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, picked up on it… but, yet, somehow still found a most bizarre way to “link” one of the perpetrators to none other than Sarah Palin, the liberals’ favorite scapegoat for everything.

The caption for one of their photos of Cpl. Jeremy Morlock reads, “Morlock was the kind of bad-news kid who the Army might have passed on. He grew up not far from Sarah Palin in Wasilla, Alaska; his sister hung out with Bristol, and Morlock played hockey against Track.”

What makes this entirely shameful and inexcusable is the sheer transparency of the stunt; any intelligent person reading this can clearly see that this insane soldier has absolutely nothing to do with Palin other than his geographic proximity to her, and ends up wondering what in the world the editors at Rolling Stone could be thinking? Are they deliberately trying to smear the reputation of their own publication?

This is so bizarre for so many reasons. First of all, is Rolling Stone implying that Sarah Palin has anything to do with this sadist simply because they come from the same town?  Is Rolling Stone therefore implying that Wasilla is a town of sadistic, crazy people?

Next is the fact that Wasilla is a very small town with a population of about 7,000 people.  So, the fact that they grew up “not far” from each other pretty much goes without saying in a town that small. So, too, is the high probability that they might have relatives who are friends with each other, or who might have played hockey against each other. I’m surprised that Rolling Stone had nothing to say about the church they might have attended growing up…

So, ultimately, not only is there no link to Obama in the same way the media was so quick to pin Abu Ghraib on Bush… but, they actually go so blatantly and outrageously far out of their way to somehow find some cockamamie way to connect someone involved to anyone on the right!

That this “news” is already popular on some foaming-at-the-mouth, lunatic left blogs is not too surprising. But, for Rolling Stone to join their rabid ranks is just a disgrace.

A disgrace not just for Rolling Stone, but—if left unaddressed and un-reproached—for journalism itself.

The latest news out of Afghanistan is going to be really interesting to follow, if only to see how the media handles it.

According to the Guardian and other (so far relatively few) sources, pictures have now made their way out of Afghanistan (courtesy of Germany’s Der Spiegel) showing brutal and psychopathic activities by U.S. armed forces over the last year or so, including premeditated murder (after torture) of defenseless Afghan civilians, posing with dead Afghans, and taking “trophies” from the bodies of dead Afghans (fingers, teeth, etc.).

In fact, speculation is that the backlash over these pictures “could be more damaging than after the Abu Ghraib scandal”.

For that reason, in comparing it to Abu Ghraib, it’s interesting to note that so far this is not in any of the U.S. media’s top headlines, as they were in the days of Bush’s presidency; that so far there haven’t been any fingers pointing at Obama as the commander in chief, as they were in the days of Bush’s tenure; that so far there hasn’t been any accusations of this being “Obama’s unnecessary war” despite his “promises” to get us out of the region, as there were in the days of “Bush’s ‘unnecessary’ war”, etc.

So, will the mainstream media treat Obama the same way?  Or will they employ their usual double-standard? The suspense is just killing me…

Maybe the mainstream media will surprise me… who knows. After all, stranger things are happening (like some Democrats calling for Obama’s impeachment)!

James Taranto relates a great Obama-Seinfeld comparison in today’s Best of the Web Today column on the WSJ site:

Reader Daniel Loomis sends along his capsule summary of “The Summer of George,” the eighth-season finale of “Seinfeld,” which aired May 15, 1997: “George uses his severance from the Yankees to stimulate the perfect summer–the ‘Summer of George’–but spends it playing frolf (frisbee golf), watching ‘The White Shadow,’ ‘investing’ in a recliner with a built-in refrigerator, taking midmorning naps, banging his head on tables, and having insignificant telephone conversations. Eventually, he ends up in the hospital having to relearn to walk.”

And here is Loomis’s capsule summary of “The Summer of Recovery,” the finale of the first full season of “Obama,” a midseason replacement that premiered to hype and high ratings but is now struggling and may face cancellation: “Barack uses his trillion dollar stimulus to create the best summer ever–the ‘Recovery Summer’–but wastes hundreds of billions on things like studies on how cocaine affects monkeys, investigating the link between yoga and hot flashes, bus-stop art, international ant research, and an upgrade to the statehouse and political offices in Topeka, Kan. Eventually, the economy ends up barely ambulatory.”

There are other parallels. Like “Seinfeld,” “Obama” is a show about nothing. Like George Costanza, Barack Obama is ending his summer with a fall, albeit a figurative plunge rather than a literal one. Oh, and Obama’s “Summer of Recovery” has actually turned out to be a summer of George, though we don’t mean Costanza.

“As Obama Struggles, Bush’s Legacy Recovers” reads the CBSNews.com headline on a picked-up Slate piece. Obama “is not consciously trying to improve the public’s view of the Bush years,” writes Slate’s John Dickerson. “Indeed, he is actively reminding people of the mess he inherited from his predecessor.”

The problem is that Obama’s leadership has been so ideologically extreme, and so politically and administratively incompetent, that every time he reminds us of his predecessor it makes Bush look good by comparison. Little wonder that a new survey of Ohio voters by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, finds that “by a 50-42 margin voters there say they’d rather have George W. Bush in the White House right now than Barack Obama.”

Last night, in an Oval Office speech, Obama said something nice about Bush for the very first time: “No one can doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security.” At one time, such an uncharacteristically gracious statement might have made Obama look good. But our hunch is that among those who bothered to watch the speech, a common reaction was: I miss having a president whose support for our troops, love of country and commitment to our security no one could doubt.

The show must go on. The network is committed to another 2½ seasons of “Obama.” If the star is hoping for renewal after that, he could do worse than to study another “Seinfeld” episode about George Costanza: “The Opposite.”

James Taranto, in his WSJ Best of the Web Today column last week, commented on Mayor Bloomberg’s asinine comments regarding the Ground Zero Mosque:

Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, has an op-ed in today’s New York Post defending the Ground Zero mosque. Actually, the Post informs us, it’s an adaptation of “Bloomberg’s prepared remarks for his annual Ramadan celebration at Gracie Mansion yesterday.”

It is a low performance. Bloomberg panders to his audience by slandering the two-thirds or so of Americans who take offense at the idea of a fancy new mosque near the site of an Islamic supremacist atrocity:

Islam did not attack the World Trade Center–al Qaeda did. To implicate all of Islam for the actions of a few who twisted a great religion is unfair and un-American.

The substance of this statement is unremarkable: Obviously it is wrong to implicate all of Islam in the 9/11 attacks.

But the mayor employs scurrilous McCarthyite rhetoric in an attempt to inflame emotions and divert attention from a point that should be equally obvious: The Ground Zero mosque planners have implicated themselves by seeking to exploit the symbolism of the site, whatever their purpose is in doing so.

Taranto points out one obvious flaw in Bloomberg’s statement: that the mosque supporters have essentially inserted themselves into the controversy by the very fact that they deliberately chose the site of the mosque solely based on the symbolism of the site and the opportunity to exploit that symbolism. THAT is why we are targeting them, and NOT simply because they are Muslim.

Another entirely different flaw in Bloomberg’s statement that I have yet to see anyone pick up on is the fact that Bloomberg simply shifts the blame from “Islam” to “al Qaeda”.

Using Bloomberg’s own logic for defending “Islam” in that ridiculous statement, one could just as easily say that it wasn’t all of al Qaeda who attacked us on 9/11; it was only those 19 hijackers! So, if he wants to be so technical about over-generalizing, why is he careful not to attribute the attacks to “Islam” (in whose name they were carried out), but not similarly careful when  attributing them to al Qaeda (also in whose name they were carried out)?

Ultimately, if one truly wants to be “fair” about it, one should do the judging not by religion or organization, per se, but by affiliation. In other words, anyone who affiliates themselves with individuals who publicly support such terrorist attacks should be equally condemned. As George W. Bush succinctly stated: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” It’s that simple.

So, if those behind the Ground Zero Mosque have been known to be affiliated with terrorists or supporters of terrorists (as has been widely reported), then it doesn’t matter whether they are with “al Qaeda” or with “Islam” in general. They chose to be with the terrorists, and they don’t belong in this country, let alone at Ground Zero.

Just when you thought there wasn’t anything left to blame on Bush and Cheney (since they’re even blaming the weather on them these days), here’s the idiotic motherjones.com web site (which ironically bills itself as “smart fearless journalism”) with this ludicrous headline:

How Bush-Cheney Policy Screwed Haiti

I wonder if Bush-Cheney is also responsible for the apparent excrement  for brains at that site.

Seriously, how did such idiots even figure out how to make a web site?!  Should they even be allowed near electrical equipment unsupervised?

This from last week’s National Review:

When a congressional committee investigating the White House state-dinner crashers considered asking Desiree Rogers, President Obama’s social secretary, to testify, the administration responded with a blanket refusal. “Based on separation of powers,” explained press secretary Robert Gibbs, “staff here don’t go to testify in front of Congress.” Obama’s view of this question was different in 2008, when President Bush tried to invoke the same principle for his aides and a certain Illinois senator called his position “completely misguided.” What makes Obama’s sudden conversion even more implausible is that Bush asserted executive privilege only for a handful of his most senior advisers: Harriet Miers, Josh Bolten, and Karl Rove. Candidate Obama scoffed at even that limited exemption — but now President Obama claims constitutional protection for his social secretary. Surely James Madison is smiling down from Heaven.

The Washington Times is reporting how a very desperate Obama, watching his popularity in the polls plummeting recently, has begun resorting again to public Bush-bashing in hopes of rallying supporters with this tried-and-true tactic.

In his White House press conference last week, Mr. Obama referred to the Bush era at least nine times, three times lamenting that he “inherited” a $1.3 trillion debt that has set back his administration’s efforts to fix the economy.

This is yet more broken promises from a man who ran on a platform of “post-partisanship” and whose inauguration speech promised things like:

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics. We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.

and who is on record as saying things like:

This is not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem at this stage. This is an American problem.

and:

What is not an option is for us to sit and engage in posturing or the standard partisan fights when the American people are out there struggling.

Obama must be taking advice from Democratic Party strategist Liz Chadderdon who said, ”I think Bush-bashing has been alive and well since ’07 and, since it keeps working, why not use it?”

In a sickening sign of the times, Catherina Cenzon-DeCarlo, a nurse at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, was coerced into aiding an abortion, despite her stated religious objection to it. This flies in the face of the federal “conscience clause” that protects medical workers in exactly such cases by requiring institutions receiving federal funding to prove that they respect this right of their employees.

Bush was famous for his strong support of this clause and his tough enforcement of it. Obama, on the other hand, is famous for his enmity toward this right, and his desire to do away with this clause is no big secret. That notwithstanding, it still remains in effect, and the Department of Health and Human Services asserted in an April report that “providers will continue to be protected . . . by existing conscience-clause statutes.”

However, as this case illustrates, it’s apparent that in these times with Obama now at the helm, the institutions don’t feel as pressured to follow the law and respect such rights, much to the horror of persecuted workers like Cenzon-DeCarlo.

I use the word “horror” intentionally, as this was her own choice of word as well. As the New York Post reports:

“It felt like a horror film unfolding,” said Catherina Cenzon-DeCarlo, 35, who claims she has had gruesome nightmares and hasn’t been able to sleep since the May 24 incident.

The married mother of a year-old baby was 30 minutes into her early-morning shift when she realized she had been assigned to an abortion. She begged her supervisor to find a replacement nurse for the procedure. . .

Her pleas were rejected, and instead she was threatened with career-ending charges of insubordination and patient abandonment, according to the lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Brooklyn federal court.

Feeling threatened, Cenzon-DeCarlo assisted in the procedure. . .

“I felt violated and betrayed,” she recalled. “I couldn’t believe that this could happen.”

A native of the Philippines, Cenzon-DeCarlo moved to New York in 2001 and started at Mount Sinai on the East Side as an operating-room nurse in 2004. During her job interview, an administrator asked Cenzon-DeCarlo whether she’d be willing to participate in abortions. She flatly said no.

The nurse said she put her beliefs in writing.

The day after the procedure, Cenzon-DeCarlo filed a grievance with her union. Later that week, she was cornered by two supervisors who told her if she wanted any more overtime shifts, she would have to sign a statement agreeing to participate in abortions, the suit says.

The next month, Cenzon-DeCarlo was assigned to one overtime shift, rather than the eight or nine she usually received, the suit claims.