Guilty (25 page)

The sex club allegations also made
NBC Nightly News,
ABC's
Good Morning America, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,
and NBC's
Today
Show.
International papers were ablaze with the story—the same newspapers that were supposed to be so bored with old-fashioned American sexual mores during the Clinton administration. The
Daily Telegraph
(London) billboarded, “Republican Took Actress Wife to ‘Kinky Sex Clubs.' ” Newspapers across Illinois, naturally, were demanding Ryan's scalp.

It took gutless Republicans about thirty seconds to dump Ryan as their candidate. You'D have thought Ryan had been caught attending Jeremiah Wright's church the way Republicans shunned him. Four days after Judge Schnider unsealed the Ryans' divorce records, Jack Ryan dropped out of the race.

Republicans tossed aside a spectacular candidate because of uncorroborated allegations in sealed child-custody records so that Republicans could prove that they weren't just picking on Clinton, who had molested an intern in the Oval Office, was credibly accused of raping Juanita Broaddrick, asked Paula Jones to “kiss it,” and committed a slew of felonies to cover it all up.

Illinois Republicans used the excuse that Ryan had “lied” when he assured them there was nothing to worry about in his divorce files. A “lie” is one explanation. Another explanation is that Ryan believed that implausible, not particularly scandalous, allegations in divorce files were not, in fact, anything to worry about. In a world of sane people, they wouldn't have been. Did she claim he beat her? Did she claim he molested their child? Did she claim he hired prostitutes? Did she claim he cheated on her? Did she claim he was friends with William Ayers? No, no, no, no, and no. In a he-said-she-said dispute in a nasty custody fight involving a lot of money, Jeri Ryan accused her husband of propositioning her in a nightclub.

And that's how we got Barack Obama, boys and girls. In the Senate race that gave him a national platform, first his Democratic primary opponent and then his Republican opponent were dispatched by the media's digging up dubious claims from sealed divorce records. Obama's Republican opponent was replaced by Alan Keyes, a man of great integrity with zero aptitude as a political candidate, and— surprise!—Obama won. This was a feat roughly equivalent to my beating Elizabeth Taylor in the hundred-yard dash, then demanding that everyone call me “the world's fastest human.”

In the few days before Ryan dropped out of the race, Obama nobly proclaimed that voters were more interested in the issues than in Ryan's divorce—though his comments were negated, to some degree, by the plastic “Mr. Spock” ears he was wearing at the time. “And so,” Obama said, “it's just not something that we've emphasized or we're planning to comment on.” It's easy to be magnanimous when the media vanquish your opponents for you.

Now fast-forward to the summer of 2008, when Sarah Palin appeared out of nowhere and posed the first serious political threat Obama had faced in his life—that is, other than his 2000 campaign for Congress, which he lost. Obama was running for office, so, according to schedule, someone's divorce records would have to be unearthed. This was the third attack on an Obama opponent that involved digging up divorce records. Instead of announcing that he would meet with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions, Obama should have admitted his secret plan:
First, we find out if Mahmoud has ever been divorced….

The divorce records in this case were not Palin's; she was not divorced. Reporters were instead poring through the divorce records of Scott Richter, a former business partner of Palin's husband, for evidence that Sarah Palin had had an affair with him, as alleged in the
National Enquirer.
²²

As a friend of the Palins, Richter tried to seal the divorce records after Palin was chosen as McCain's running mate, correctly anticipating that reporters would be descending on Alaska looking for dirt on Palin and her associates. (Would that Tony Rezko had been as nervous!) The court denied his request to seal the divorce records and the media pounced on them. Sadly for the press jackals—and Obama—there was no mention of Palin in the Richter divorce records. Not only that, but Richter's ex-wife, Debbie Bitney, told
Us Weekly,
“I can tell you this with 1,000 percent certainty, Sarah Palin never had an affair.”
²³

Poor Obama. No messy allegations from a divorce file would help him this time.

Moreover, contrary to the Palin “enemy” quoted in the
Enquirer,
who said that Todd had discovered the affair and ended his relationship with Richter, the divorce records showed the Palins still shared a
vacation property with Scott Richter. It turned out Mr. Richter was the wronged spouse—Sarah Palin's only involvement in the affair was to fire the man having an affair with Richter's wife. To his credit, the fired adulterer defended Palin's decision, telling the
Wall Street Journal,
“I understand why I had to go. I accept that. I was in the governor's office and a trusted adviser. I betrayed that trust by not being forthcoming about what was going on in my personal life.”
²⁴
In Alaska, even the sinners are saints.

In a major profile of Palin, the
New York Times's
entire summary of this incident was to say that Palin “fired [the man] after learning that he had fallen in love with another longtime friend.” There was absolutely no mention in the Newspaper of Record that this glorious love story stomped on by Ebenezer Palin involved a couple who were both married to other people at the time.
²⁵
He fell in love, so the mean governor fired him. There are lies, damn lies, and the
New York Times.

Lying by omission is not the only way the establishment press slanders Republicans. In a form of respectability-laundering, the
New York Times
has energetically promoted all the left-wing websites that were gustily retailing the demonstrably false Palin affair story.
Salon, Gawker,
and Pam's House Blend, for example, were all hot on the trail of the
Enquirer's
(false) story about the Palin affair
²⁶
—some noting that “in fact the
Enquirer
is surprisingly good at reporting on these kinds of stories, and it has a decent track record with them,” as an article in
Salon
put it.
²⁷

The establishment media treat these liberal websites like their mistresses, lending them credibility on their lunch hour, but claiming not to know them on the holidays when they publish outrageous lies about conservatives. Pam's House Blend, a “news site for the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community,” gets about thirty-eight visitors a month, but merited a front-page story in the
Times's
Sunday Style section.
²⁸
The
Times
has cited liberal website
Salon
hundreds of times and
Gawker
more than a hundred times. At least those sites get between 1 and 2 million visitors a week—in part thanks to the
Times's
incessant flacking. But so does the conservative website FreeRepublic, which has received fewer than two dozen mentions in the
Times
—all of them identifying FreeRepublic as a conservative website. With more
than twice as many visitors as either
Salon
or
Gawker,
even the Drudge Report has received only as many mentions as they.

So while the Old Gray Lady kept its hands clean from the most scurrilous slanders about Sarah Palin, it used the left-wing nut websites as its cutouts to do the dirty work. True, no one can say the
Times
printed accusations that Palin had had an affair. But websites avidly promoted by the
Times
did.

Contrary to the
Salon
article hailing the renowned accuracy of the
National Enquirer,
the
Enquirer's
track record varies depending on whether the target is a liberal or a conservative. The
Enquirer
has acquired undeserved credibility for its scandal stories on conservatives because its scandal stories on Democrats usually are true—such as Gary Hart's affair with Donna Rice, Clinton's affair with Gennifer Flowers, and John Edwards's affair with Rielle Hunter.

By contrast, the
Enquirer
is constantly running preposterous stories about conservatives, such as the Sarah Palin affair story, the banner reports about Palin's son vandalizing school buses—proved false before the juicy
Enquirer
story even hit the newsstands
²⁹
—the David Schippers affair story, the story of Rush Limbaugh's impending marriage to Daryn Kagan, as well as every detail of the Limbaugh prescription drug story, including the lurid tales of Rush skulking around parking lots to buy drugs and even which painkiller he was taking. Many people are under the impression that the
National Enquirer
is accurate but tasteless. When it comes to its stories on conservatives, it's just tasteless. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that a “key owner” of the
Enquirer
is prominent Democrat Roger Altman.
³⁰

THE SAME YEAR THAT THE ESTABLISHMENT MEDIA WERE BUSY opening sealed court records of Obama's electoral opponents, Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean refused to release even sealed gubernatorial records—you know, documents plausibly relevant to assessing his governing abilities. Dean said he'D prefer to “end the campaign than let the world see everything.”
³¹
The media went ballistic when it was discovered in March 2008 that State Department contractors had glanced at Obama's passport file. There were banner
headlines, breaking news reports on the cable networks, and even an ABC
Nightline
special on this shocking breach of privacy. The matter was quietly dropped when it turned out the passport files of John McCain had been breached, too. The media consider a passport file the very soul of privacy when a Democrat is the target, but the sealed divorce records of a Republican are fair game.

At least both Obama and McCain were running for president. When Ohio plumber Joe Wurzelbacher asked Obama the Redeemer a question, prompting Obama to casually reveal that he was a Marxist whose plan was to “spread the wealth,” state employees working for Democratic governor Ted Strickland set to work examining government files protected by law to find dirt on “Joe the Plumber.” At the direction of Obama supporter Helen Jones-Kelley, director of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, they searched tax records, child support files, and business license records for embarrassing information about a private citizen.

Soon government busybodies were jubilantly announcing that Joe the Plumber didn't have a plumber's license! This was shocking to people who are unaware that plumbers don't need licenses, owners of plumbing companies do. But that's not all: Joe the Plumber's name wasn't even Joe!!! His given first name was Samuel.
People just called him Joe as a nickname!
Clearly, this “Joe” character was one of those con artists who goes around taking advantage of decent people by impersonating a plumber.

And yet none of that changed the fact that Obama had still said he wanted to “spread the wealth.”

I think most people would rather have the government listening to their phone calls to see if they are terrorists than have the government designate them as “enemy combatants” for asking Obama a question. Government employees searched state databases for the specific purpose of destroying one citizen. If this sort of scrutiny were directed at a Pakistani immigrant training to be a crop duster pilot, everyone involved in the investigation would be fired and publicly humiliated. But Governor Strickland, also an Obama supporter, took no action against Jones-Kelley. To the contrary, he enthusiastically defended her.
³²

If it's open season on random American citizens, how about reporters?
Washington Post
reporter Dana Priest has revealed boatloads of classified national defense information over the years that has been extremely damaging to the War on Terror. For endangering all Americans, she won a Pulitzer Prize. I think it would be “interesting” to see the medical records of Dana Priest to find out if she's ever had an abortion. Can I get a peek?

The concept of “privacy” is respected solely to protect liberals. While President John F. Kennedy carried on an affair with a mob boss's mistress, Judith Exner, fed his mind-boggling drug addictions supplied by his own “Dr. Feelgood,” and brought whores to the White House to satisfy a dangerous sex addiction, the media aggressively covered it up, on the grounds that it was private. CBS's Dan Rather explained why most of the mainstream media buried Juanita Broaddrick's claim that Bill Clinton had raped her, saying, “When the charge has something to do with somebody's private sex life, I would prefer not to run any of it.”
³³
But Joe the Plumber, Jack Ryan, and Rush Limbaugh might as well be living in a police state for all their privacy is respected.

Oddly, the media never used their innovative “it might be interesting” argument to unseal the divorce records of John Kerry (Democrat), Joe Lieberman (Democrat), or Teddy Kennedy (Democrat). I'm not sure about the first two, but
Ted Kennedys divorce records not interesting?
I'm surprised they haven't been optioned by a major Hollywood film studio. With a string of drunk-driving offenses, adulteries, a night of boozing with his younger relations on Good Friday leading to a rape accusation against nephew William Kennedy Smith, and one dead girl to his credit, if anyone's personal life ever deserved looking into, it is surely the Fredo of the Kennedy family. But as far as the media were concerned, it was America's responsibility to deal with the Kennedy self-esteem problem. Kennedy's divorce was not deemed sufficiently “interesting.”