by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
Advancing a Free Society<\/em><\/p>\n As usual, the mainstream media are getting wrong the significance of President Obama\u2019s release of his actual birth certificate. In the liberal-left narrative, the \u201cbirther\u201d issue was always evidence of the Republican Party\u2019s fringe kookiness: as the\u00a0Daily Kos<\/em>\u2019s Markos Moulitsas crowed, \u201cWhat better way to show how out of touch and irrational Republicans are than to rub this in their face?\u201d Moreover, according to\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em>\u2019s David Remnick, any questions about Obama\u2019s past are \u201ca conscious form of race-baiting, of fear-mongering,\u201d on the part of crypto-racists unwilling to accept a black President because of \u201cfear of the Other.\u201d But these juvenile ad hominem attacks can\u2019t illuminate, any more than releasing the birth certificate did, the truly significant issue \u2014 the media\u2019s complicity in leaving unanswered an unprecedented number of questions about the least investigated President in modern history.<\/p>\n The enabler and abettor of this studied indifference to the past life of the most powerful man on the planet has been the media. Partly this reflects their rank hypocrisy, the way they protest their Olympian objectivity and exalted status as the \u201cwatch-dogs\u201d of the republic, ever vigilant and ready to expose the secret abuses and machinations of the powerful, even as they shill for the Democratic Party and its various clients like trial lawyers, race-mongers, and public employee unions. Just compare the birther controversy \u2014 which the President could easily have defused three years ago by releasing the long-form certificate then \u2014 with the despicable, much more serious slander that claimed President George Bush knowingly lied about the presence of WMD\u2019s in Iraq, getting Americans killed just so he could enrich the oil companies and his corporate cronies.<\/p>\n Rather than dismissing the canard for the lie it was, the mainstream media abetted it. For example, they made a hero out of Joseph C. Wilson, whosemisleading<\/a>\u00a0and incendiary July 2003\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0editorial<\/a>, concerning Iraq\u2019s attempt to buy uranium from Niger, claimed that \u201csome of the intelligence related to Iraq\u2019s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat,\u201d and thus fueled the \u201cBush lied\u201d narrative. As for the Democratic leadership, they too endorsed and exploited this lie by attending the premier of Michael Moore\u2019s cinematic libel,\u00a0Fahrenheit 9\/11<\/em>, in June 2004. Former President Jimmy Carter further legitimized this vicious fantasy when he invited Moore to sit next to him at the Democratic National Convention. Imagine the hysteria from the media if a Republican ex-President had invited to his party\u2019s convention someone who had viciously libeled a sitting President. The liberal disdain for swamp-fever conspiracy fantasies indulged by knuckle-dragging cretins mysteriously disappears when the target is a conservative.<\/p>\n This double standard generated by ideological bias has left much of Obama\u2019s life in the shadows, thus inciting the continual questioning of those obscurities. Nor does it help that the President continues to refuse to release other information that could put all these allegedly paranoid fabrications to rest. Given that the media have gushed so much over Obama\u2019s intellectual brilliance, why not release his undergraduate transcripts or his LSAT scores? The refusal to do so merely deepens the suspicion that there is something to hide. The same holds true for his medical records. If all these suspicions were merely the fruit of right-wing paranoia and racism, as the liberal commentariat claims, wouldn\u2019t a release of all pertinent documents settle the nonsense once and for all? Didn\u2019t a liberal icon once say \u201csunlight is the best disinfectant\u201d?<\/p>\n We can understand Obama\u2019s reticence, even if we are unclear about its motive. What is more disturbing is the media\u2019s refusal to apply the same scrutiny to Obama that they inflict on all other major political figures. Of course, politics accounts for this sudden delicacy about the lives of politicians. Anything that might damage the media\u2019s champion will be ignored if possible, and rationalized or downplayed if not. But something else is at work here \u2014 the old race-politics tactic of meeting any and every criticism of a black politician with the charge of racism. Good liberals that they are, most reporters cannot bring themselves to write anything that might bring down the wrath of the race lobby and its attendant boycotts and denunciations. Better simply not to investigate anything that might reveal Obama to be something less than the leg-tingling messiah the mainstream media have fabricated, peddled, and protected for several years.<\/p>\n So add to the political double standard the racial one neatly summarized in Remnick\u2019s reductive statement quoted earlier. What is a legitimate investigation of a conservative white politician is \u201crace-baiting\u201d in the case of a liberal black one. Both double standards reflect a dereliction of journalistic duty, and provide further evidence that the mainstream media are now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party.<\/p>\n \u00a92011 Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society As usual, the mainstream media are getting wrong the significance of President Obama\u2019s release of his actual birth certificate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,145],"tags":[12,207,165,1036,1044,93,527],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-Rm","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":694,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-potemkin-president-disintegrates\/","url_meta":{"origin":3308,"position":0},"title":"The Potemkin President Disintegrates","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 18, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine After nearly four years in office, the tinsel and cardboard persona of Barack Obama is starting to fall apart. The political unifier who claimed, \u201cThere is not a liberal America and a conservative America \u2014 there is the United States of America,\u201d has been\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Punditry"","block_context":{"text":"Punditry","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/punditry\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6693,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/for-obama-nothing-succeeds-like-failure\/","url_meta":{"origin":3308,"position":1},"title":"For Obama, Nothing Succeeds Like Failure","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 30, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 Rasmussen reported last Friday that 52% of likely voters approve of Obama\u2019s job performance. This number is both astonishing and depressing. The avalanche of Obama\u2019s failures both domestic and foreign should have buried this presidency months ago. Yet despite the slow-motion implosion of Obamacare\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1138,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/its-the-president-stupid-the-referendum-on-barack-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":3308,"position":2},"title":"It’s the President Stupid: The Referendum on Barack Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 10, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com The people have spoken, and what they have said concerns more than just the wrong-headed policies the Democrats have inflicted upon us in the past few years. This election was never just about policy \u2013\u2013 it was also about Barack Obama and the repudiation of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":602,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-medias-racial-prison\/","url_meta":{"origin":3308,"position":4},"title":"The Media’s Racial Prison","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 31, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine Two incidents last week suggest once more that our confused, hypocritical, and politicized notions of race and relations will play a huge role in the presidential election. In the first, Virginia state senator L. Louise Lucas, part of Obama\u2019s \u201cTruth Team\u201d campaigning for the president\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. 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