Guilty (15 page)

To avoid having to admit that the only thing that had changed about Bill Clinton was that the media were no longer lying for him, reporters began postulating a series of ludicrous explanations for why their earlier descriptions of him were so different. The most ambitious of these Rube Goldberg–type stretches of the imagination was Pur-dum's suggestion that it was perhaps “his quadruple-bypass surgery.” Purdum noted that friends say “Clinton has never been the same.” Yes, who doesn't know someone who, after open-heart surgery, suddenly became an egomaniacal, pathologically lying horndog? Clinton was exactly the same as he had always been.

But in an exciting new development, the establishment media began to notice the Clinton attack machine. Maybe the mainstream media had had open-heart surgery! In the entire eight years of the Clinton administration—through the attacks on Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Paula Jones, Linda Tripp, Ken Starr, the fired White House Travel Office employees, and the “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy”— there are only 28 documents on Nexis with the words “Clinton attack machine.” But in the six months before Hillary dropped out of the primary campaign against Obama, Nexis records 54 mentions of the “Clinton attack machine.” The same people who loved the Clinton attack machine when it was used against Republicans cried foul when it was turned on the new fair-haired boy B. Hussein Obama. It was hard to decide what was more fun—watching liberals discover the Clinton attack machine or watching Hillary discover affirmative action.

You can tell which candidate the Media Attack Machine has anointed the favored candidate by seeing which one gets treated like the biggest victim. Instead of asking the beloved Obama any tough questions, the media asked the Golden Boy to comment on Republicans'
attacks—imagined attacks that hadn't materialized yet. Referring to Obama's admitted past drug use, Tom Brokaw's question to Obama was “Aren't the Republicans going to come after you on that?” (Obama: “You know, they already have.”)
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Or consider the questions asked of presidential candidates appearing on CNN's
Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer
during the most crucial phase of the 2008 primaries (January for the Republicans and May for the Democrats). Excluding pointless chitchat, the first question asked of all Republicans—as well as disfavored Democrat Hillary Clinton—was a tough question about the economy. The angel Obama was asked if he was prepared for the Republican assault. As Blitzer himself described the coming interview, “And is he ready for an onslaught from the Republicans? Some tough questions for Senator Obama.”

THE MEDIA USE THE IDEA OF A REPUBLICAN ATTACK MACHINE to bury negative information about a Democrat without actually refuting it. Whenever there's a glitch in the matrix and the public is accidentally exposed to actual facts about a Democrat, the media go to DEFCON 4 to neutralize the negative information with hysterical denunciations of Republican attacks.

Obama supporter Steven Cohen, public administration professor at Columbia University, warned, “It's clear how the Republicans are going to attack…. They're going to try to make him out like he's some kind of Middle East left-wing crazy.”
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Obama had said he would meet without preconditions with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a mad Holocaust denier with a messianic complex trying to develop nuclear weapons. (Plus he has some other ideas that are just plain nuts.) Obama also said that, as president, he would immediately withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq. As the cherry on top, Obama had been endorsed by the Islamic terror group Hamas. Weren't those facts voters should be told?

On
The Charlie Rose Show,
Joe Klein of
Newsweek
said, “Republicans are going to want this to be about guns and about God and about homosexuality and all the other things.”
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Why shouldn't Republicans talk about those things? Those are at least actual issues, as opposed to having to listen to liberals fret about Republican attacks in every media outlet twenty-four hours a day.

Democrats have staged an all-out war on guns, God, and marriage. Liberal judges have banished any allusion to a higher being from the public square. They even ban the Pledge of Allegiance periodically because it mentions “God,” whoever she is. Democratic legislators have enacted restrictions and all-out bans on gun ownership. Obama himself had dismissed gun owners and people of faith, famously sneering that they “cling” to God and guns because they're “bitter.” And those sneaky Republicans were threatening to quote him!

Judges appointed by Democrats have forced gay marriage on the nation despite Americans' repeatedly rejecting the idea at the ballot box. Liberals treat the Boy Scouts like a hate group because they refuse to employ gay scoutmasters to take adolescent boys camping in the woods—a policy the Catholic Church wishes it had thought of years ago. In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court barely upheld the Boy Scouts' First Amendment right to exclude gay scoutmasters—in a 5–4 ruling. That same year, Democratic congresswoman Lynn C. Woolsey introduced a House bill to revoke the Boy Scouts' nearly century-old congressional charter
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and a Boy Scout troop was booed by the delegates at the Democratic National Convention.

Klein's statement is the equivalent of the Japanese complaining on December 8, 1941, that the Americans “want to make this about Pearl Harbor.”

Just a few weeks before Jeremiah Wright's greatest hits collection hit the airwaves, Obama had said, “I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial.”
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But once Americans got a taste of Wright's sermons, it turned out most people found them fairly controversial. The clips were not—as Obama's defenders initially said—taken “out of context.” What Democrats mean when they say something was “taken out of context” is that a third party heard it. That's the context: No one else was supposed to hear it. The Jeremiah Wright clips happened to have come from the Trinity United Church's own website, which was selling the videos as stand-alone gems from the Reverend Wright's oeuvre. Once it became clear that normal people were appalled by Obama's reverend damning America, denouncing “white arrogance,” and saying America deserved 9/11, Obama distanced himself from whatever voters didn't like, saying, “All of the statements that have been the subject of controversy are ones that I vehemently condemn.”
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And yet in his autobiography,
Dreams from My Father,
Obama wrote admiringly of the first sermon he heard the Reverend Wright give, in which the pastor blamed “white folks' greed” for “a world in need.” Obama said of this talk, “I felt the tears running down my cheek.” Indeed, he was so moved by the “white folks' greed” sermon, he joined the church immediately and even used the name of Wright's sermon, “The Audacity of Hope,” as the title of his second book.

These were legitimate issues about the man running to be the most powerful person in the universe. But all liberals cared about was whether Republicans would run ads about Obama's crazy pastor. Thus, the
New York Times
earnestly reported on April 23, 2008, “Yet Mr. Obama also faces challenges ahead: According to Republican Party officials, party members in North Carolina … are considering running an advertisement against Mr. Obama that highlights his ties to controversial figures like his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. That ad could have the effect of adding a racially divisive element to that Southern state's primary.”
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The North Carolina Republican Party ad
showed Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright screaming one of his classics: “God damn America!” The ad noted that two North Carolina Democrats had endorsed Obama for president and concluded, “Too extreme for North Carolina.”

Evidently it is not racially divisive to accuse the U.S. government of starting AIDS to kill blacks or to preach about “white man's greed” creating a “world in need.” It's only racist to quote a black man saying these things.

Liberals were ecstatic about the ad: The Republican Attack Machine had shown its ugly true colors! America's only fifty-three-year-old woman trapped in a man's body to host his own TV show, Keith Olbermann, called the North Carolina ad a “Republican hit job,” a “Republican smear ad,” and a “virulent racist anti-Obama ad.”
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Which I guess it was, if “hit job” is defined as “giving voters relevant information about a Democrat.” The Reverend Wright matter wasn't a smear, it was a fact: Obama attended Wright's church for twenty years, listening to what the
Times
itself called “racist oratory.”
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If he didn't grasp the hatred in Wright's sermons, let's just hope he pays closer attention during national security briefings than he did during twenty years of the Reverend Wright's church services.

Alas, despite liberals' terrific fear of John McCain and the Republican Attack Machine, evidently McCain was more afraid of the real attack machine: the mainstream media. He wasted no time in denouncing the North Carolina ad. Obeying the media's command that Republicans not mention any facts unfavorable to Obama, McCain said, “There's no place for that kind of campaigning, and the American people don't want it.” He promptly fired off a letter to the North Carolina Republican Party presuming to tell them not to run the ad.

Say, is it too late to nominate someone else for that “Who's the Biggest Pussy?” contest?

McCain even fired a “low-level staffer” who sent around a YouTube video on his personal Twitter account linking Obama to the Reverend Wright—Obama's own pastor, who married him, baptized his children, and gave him the title to his second book. “We have been very clear,” a McCain campaign statement said, “on the type of campaign we intend
to run and this staffer acted in violation of our policy. He has been reprimanded by campaign leadership and suspended from the campaign.”
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Rank-and-file Republicans began to fear an announcement from McCain that Reverend Wright would be joining his campaign.

Even faced with a Republican presidential candidate who stoutly refused to mention any negative information about his opponent in order to impress the media, liberals would not stop fretting about the Republican Attack Machine.

In the
New York Times,
Frank Rich paid the usual media homage to Obama by denouncing Hillary for “her ceaseless parroting of right-wing attacks.” More of a man than McCain, Hillary was not afraid to mention Obama's friends. Or as Rich put it, she launched a “barrage of McCarthyesque guilt-by-association charges against the media's candidate, portraying him as a fellow traveler of bomb-throwing, America-hating, flag-denigrating terrorists.”
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True, Joe McCarthy named only Soviet spies and their witting accomplices, but when liberals use phrases like “McCarthyesque guilt-by-association charges,” they mean something bad.

No one had accused Obama of guilt by association, but rather guilt
of
association—association with a bomb-planting, America-hating, flag-denigrating imbecile. Obama's pal Bill Ayers was cofounder of the domestic terrorist group the Weather Underground, which had bombed a dozen buildings, including the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, and various police stations. Ayers was utterly unrepentant, saying—in an interview published on September 11, 2001—that he wished he had set more bombs. In a 2001 issue of
Chicago
magazine, Ayers was photographed jumping on an American flag, and in another interview after the 9/11 attack, he said that this country makes him want to “puke.” Those are facts. I am sure liberals like Frank Rich would like to embargo discussion of their favorite terrorists, but Obama's friends were not being “portrayed” as “bomb-throwing, America-hating, flag-denigrating terrorists.” They
were
“bomb-throwing, America-hating, flag-denigrating terrorists.”