Marvino Guardino

So many distractions

Michael Scherer has a piece in Time Magazine’s Swampland blog criticizing Senators Dodd and Conrad for accepting favorable rates from mortgage lenders. (Better than listed rates, but not crazy better.) He thinks that just because one of the Senators oversees the Senate Banking Committee, that Senator should hold himself to some kind of higher ethical standard—like not to accept sweetheart rates from an entity he regulates. This is like asking the Senator not to be a Senator. Why would he do that? Turn down financial favors? Crazy talk.

I do think there are two important issues in the piece, however, worth examining. At the least, there are questions worth asking.

1. Why do all the well-regarded newspapers and magazines have a “blog” section? Either the piece is part of the magazine/newspaper or it’s not. That it’s published online isn’t the point. I think these “blogs” are a way of avoiding payment (or at least regular scale payment) to journalist-bloggers and at the same time a means of accruing additional costsaves by not bothering to edit, fact-check, or proofread the content. This would be in a different way than their not bothering to edit, fact-check, or proofread all the other content they publish elsewhere on paper or the Web. Big publishers fail to edit, fact-check, or proofread that content in a far more expensive and elegant manner. Seems to me.

2. Why do all the well-regarded newspapers and magazines not think that anyone notices how inherently biased towards Obama their reporting (or “blogging”) is? Scherer’s first line: “The endless and insufferable presidential candidate guilt-by-association game may have finally led to a big story.” This line is worth looking at because he ain’t talking about McCain’s coverage.

a. It would be helpful if he added a little color, a touch of clarification: is he referring to the “distractions” caused by the Right Reverend Jeremiah Wright, noted racist and hate-monger? Bill Ayers, renowned anti-American terrorist? Model businessman, Tony Reszko? Or, does he refer not to Obama’s associates at all, but to McCain’s? People like…like…uh, yeah. Must be Obama’s.

b. Should it not matter to the Press and to the public that this scurvy lot includes Obama’s closest friends and advisors? Barry’s strength and majesty are so great as to wash away any of the (putative) sins of his henchmen? My, his power is great indeed.

c. Has the “endless and insufferable” nature of the campaign not been facilitated by the sheer volume of Obama’s poor choices in friends and advisors?

Our point today really isn’t about Senator Dodd (but to echo Scherer…what was he thinking???), but is about the Press’s attitude, and indeed Obama’s own stance, prohibiting the questioning of any of Barry’s statements, frequent gaffes, or filthy associates. Any critical or probing examination of Obama is a distraction. Pulls our attention away from his message of hope and change. We are not worthy to loose the sandal of his feet. So don’t ask.

Johnson resigns...Times gets a couple of facts wrong. No big.

So Jimmy J.’s out and Barry O. “accepts” this removal of “distraction.” What Obama wants, actually, is more distraction. He needs anything to happen that will distract people from looking too closely at his sleazy political and personal connections.

Glenn Reynolds warns that Johnson will be back once the commotion dies down.

In an interesting yet hardly surprising lapse of fact-checking, the L.A. Times notes Johnson’s sweetheart deal with Countrywide gratis his “Friend of Angelo” status. That part's accurate.  The Times then describes Angelo Mozilo as “the former head of Countrywide.” [The Times spells his name incorrectly as “Mozillo.”]

Check your calendars guys: Mozilo is still Chairman and CEO. BofA hasn’t signed the deal yet.

Isn't there something creepy about Maureen Dowd?

Maureen Dowd whines today in the New York Times that Republicans have or will begin “Mincing Up Michelle” Obama now that the Clintons are out of the picture. Dowd spent a great deal of time during the past few months “mincing up” Hillary Clinton, but that was different—Hillary is a monster. Michelle is apparently the creepy holy virgin to Barack’s infallible savior. Dowd says:

“There are creepy Web sites, like TheObamaFile.com, dedicated to painting Michelle as a female version of Jeremiah Wright, an angry black woman, the disgruntled, lecturing “Mrs. Grievance” depicted on the cover of National Review.”

Couple of problems here:

1. Michelle has thrown herself into the campaign and made it known that she has opinions. As she’s entitled. Having jumped into the fray, however, every one of her opinions are open to scrutiny, worthy of comment, and may be disagreed with. Vigorously. (There’s a weird rhetorical thing going on here, I think. She has opinions, and isn’t that great, but do not dare call her on any of them. I think there’s some reverse, left-handed sexism there.)

2. Michelle like Barry sat in Wright’s church for 20 years, and brought her children to hear his racist screeds. Quitting the church now doesn’t erase this history—BTW, has Michelle quit also? Or just Barry? Taking your daughters to this church is not “loving parenting.”

3. Michelle’s sinecure and pay raise following the successful delivery of earmarked funds is creepy.

4. There’s plenty more.

According to Dowd, this is all off limits.   Almost like Bill Clinton was hired as a consultant to the campaign and came up with another brilliant policy:  Don't ask, don't notice.

Media Bias, Where is Thy Sting? Ouch! There It Is.

So desperately desiring senior statesman status, Bill Clinton just can’t get his media coverage out of the gutter. Todd Purdum writes in his Vanity Fair piece that ‘Bill Clinton's personality had changed since his 2004 heart bypass surgery and said that there were reports of Clinton "seeing a lot of women on the road."’ CNN quotes President Clinton describing Purdum as a “scumbag” for writing “five or six blatant lies” and using unattributed quotations in his piece.

Sigh… Poor Bill. Poor Hillary. The media favors Barack and has had a mini-field day slamming the Clintons. No kidding. But there’s always been so much material to use when the game is slamming the Clintons—they insist on making it easy. We just wonder: does an ex-President attract a better class of groupie than the trash Bill pulled into his gravitational field as a sitting Governor and President?

The Same Thing Again And Yet Different

HRC’s Bobby K. gaffe has been chewed up and spit out so much in the past two days that there can’t possibly be anything new to say about it. But that has never stopped me before!

The New York Times, always agenda driven, but until recently, more or less edited…unlike, say, the San Francisco Chronicle or the Washington Post—both essentially unreviewed blogs with budgets—has a piece on Saturday in its “blog” section (see, they admit it) called On the Road: Clinton’s Very Bad Day.

The lede:

“Friday might have been one of the worst days of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political career. Her campaign, as everyone knows, was already struggling. But on Friday, she made a reference to Bobby Kennedy’s assassination — a terrible choice of phrase in a presidential campaign that features an African-American candidate.”

You simply cannot write something like this in the NYT. It is overt race-baiting. This is a shocking paragraph—far more so than Hillary’s own, I admit absurd, reference to RFK. NYT commenter “Joe” asks,

“What does Obama’s race have to do with the word being used? Would Clinton’s remarks, which seem to be a minor gaffe (and I’m an Obama supporter), have not raised this silly uproar if it were John Edwards that was leading her in the campaign at this point?”

This is the dark soul of the left, safeguarded in an even darker, danker place in the depths of the Times’s office block. Hill’s placing herself (rather grandly), not Obama, in RFK’s position. Furthermore, Obama’s race has nothing to do with it. The Times should apologize to its readers and to Miz. C.

The Whole Truth (that fits the narrative) and Nothing But the Truth (that fits the narrative)

The New York Post on Saturday recapped for its younger readers RFK’s bio:

Robert Kennedy, the younger brother of President John F. Kennedy, was gunned down in 1968 after winning California's Democratic presidential primary.

The New York senator had been a hero of the left for his civil-rights agenda and his calls to end the Vietnam War.

1. The paper does not remind us of RFK’s support for, and close association with, and active collaboration with, that icon of the left (but not in a good way), Senator Joe McCarthy, noted Commie hunter.

2. Nor does the paper mention that JFK (Άγιος Ιωάννης), brother to RFK, started our involvement in the Viet Nam war.

3. Nor does the paper mention that JFK appointed his own brother, RFK, U.S. Attorney General. Dare we imagine the reaction of the left had G.W. Bush appointed Jeb Bush Attorney General? (Awkward partly, of course, given that Jeb isn’t an attorney.)