I’m creating a place to collect the incidents where the mainstream media unfairly dumps on Obama.
I’ll start with this outrageous Washington Post article (and headline) slamming Obama’s proposed budget even while McCain’s proposed budge is much worse pursuant to non-partisan sources.
I'm also going to include McCain's campaign ads that contain clear lies. Such as this one, which is analyzed by the Obama staff.
Indeed, McCain's campaign ads contain so many obvious lies that I'm a bit surprised he's running them. One of his most recent ones condemns Obama for wanting "…more government spending, so fewer American jobs…." Huh? Apparently, when Republicans increase government spending to mail out "stimulus checks" it creates jobs, but when Democrats increase government spending (such as by creating jobs programs), it reduces jobs.
While channel surfing over the weekend, I caught a bit where one of the pundits seemed to be arguing in favor of the tax exemptions for the oil companies, by insisting that the oil industry only had 8 percent profit margin while the computer industry had 14 percent.
The sheer idiocy of this logic is astounding. Oil is a commodity, computers are durable goods. High oil prices have a downstream effect on everything that uses oil products in the production, packaging and distribution.
Touche, Grumpy and Niklaus. Where exactly is the left-wing media bias?
Here's another stick for the fire. I saw a recent McCain ad in which he supported giving tax breaks to corporations because he said it would "improve their productivity." Huh? Tax breaks neither increase nor decrease productivity, because productivity — output versus input — is purely a function of a company's daily operations. It improves only when employees work smarter and more efficiently — something that federal tax policy obviously doesn't influence.
I've seen, I believe, five McCain ads, and every single one of them contains at least one massive lie. Not little oversights or ambiguities, but massive lies that scream McCain's dishonesty.
BTW, speaking of corporate productivity, if you measure productivity on an *hourly* or *daily* basis, it turns out that European workers — even the French(!) — are more productive than American workers. Conversely, if you measure on an *annual* basis, American workers come out ahead. Why the difference? Europeans take longer vacations, so they tend to focus more on their jobs when they're at work. Americans live at work, so they tend to waste more time on a daily basis but produce more per year because they work more hours. Seems to me the European way is a smarter way to live.
Here's a report of a recent media attack on Obama, the attacking being done by true elitist Cokie Roberts:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/all-americ…
Here's a montage of many recent FOX "News" attacks on Barack Obama, created by Robert Greenwald.
Consider, also, this report on whether Barack Obama is the antichrist, by Vicki Baker: Here’s the link. http://dangerousintersection.org/2008/08/17/news-…
Now the AP is working hard to smear Obama. Keith Olberman took issue with the AP's recent account of Obama's acceptance speech:
Here's the full article.
Now that McCain has chosen a virtually unknown political novice as his running mate, it will be very interesting to see how the MSM reacts. I'm curious to see how far it bends over backwards to find nice things to say about the McCain-Palin ticket when there would appear to be very few respectful things to say about it. I'm also curious to see what will happen to McCain's television advertisements that try to brand Obama as "not ready to lead," when McCain's own VP choice is so conspicuously immature.
So far the best comment I've heard about the Palin choice is that McCain knows he's going to lose the election, so he simply decided to pick a young, attractive woman to campaign with. No doubt it will be a whole lot nicer than spending the next couple of months with Romney, Huckabee or Lieberman glued to his hip. But I do wonder how Ms. McCain will feel about this choice, given that John McCain has already dumped one wife for a newer model.
Grumpy: Here's what we know about Palin and Iraq:
In an interview with Alaska Business Monthly shortly after she took office in 2007, Palin was asked about the upcoming surge. She said she hadn't thought about it. "I've been so focused on state government, I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq," she said. http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/
Here's a more recent account of what Palin thinks, this one from two weeks ago. She knows nothing at all about the U.S. plan in Iraq. Listen to her own words and be amazed. http://thinkprogress.org/2008/08/29/plan-mccain-i…
grumpypilgrim said: "But I do wonder how Ms. McCain will feel about this choice, given that John McCain has already dumped one wife for a newer model."
It's an embarrassingly catty thing to say, but someone has to: McCain is being absolutely true to McCain. First two trophy wives, now a trophy Vice President. Clearly McCain has a "Trophy Vice" in more ways than one.
The choice of Palin reminds me of so many other Republican appointments of incompetent people: Brown (FEMA), Miers (Supreme Court), Quayle (V.P.), the list goes on.
Further to Edgar's comment, chauvinism seems to be a trait of many men of McCain's generation. In their era, women were expected to be homemakers, were chosen for their looks, and were expected to obey their husbands. Which brings up another issue that troubles me about McCain's choice: to what extent did McCain choose Palin with the expectation that she would, for lack of a better expression, shut up and stay in the kitchen? I have no doubt in my mind that if Biden thought Obama was wrong, he'd say so. But what about Palin? We already know McCain has a volatile temper, and that he can be especially condescending toward women (he reportedly once used the "c" word in public to refer to his wife), so what sort of dynamic could we expect to see between a President McCain and Vice-President Palin? Does anyone seriously think McCain would listen to her or take her advice about anything, especially given that so many of McCain's campaign ads have tried to brand Obama as "not ready to lead"?
No, the best explanation I've heard so far for McCain's choice comes from progressive radio talk-show host Ed Schultz, who observed, "If this isn't pandering, I don't know what is." Palin is a hard-core, far-right-wing, evangelical Christian who supports prayer in school, believes in creationism, and absolutely opposes abortion. Palin is McCain's way of playing the exact same trump card that got George W. into the White House: if you can energize evangelicals to come to the polls, then their votes, plus those of mainstream Republicans, just might be all the votes you need. Palin is window dressing designed to appeal to America's Christian extremists, many of whom would have otherwise seen no other reason to vote in November.
For those interested, here is a more extensive analysis of McCain's V.P. pick:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/12997/. It mentions one thing I didn't know: McCain and Palin are almost total strangers to each other. They've apparently only met one time and only spoken to each other twice, the second time being when McCain called her last Sunday to ask her to be his running mate. It will be interesting to see how McCain defends himself against charges that his choice was purely a political move that gave no consideration whatsoever to whether his V.P. would be competent to step into the role of President. It will also be interesting to see what analysts and humorists say about McCain's choice — for instance, Jay Leno observed last night that McCain's choice might have been about an old guy with health problems choosing who will be by his side to administer mouth-to-mouth when he collapses. It's also interesting that, if he wanted a woman, he didn't pick Condoleezza Rice.
Then again, for all we know, all those other folks that McCain could have chosen might have turned him down. Being one of two candidates in a landslide election loss probably doesn't enhance a person's future political prospects.
Glenn Greenwald:
The very notion of the "Liberal Media" is one of the most inane myths in American politics — something spat out and repeated in the lowest right-wing sewers for so long that it has become conventional wisdom — but Halperin's frequent vouching for that myth, in his role of "journalist," illustrates all one needs to know about him. The media's contempt for both John Kerry and Al Gore was matched only by their reverence for George Bush's swagger. The first several months of media coverage this year was dominated by Jerimiah Wright, lapel pins, bowling scores, Bittergate and elitism. And it is highly unlikely that there has even been a time in American history when the media was as subservient to Government as they were during the Bush era. It's literally hard to imagine a claim that ought to be more discredited in general than the notion of the "liberal media" and its "anti-Republican bias."
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/09/03…