I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
The Emperor’s New Clothes
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For the longest time, I’ve had to sit and listen to everyone talk about how Obama is “post-partisan” and how he will “bridge the partisan divide”. This drivel went on all through the campaigning and the elections and even into the start of his presidency.
Now, half a year into his presidency, it’s gradually becoming obvious to everyone that this was a huge bill of goods sold by the press corps and the campaign… obvious to everyone except the press corps themselves.
The members of the press are like the last townspeople to admit that the emperor has been walking around naked all along, desperate to cling to their hysterical “post-partisan” story, rather than look stupid at their naïveté at having swallowed Obama’s bait, hook, line, and sinker.
As William McGurn points out in the Wall Street Journal, this deperate clinging of theirs takes the ugly form of some serious spin—some unique redefinitions of terms in the English language:
The redefinition started during the stimulus debate, but it really picked up steam late last month with David Axelrod’s appearance on ABC’s “This Week.” There the president’s chief strategist explained that a bill didn’t need Republican votes to be “bipartisan”; it was enough if Republican “ideas” were included. A few days earlier, Rahm Emanuel had offered reporters another redefinition, suggesting that a bill was bipartisan if people merely “saw the president trying” to get Republicans on board.
The president himself endorsed this redefinition during Rose Garden remarks delivered after a Senate committee passed a health-care bill on a strictly party-line vote. Perhaps only someone who truly embraces “the audacity of hope” could see healthy bipartisanship at work in the complete lack of GOP votes. Here’s how he put it: “It’s a plan that was debated for more than 50 hours and that, by the way, includes 160 Republican amendments—a hopeful sign of bipartisan support for the final product.”
Let’s leave aside specific complaints from Republicans, who note that the “Republican” amendments the president cited are mostly technical in nature. The larger point is that the White House’s new definitions of bipartisanship are just like the fake “jobs saved or created” numbers Mr. Obama used to justify the stimulus at a time when the economy was in fact shedding tens of thousands of jobs. And the press should call him on it.
Contrast this with the Democrats’ favorite villain, George W. Bush, who actually did pass a lot of true bipartisan bills.
Back when George W. Bush was in the Oval Office, the press routinely characterized almost everything he and the GOP Congress did as partisan. While it’s true that some parts of his agenda were passed on a purely partisan basis—most notably, the 2003 tax cuts pushed through the Senate with the deciding vote cast by Vice President Dick Cheney—this was the exception rather than the rule. In fact, many of the most far-reaching bills pushed by President Bush—the Patriot Act, the war-funding bills, No Child Left Behind, the Medicare drug benefit, etc.—were in the end passed with a healthy number of Democratic votes.
McGurn somes it up nicely as follows:
In itself, of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with opting to forgo bipartisanship support for the sake of getting your ideas through. That, however, is not what Candidate Obama promised. And just think how the debate would change if the press were to begin describing Mr. Obama in a way that seems reserved for Republicans: a highly partisan president pursuing a narrow partisan agenda.