his temerity in not sporting a flag pin, even his arugula-loving, bad-bowling, let-me-eat-my-waffle persona that fostered what Newsweek has branded “the Bubba Gap.”

“The media have decided to get tougher on Obama,” says St. Petersburg Times media critic Eric Deggans. “There was so much talk about him getting such an easy ride that some journalists got tired of it.”

And the catalyst for this turnabout came from a very unexpected source; a couple of skits on the old political warhorse TV show Saturday Night Live. The bits were devilishly clever, playing to the idea that the media was in the tank for Obama - something almost everyone in America was aware except the media itself.

The February 23rd show was actually mentioned by Hillary Clinton in the Cleveland debate as proof that the press was biased toward her opponent. Those skits may have been one of the most impactful political satires in decades. Not since Chevy Chase’s bumbling portrayal of President Ford has a TV bit entered the political consciousness of the country.

The press was stung to the quick and began to look for opportunities to stick it to Obama. They didn’t have long to wait when the Jeremiah Wright fiasco exploded onto the scene in mid-March. Seeming to make up for lost time, the press latched on to the Wright controversy and began to question Obama’s judgement and beliefs - long overdue according to some:

Still, says David Greenberg, a Rutgers University professor of journalism and history, the coverage could be far worse. For journalists, he says, “there has been a real infatuation with Obama that has served as almost an unconscious restraint” as many became “taken with the idea of demonstrating their tolerance and America’s tolerance by electing a black candidate.”

What loosened those restraints, Greenberg says, was the media’s conclusion that Obama had virtually wrapped up his nomination fight against Hillary Clinton. “It’s backwards — the toughest scrutiny should come while it’s still a real fight,” he says.

Obama’s image has undergone something of a transformation. In March, feeding the curiosity about his background, a Newsweek cover story focused on “When Barry Became Barack” in college, while a Time cover profiled the candidate’s mother. By last week, Newsweek’s cover piece was exploring why he seems “strange,” “exotic” and, to some, “haughty” and “a bit of an egghead.” How did Obama, cast by some journalists as the new JFK, come to be depicted as what the New Republic’s John Judis says may be “The Next McGovern”?

What does it say about a press that waits until the candidate has the nomination virtually sown up before pouncing on his vulnerabilities? I think any reasonable person can conclude that they’ve got the process back asswards. Aren’t they supposed to vet the candidate while there is still a competitive race going on? And the fact that they haven’t played their traditional role of gatekeeper with Obama (closing the gate after the horse has gotten away) is significant.

That and the fact that all of this is happening 7 months before the election in November means that Obama - a gifted and inspiring figure to many - can still recover and beat McCain in the fall. One wonders if Reverend Wright would have received this kind of coverage in October.

My guess is no, he wouldn’t have been a big issue in September or October. Nor will Tony Rezko make an appearance between the time of the Democratic convention and election day. And I doubt we’ll be hearing too much about William Ayers and his flag stomping, terrorist ways either.

All of that will rightfully be seen as old news by then - that is, unless new information surfaces that would show Obama to be a liar as far as the extent of his problem associations have been. Whether such information is out there to be reported I have little doubt. But the only place you are going to see Wright damning America come the fall campaign is in a GOP 527 ad.

In short, the press may not be as puppy-dog worshipful as they were a couple of months ago. But their basic feelings about Obama don’t show any signs of changing. Witness the panting over his March speech in Philadelphia where he denounced what Wright was saying but not the man. It was hailed as one of the greatest political speeches in history. The press was just looking for an excuse to forgive him and they found it in Obama’s post-racial vision of America.

Then just last week, the press once again praised Obama to the skies for “distancing himself” from Wright - rarely asking the obvious question of why he couldn’t have done so the previous month in “one of the greatest speeches” of all time.

Yes the press has taken a more aggressive tack in covering Obama. But at the same time, they are still bending over backwards to excuse, to explain away, or, as in the case of the William Ayers story, simply ignore Obama’s lies about how well he knew him.

For these reasons, I don’t think we can say that the press still isn’t in the bag for Barack Obama. They may like McCain as well but does anyone really believe that when the campaign narrative is developed this fall that John McCain will be seen by the press in a positive light? It will be Barack Obama to America’s rescue, riding on a black and white horse but with the head of an elephant and the tail of a donkey. He will be the post-racial, post partisan candidate just as he was always meant to be.

Just as the press wants him to be.

Jeremiah Wright? Who’s he?

If you are referring to Barack Obama’s no-longer-controversial-because he’s now-an-ex-pastor-millstone-around-the-neck-of-his-campaign misanthrope, I will let others say what’s been repeated ad infinitum about the situation. After my PJ Media piece yesterday, I have little to add to the discussion although I was mighty tempted to do a connect the dots post on the notion that the two old friends cooked the whole thing up and staged this little break up for the press. Both are now chortling over how they put one over on whitey and Wright is already writing the invocation for Obama’s inaugural.

So if it Wright you seek, you must go elsewhere. Instead, we have a moral crisis in America with which we must deal - a crisis where money, sex, rock ‘n roll, and one 15-year old megastar of a little girl who has been shamelessly exploited by her parents, her handlers, her corporate daddy, and an industry where “morals” is a word uttered with contempt and derision.

Miley Cyrus is a cute-as-a-button little girl who plays the wildly popular Hannah Montana on the Disney Channel. It’s a neat concept; Miley Stewart is a mild mannered, typically awkward high school kid by day and rock star Hannah Montana at night. She has all the typical problems of a young girl developing the first flush of womanhood; boys (non-sexual, almost platonic yearnings), food, shopping - in short, everything that the target audience of 9-13 year old girls look forward to and dream about when they fantasize about being a teenager.

The complication of being a rock star also plays to these little girl fantasies involving acceptance and glamour. In short, the show is a relatively harmless piece of fluff that also stars Miley’s father, one hit wonder Billy Ray Cyrus (”Achy, Breaky Heart”). He is a buffoonish but loving dad who, of course, doesn’t understand teenagers.

The show has spawned a financial empire worth more than some small countries. Records selling in the millions, a Best of Both Worlds concert tour and movie, a clothing line, dolls - the whole Disney treatment. Let’s not forget that this is the company that took a non-descript little mouse and made him into a worldwide icon, beloved of billions of children and adults.

Last year, little Miley raked in $17.2 million for herself - not a bad haul for a 15 year old kid with marginal talent. And what makes this story so incredible is that the guys with the green eyeshades at Disney believe that her career hasn’t taken off yet, that it is the next two years where the Miley Megamarketing Bonanza is expected to detonate on the American cultural landscape and a mother lode of money descend upon the corporation like manna from, well, Montana. For Disney, a troubled company in recent years, Miley Cyrus has been a godsend.

There’s only one small problem with this happy picture; the entire Miley enterprise rests precariously on the boney shoulders of a 15 year old girl and an absolutely, impossibly squeaky clean image of the star and her family. Like an upside down ziggurat balancing on a knife’s edge, one wrong move - one slip - and the whole edifice can come crashing down around their heads.

An overstatement? Earlier this year, Consumer Reports Magazine noticed that Miley and her father did not buckle up after getting into a car during the filming for Best of Both Worlds. In a blog post “Note to Hannah Montana: Seat belts are a necessity, not an accessory,” the consumers group criticized Miley for not setting a good example for her legions of fans by not buckling up.

The news nets picked up the story and ran with it. CNN, MSNBC, Fox, all devoted an entire news cycle to the “controversy.” Social scientists weighed in. Traffic safety groups had their say. Billy Ray actually felt compelled to issue an apology blaming the press of film making for his egregious error.

Disney execs fretted that the porcelain doll image of their little creation would take a hit. And while there was plenty of criticism from the busy bodies of the world, the seat belt controversy quickly died for lack of oxygen. After all, how long can you milk a story about absolutely nothing? Even the geniuses in cable news were hard pressed to come up with anything original to say after two or three days.

But there is trouble in Mileyland today as the young lady finds herself embroiled in a very grown-up controversy. And the issues raised by this imbroglio go to the heart of American morals, American culture, and the increasing sexualization of children to gratify adult desires.

A photo spread of young Ms. Cyrus in Vanity Fair turned into what can only be called a porn shoot. The shocking picture of little Miley in the altogether wrapped in a bedsheet to hide her breasts has thrown the muti-billion dollar Disney company into a panic and has angered parents groups, child welfare organizations, feminists, and millions of parents who saw the all-American image of Miley Cyrus as a godsend - a counter to the raw sexual images their kids are bombarded with every day.

Disney tried some immediate damage control with a statement from Ms. Cyrus:

“I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed,” Miley said in a statement. “I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.” The most controversial of the images, which appear in the June issue of Vanity Fair, is the classic, “Guess what I just did” pose, showing Miley apparently topless, with a silk bedsheet gathered around her chest, her hair and lipstick mussed. In other shots, Miley is draped languidly across the lap of her father, country singer Billy Ray Cyrus.

The link to the Time website shows the offending picture. As for the others, you can find them yourself I’m sure. I don’t usually link porn at this site but this is a special case.

And pornography it is - child pornography as defined by statute. It is the deliberate posing of a minor to elicit sexual feelings in adults. The photographer - the award winning, brilliant and creative Annie Leibovitz - can tell us her photos of Cyrus represents “art” from now until the cows come home but that won’t change the reality of how those photos are viewed by the law.

Leibovitz will probably skate because of her reputation. But it raises the question; where in God’s name was her father? Her Mother? Her handlers? Surely anyone with half a brain would have seen enormous trouble with the publication of these photos.

It turns out, the Miley camp is spinning a tale of serendipity where the photo was set up and shot while everyone else was looking the other way or manged to be somewhere else. Miley herself is a little more sensible, issuing the statement of apology above (no doubt drawn up by fainting executives at Disney).

We’ve all seen the clothes little girls are wearing these days; the bare midriff tops, the skin tight jeans, the obsession with showing as much skin as possible. Why this is so goes to the heart of the culture wars - the idea that children are not impressionable beings with ill-formed social and intellectual gifts but rather just little adults.

Kids as young as 11 or 12 take part in sex parties where sexual acts are performed as a game. “Hooking up” - sex among friends without strings - is popular in teen circles. And why not? This is the culture to which they are exposed. Romantic ideals of sex and relationships are replaced by a soulless view of sex as some kind of release or duty.

No mystery. No emotional attachment, which some experts believe actually harm young women, some of whom will have difficulty in forming lasting relationships later in life. The question of when or if this madness will end is irrelevant. In a free society, it is the people who determine the limits of such things. And we have, as parents and concerned citizens, abandoned that responsibility and put it in the hands of people who have dollar signs in their eyes and exploitation on the mind.

To the skin masters of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, it really is a question of dollars and cents. And if parents of young girls don’t care enough to keep their kids from being caught up in this cultural cesspool, then perhaps we should stop blaming the purveyors of this crap and start pointing a finger at adults who are either too tired, to lackadaisical, or too cowed by their kids to put their foot down.

No one has covered these issues more regularly than Michelle Malkin:

The adults surrounding Miley Cyrus shamelessly abdicated their responsibility to protect her best interests. Mom and Dad got caught up in the Vanity Fair glam. Vanity Fair didn’t see a 15-year-old girl. They saw magazine sale dollar signs. And Annie Leibovitz saw skin, skin, skin and another notch in her belt.

The parents, grandmother, and teacher are not alone in shouldering blame. Shame on Liebovitz and the pretentious left-wing editor of Vanity Fair, Graydon Carter.

“Artists” and “literary magazine editors?” Nonsense. They’re the elitist version of Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis and his video camera operators, coaxing girls to take it all off–just with more refined tones and high-minded pretentiousness.

It is a constant, draining battle for parents to monitor their kids intake of everything from junk food to internet content. I sympathize. But giving in to your kid’s desire to fit in with the crowd by allowing them to walk out of the house dressed like a streetwalker is the wrong decision under all circumstances.

What happened to Miley Cyrus will not hurt her image - much. But by allowing their child to be exploited in such a public way, the parents of little Miley deserve all the disapprobation that comes their way. And I suspect that there are quite a few confused kids and parents out there right now, wondering whether the carefully constructed image of Miley Cyrus will be tarnished from here on out or whether the young lady can roll with this blow and come out unblemished in the eyes of her millions of fans.

Would the last person reading the New York Times please turn out the lights?

The following circulation compares the new data to the same period a year ago. Daily circulation is the Monday-through-Friday average.

* The New York Times lost more than 150,000 copies on Sunday. Circulation on that day fell a whopping 9.2% to 1,476,400. The paper’s daily circulation declined 3.8% to 1,077,256.

According to New York Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty, the company had budgeted for the declines in Sunday and daily circulation. Two-thirds of the Sunday loss stemmed from the elimination of bonus days and third-party bulk copies. Also: the paper had a single copy and home delivery price increase in July. The paper also focused on growing “highly profitable circulation,” she noted.

* At The Washington Post, daily circulation decreased 3.5% to 673,180 and Sunday dropped 4.3% to 890,163.

* Meanwhile, daily circulation at The Wall Street Journal grew a fraction of a percent, up 0.3% to 2,069,463 copies. At USA Today, circulation inched up 0.27%* to 2,284,219. (Correction: the original version of this story said USA Today’s daily circulation was up 2.7%.)

I guess people decided that they wanted to eat their Sunday breakfast without being interrupted by a wave of nausea after reading some typical New York Times bilge.

If this keeps up, the dinosaur media will become fodder for archaeologists and story tellers (”Once upon a time, Americans got their news by reading something we used to call “newspapers”…)

I am happy to see that the Times “budgeted” for this catastrophe although their attempt to put a prom dress on a pig falls pretty flat as you can well imagine. And I suppose by “highly profitable circulation” the Times is talking about their efforts to get their own employees to subscribe to the paper. Perhaps they can branch out and start a subscription drive that would target employees’ mothers. Now there’s an untapped resource ‘ole Pinch never thought of, I’ll bet.

Really, this is getting serious. What will us conservative blogs do if the New York Times goes under? Think about it. No more Maureen Dowd to reduce to tears. No more Krugman to fact check. No more Frank Rich to laugh at.

On the plus side, our national security will improve. But then at the same time, we will no longer be able to write towering denunciations of the perfidious louts who continue to publish our closely held secrets. How can any self respecting conservative blogger get by without the occasional foray into sanctimony that the Times so generously provides us?

So we here at The House have decided to start a campaign:

SAVE THE NEW YORK TIMES!

To all our readers, we ask you to subscribe or give generously to the Times just so that we have something to write about in the future. This site and others would grind to a halt if the Times went out of business so we are asking you to save the Times - and save the righty blogosphere.

I suggest we hurry. At the rate these guys are losing readers, Bill Keller will have to cancel the annual New York Times Summer Retreat in the Hamptons.

Note: Much of the above piece was originally published in The American Thinker

This is the very first thing I read after getting out of bed and before the coffee was ready. Needless to say, it was an eye-opener:

In his portrayal of our second president, Paul Giamatti creates a man perpetually dissatisfied, disgusted by the preening ambition of politics even as he is infected by it. If his relentless crankiness was a bit hard for some of us to take in early episodes, in the second half of the series it makes much more sense. While exhorting angry men to throw off the shackles of tyranny offers many opportunities for rhetorical fabulousness, setting up a new government is a bureaucratic nightmare, with oversized personalities disagreeing over things both petty and fundamental. George Washington (David Morse) so quickly tired of the infighting among his Cabinet and vagaries of public opinion that he stepped down from the presidency after a single term. “I know now what it is like to be disliked,” he says to Adams, his perpetually disliked vice president.

I literally had to read it three times before I convinced myself that it wasn’t the lack of coffee or the fact that sleep was still in my eyes which may have caused me to see something that wasn’t there. I briefly considered the possibility of an hallucinogenic flashback which was causing the letters on the page to re-arrange themselves into words that were not actually printed but imagined.

After dismissing all rational and irrational reasons for anyone above the age of 7 to make such a gargantuan error, the horror finally engulfed me; the Los Angeles Times has hired a 6 year old to write for them - a cost cutting measure sure to please their new owner Sam Zell but would probably not sit well with anyone who possesses an IQ above 60.

I felt compelled to send the following email to the author of this piece, a lass named Mary McNamara:

My guess is that you have received 5,000 emails telling you what every 1st grader in the United States knows - that Washington served two terms as president.

Oh well, not everyone can be a reporter. To take liberties with the quote from John Houseman in Paper Chase:

“Ms. McNamara, here is a dime. Take it, call your mother, and tell her there is serious doubt about you ever becoming a journalist.”

Rick Moran

A word here about the aforementioned Zell, owner of the Tribune Company as well as the Chicago Cubs baseball team. When last we left our hard charging, foul mouthed, bullying, media tycoon, he was busy trying to make himself the most unpopular business executive in the history of Chicago by proposing that the holy shrine of Wrigley Field (home of the hapless but lovable Chicago Cubs) undergo a slight name change. It seems that Sam wanted to open bidding among corporations for the honor of having their company name attached to the ballpark as is the custom for some other ballyards. Such elevating names as “Progressive (insurance) Park” in Cleveland or “US Cellular Field” across town, home to the White Sox, has garnered the owners hundreds of millions of dollars.

That Zell could be so ignorant of the passion that even non-baseball fans have for Wrigley Field in Chicago does not bode well for his efforts to resurrect the Tribune media empire. A poll taken by the Sun Times showed that 53% of fans surveyed would never attend a game at Wrigley Field if it were renamed.

So I wouldn’t put anything past Sam Zell. Perhaps he cut the fact checking department at the Times. Perhaps he had all reference materials like dictionaries and encyclopedias removed - or burned to save money on electricity. Maybe instead of 6 year olds, he hired J-school graduates who may be more expensive than children but demonstrate a similar understanding of the world and current events.

Of course, Patterico weighed in on this gaffe. The long suffering blogger who has forced himself over the years to read the Times while the rest of us riffed off of his excellent analysis of their foibles searches desperately for an explanation beyond pure, unadulterated, sublime ignorance on the part of McNamara:

Straining to give them the benefit of the doubt, I wonder: does the miniseries somehow portray Washington as having served only one term? I haven’t seen it, but I doubt it. [UPDATE: Make that “seriously doubt it.” See the UPDATE below.]

Lefty blogger Steve Smith, who tipped me to this, is beside himself with amazement at how they could get such a basic fact wrong. Go his post for his amusing cries of disgust, which conclude with this:

It’s enough to make a lefty sympathetic to Patterico. Does the fact-checker at the Times have to regularly drink water out of the toilet or lose their back teeth from subsisting on a diet of rocks to get that job?

I don’t know, Steve. But I hear they use the paper to housebreak him.

In defense of McNamara, she is, after all, an entertainment reporter. Her knowledge of shows I’ve never heard of and would never watch in a million years is extensive so perhaps she has filled her brain with so many facts about horrible television shows that it pushed out other, less relevant information like history and such. Or maybe important facts like the number of terms Washington served as president just oozed out of her ears while watching all of the drivel she evidently enjoys viewing to prepare for her scratching out her deep thoughts about a medium that insults the intelligence of anyone with half a brain who partakes in its idiocies.

Then again, she was writing about the success of the best thing on TV I’ve seen since Band of Brothers; the John Adams miniseries which is surprisingly literate, achingly accurate, and marvelously performed by Paul Giamatti in the title role. But if like many under the age of 30, she gets her knowledge of history from films and TV, I suppose it shouldn’t surprise us that she hasn’t a clue about how many terms Washington served as president.

As of 7:30 AM Pacific time, the error is still there, standing out like a huge zit on the face of a major metropolitan newspaper whose credibility - already in the pits - has been strained to the breaking point. One can imagine the fate of poor Ms. McNamara once Sam Zell hears of this stupidity. If I were her, I would make sure my resume is up to date and perhaps even look into that editor’s job at the Jackson Hole News.

At least if she makes a ridiculous error there, she won’t have more than a million Sunday readers and countless blogs pointing a finger in her direction and laughing like a baboon over her imbecility.

The left’s towering anger that exploded onto the internet after the Philadelphia Democratic debate is a little misplaced aggression in my opinion. The fact of the matter is, this is the kind of press the left created, nurtured, supported, and lionized for the last half a century.

The modern American media has its roots in the way news was first delivered over television. And the granddaddy’s of TV journalists - the men most responsible for the way that television, print, radio and now internet news operates in tone and content - were Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly.

In many ways, those two brilliant gentlemen, both with enormous professional integrity and a keen sense of the way that news was important to the American people, made it impossible to escape the “gotcha” mentality that would dominate the news landscape for the next 50 years. Friendly and Murrow were both classic FDR liberals - perhaps a little farther left in Friendly’s case - and saw the drama inherent in media confrontations as the best way to get eyeballs in front of the screen. Beyond that, Murrow especially was on a quest to destroy his ideological foes - and not just McCarthy who Murrow delayed skinning until the beast was already cornered and gravely wounded but also other cold war figures who he believed stood in the way of the naturally friendly relations with Soviet Russia we should be enjoying.

Nixon, Acheson, and the Dulleses were also damned by Murrow and Friendly and thus began a tradition in news reporting that continues to this day; savaging conservatives.

If you can name one prominent conservative figure of the last half century who has not been subject to the most unflattering, scathing, unfair and ultimately dishonest portrayal in the media then I will eat my skimmer. On the other hand, of course, the left has a pantheon of heroes from Kennedy to Kerry who have gotten the kid glove treatment from the press. Yes there was occasional criticism. But this was mostly pro-forma and somehow never quite made it into election campaigns. Curious, that.

The CBS Show “60 Minutes” refined this tactic using new technologies and added “ambush journalism” to the mix. Now it wasn’t simply a case of “gotcha” but also watching the target of the hit piece jump around like a bug on a hot griddle trying to avoid reporters running after them with camera and mike in tow. It made for wildly successful television and “60 Minutes” became the #1 show in the country for decades.

This is not to say that most if not all the subjects ambushed by “60 Minutes” didn’t deserve every squirming second they spent in front of the cameras. But one may have asked at some point, “Is this journalism?” Or is this a circus? The imitators came fast and furious on the other networks followed by investigative reporting outfits at both the national and local levels of broadcast news, radio, and finally newspapers. Much of the work done by these units was vital and necessary. But some of it was trivial and titillating rather than newsworthy. No matter. It all went into the great maw of the information delivery systems of the day and was swallowed up by the people.

The crowning moment for this news culture was Watergate. Ironically, at a point where this creation of the left reached its zenith, real journalists began to ask questions about the power of the press and the potential for abuse. But the pattern had been set and from then until now, news coverage of our politics has become more and more concentrated on digging for dirt and hopng to expose embarrassing facts about a candidate’s past which used to be the job of the political opposition but is now an obligation of the press corps.

The “gotcha” political culture is an outgrowth of all this. So why is the left complaining? They created this creature to devour their ideological enemies. Should they be so surprised that it has turned on them and is now devouring their candidate of choice in the most hotly contested primary race in decades?

Admittedly, both Clinton and Obama are sitting ducks. There literally is no one else to target at the moment. McCain is off in the shadows, largely ignored as Hillary and Obama gore each other. Also, McCain has something of a special relationship with many in the press that for the moment is allowing him to operate as he wishes. I imagine once the outlines of the general election race takes shape that will change and the press will be an equal opportunity destroyer. At least, that’s how it’s been in the past.

Not only are both candidates tempting targets but they themselves have given the press the ammunition to attack them. Hillary’s serial fibbing and Obama’s stammering excuses for his past problem associations have left the candidates wide open to the kind of “How many times have you beaten your wife today” questions that were asked by Gibson and Stephanopolous. Both journalists were doing their jobs - probing and prying, looking for soft spots. In Obama’s relationship with Ayers, they struck jello. And Obama’s dismissive answers as well as his comparing a Senate colleague to an anti-social domestic terrorist only served to highlight the candidate’s lack of understanding of why people might see a potential president of the United States being on a first name basis with Bill Ayers in the age of terror would be a shocking thing.

For those on the left who feel betrayed by the media, I would say don’t worry. By the time the leaves begin to turn the press will be back right where they always have been; standing shoulder to shoulder with the Democratic party and working to belittle, injure, and destroy conservatives and Republicans running for office.

UPDATE: Stupid Liberal Comment of the Decade

The comment by “Bobwire” I am reproducing below will cause any conservative in America to burst into laughter. I reproduce it and urge you to congratulate Bobwire on his perspicuity:

bobwire | bobnoxious@lycos.com | IP: 72.173.105.69

You have been pwned. You exist only as a button pusher.

I don’t get it. This is one time I agree with most of the left.

What is the big deal about Hillary’s schedule as First Lady?

Brian Ross, in a mindlboggingly stupid and inane article, breathlessly informs us that Hillary was in the White House when Monica Lewinsky was servicing her husband:

Hillary Clinton spent the night in the White House on the day her husband had oral sex with Monica Lewinsky, and may have actually been in the White House when it happened, according to records of her schedule released today by the National Archives.

An initial review by ABC News of the 17,481 pages of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s schedule as first lady, released today by the National Archives, also finds significant gaps in time and many days containing only “private meetings” at the White House with unnamed individuals.

The public schedule for Sen. Clinton on Feb. 28, 1997, the day on which Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress would become stained by the president, shows the first lady spent the morning and the night in the White House.

The Feb. 28 schedule lists her as attending four “drop-by” events, closed to the press, between 11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. and then records her as staying in the White House overnight that fateful day.

I can’t tell you how uninterested I am in knowing this information. It doesn’t even register on my Banal-o-Meter. In fact, I would say without qualification or hesitation that the knowledge regarding Hillary Clinton’s whereabouts on the day that her husband achieved a form of coital bliss with Miss Lewinsky is so far down the list of “Things I wish to know before I die” that I would have to live to be 108 to get to it. It doesn’t even top the query “Is bigfoot real?” or “What brand of chewing gum does Britney Spears chew?”

The Wall Street Journal tries very hard to outdo Brian Ross but ultimately fails because let’s face it, sex is a more enticing lede than murder/suicide:”

The day before Foster’s death, Clinton was in Southern California. She spent the morning at Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, touring the facility and meeting with students, then attended a luncheon in honor of Iris Cantor, the head of a foundation that supports, among other things, women’s health care. She spent the night at a hotel in Santa Barbara.

On July 20, 1993 — the day of Foster’s death — Clinton spent several hours conducting media interviews. She had a live appearance on the “Michael Jackson Show” (with the following rule: “Note: NO Call-in questions”), talked with the WAVE newspaper and later flew from Los Angeles to Little Rock, Ark.

That day, a Tuesday, Foster was reportedly found dead at a park in around 6 p.m. local time. According to her schedule, Clinton would have been in the air at that time (she wasn’t schedule to land in Arkansas for another two and a half hours).

Does this eliminate Hillary as a suspect? Or did she call Foster from the plane and give him the kind of pep talk given by Tom Hagen to Frank Pantangeli in Godfather Part II?

Tom Hagen: When a plot against the Emperor failed… the plotters were always given a chance… to let their families keep their fortunes. Right?

Frank Pentangeli: Yeah, but only the rich guys, Tom. The little guys got knocked off and all their estates went to the Emperors. Unless they went home and killed themselves, then nothing happened. And the families… the families were taken care of.

Tom Hagen: That was a good break. A nice deal.

Frank Pentangeli: Yeah… They went home… and sat in a hot bath… opened up their veins… and bled to death… and sometimes they had a little party before they did it.

I’m sorry to say that the Wall Street Journal failed to discover if such a scenario played out. Why they would think any person who doesn’t believe Vince Foster was murdered by the Clinton’s to shut him up would be interested in Hillary’s whereabouts on that tragic day is beyond comprehension. Perhaps someone should ask the Journal why they are pandering to people who believe in nutty conspiracy theories about the Clinton’s when there’s a financial crisis that could rock everyone in America’s world hovering like the Sword of Damocles over the country at present.

There’s more. We learn from the Washington Post that Bill basically stuck Hillary in a closet after the health care debacle, not giving her much to do and ending (we assume) that “co-presidency” idea that riled conservatives and cheered feminists during the campaign.

I would much prefer to have read about this in Cosmo or even Ladies Home Journal rather than the pages of our nation’s premier political newspaper. What “news” value it has isn’t registering at the moment. Anyone who followed politics at the time knew that Hillary’s role changed after the health care mess so for the Post to devote column inches to the definition of a “non-story” is astounding.

The Brits get into the act with The Guardian scolding Hillary for not being in the “War Room” when we attacked Serbia:

On the day that dozens of US cruise missiles rained down on Serbia in an attempt to punish Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the country’s onslaught against ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, first lady Hillary Clinton was far from the White House war room: instead she was touring ancient Egyptian ruins, including King Tut’s tomb and the temple of Hatshepsut. And on the day before the signing of the Good Friday agreement in Belfast she was at an event called “Hats on for Bella” in Washington.

In her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton has touted her experience in the Clinton White House as preparation to lead the nation in a time of crisis. “Ready on day one” has been her slogan.

But an initial reading of some of the more than 11,000 pages of Clinton’s schedules from her days as first lady, released today by the National Archives and the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library, shows that she was often far from the site of decision-making during some of the most pivotal events of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

The Guardian being something of a left wing rag, perhaps they are unaware of a modern invention known as “the telephone” or just “the phone” to us Americans. To the extent that Hillary Clinton could advise her husband, I am sure - like every other First Lady who has lived in the White House - she gave him the benefit of her thoughts on the matter. And something as momentous as going to war with Serbia, I would expect that Bill Clinton consulted her for at least her opinion on some of the political ramifications of the attack.

Does Hillary exaggerate her foreign policy “experience” in the campaign? Only the most rabid of Hillary partisans knows full well that she does so shamelessly. Is it news that she was out of the country during big foreign policy decisions and not in the “war room” with Dr. Strangelove and the rest of the “experts?” If you believe that Bill Clinton did not take advantage of consulting with the one person he was sure would tell him the truth about any action he would take, then you should sleep on the couch tonight. Shame on you for not trusting your wife.

With 18,000 pages to go through, I’m sure the press will come up with other vitally important stories on where the First Lady of the United States was and what was she doing during some of the more exciting events in the 8 years the Clinton’s ruled Washington and the country.

The only request I have regarding further revelations is that they be placed in the section of the newspaper most appropriate to their impact and importance:

The comics section.