Poor Bill.
President-Elect Obama, through this election, gave Americans a renewed sense of hope and pride in our country. He has breathed new life into a disillusioned generation of young voters.
In short, the 8 year cloud is lifting. The life-sucking vampire Bill O’Reilly can’t seem to stand the light of this new day.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, Mr. O’Reilly.
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It seems it is finally open season on John McCain in the Mainstream Media for his poor judgement in his irresponsible decision to chose Sarah Palin as a running mate.
On TV
CNN
Scarborough (H/T wordie):
And on the News sites in America:
The New York Times here and this is David Brooks speaking:
He really needs someone to impose a policy structure on his moral intuitions. He needs a very senior person who can organize a vast administration and insist that he tame his lone-pilot tendencies and work through the established corridors — the National Security Council, the Domestic Policy Council. He needs a near-equal who can turn his instincts, which are great, into a doctrine that everybody else can predict and understand.
Rob Portman or Bob Gates wouldn’t have been politically exciting, but they are capable of performing those tasks. Palin, for all her gifts, is not. She underlines McCain’s strength without compensating for his weaknesses. The real second fiddle job is still unfilled.
and here:
Aides to Mr. McCain said they had a team on the ground in Alaska now to look more thoroughly into Ms. Palin’s background. A Republican with ties to the campaign said the team assigned to vet Ms. Palin in Alaska had not arrived there until Thursday, a day before Mr. McCain stunned the political world with his vice-presidential choice. The campaign was still calling Republican operatives as late as Sunday night asking them to go to Alaska to deal with the unexpected candidacy of Ms. Palin.
[…]“They didn’t seriously consider her until four or five days from the time she was picked, before she was asked, maybe the Thursday or Friday before,” said a Republican close to the campaign. “This was really kind of rushed at the end, because John didn’t get what he wanted. He wanted to do Joe or Ridge.”
The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen says:
One of the great sights of American political life — a YouTube moment if ever there was one — was to see the doughboy face of Newt Gingrich as he extolled the virtues of Sarah Palin, a sitcom of a vice presidential choice and a disaster movie if she moves up to the presidency: “She’s the first journalist ever to be nominated, I think, for the president or vice president, and she was a sportscaster on local television,” Gingrich said on the “Today” show. “So she has a lot of interesting background. And she has a lot of experience. Remember that, when people worry about how inexperienced she is, for two years she’s been in charge of the Alaska National Guard.”
and adds, rather pointedly:
It’s a pity Gingrich was not around when the Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known by his nickname Caligula, reputedly named Incitatus as a consul and a priest. Incitatus was his horse.
It doesn’t stop here, there’s the European media, too:
The Times calls her half baked Alaskan and concludes:
Mrs Palin’s selection has made for great political theatre. It is also profoundly irresponsible. This was Mr McCain’s first Cabinet-level appointment, and it reflects as vividly as any of his battles over campaign finance reform the maverick tendencies that continue to define him. Such tendencies are of huge value on the American football field, in certain corporate settings and, indeed, in the US Senate. Whether they belong in the Oval Office at a time of grave and unfamiliar challenges to Western civilisation is far less clear.
The Telegraph likens the frantic post factum vetting to a political hit squad:
Senior allies of the Republican presidential nominee insisted that the team of press officers will handle the worldwide media frenzy surrounding the selection of only the second woman ever on a presidential ticket.
But they also admitted that they have operatives on the ground in Alaska to probe more deeply into her background.
Democrats detected a whiff of panic in the McCain camp, amid growing claims that Mrs Palin’s personal history was not properly vetted before Mr McCain announced his pick on Friday.
I think it is more than a whiff of panic. I bet, they didn’t even google her name before the announcement. They couldn’t have, because if they had they would have come up with what we have have come up with:
About the Independence Party of Alaska
About Governor Palin and Creationism
I’d say we vetted Governor Palin here and as far as I am concerned, this appointment is an insult to every American voter.
UPDATE: More international media comments in Open Season II
I was under the misguided delusion that all of these raids, police harassment, snatch squads, and arrests made in St. Paul would cause a media blitz to descend upon the Twin Cities. Oh, there was a blitz, but it wasn’t by the media. It came from concerned bloggers and journalists that don’t work for the MSM.
So I checked the front page stories from all the newspapers today; to see what they deemed important for you to know. This is what I found. NYT’s has “Thousands Stream From New Orleans Ahead of the Storm”, good start but “Troops Surge Took Place Amid Doubt and Debate” could have been buried on page two. How about USA Today, maybe they thought is was noteworthy, no it didn’t appear there either. “Bush, Cheney skip GOP Convention” made it. Wall Street Journal headlined Gustav, Bush Cancels Convention Speech and the Highlight of the Day “Night Runner”. You ask “Night Runner”?? Is about McCain VP pick Gov. Sarah Palin discusses her unusual workout and fitness routine. Do I care about the workout habits of Sarah Palin?? OMG, since when did a government official’s fitness training become of National Importance.
Robert Kennedy Jr., in his speech, notes that the decline of our media could be traced to the 1988 repel of a Federal Communications Commission regulation known as the Fairness Doctrine, which Reagan threw out the window.
I agree with that view to a certain point, the rest of it IMHO is the 5 or 6 men that run all the media outlets. The Rupert Murdoch’s of the world have killed any fair and balance reporting that most of us remember. It is not in their best interest for you to know about civil rights violations that are happening around the country. If you did, you would probably write your congressman, email the government, or even protest on the White House front lawn. That is not a problem Bush and his cronies want to deal with. So to protect them, media giants like Murdoch squash any chance of you hearing the truth. That the US is under siege, in a manner of speaking, that you could just disappear or have policemen break down your door with automatic weapons in hand, cuff you and take you to jail. Your crime, you thought about, or were going to protest a corrupt government, and you asked to see a warrant.
Whatever well meaning leeway Obama got or did not get from the media during the last months, some of the press are definitely turning on the heat. Leader of the pack: Murdoch’s “The Times”. While their reporting has been fairly unbiased up to, let’s say yesterday or the day before, the increased media pressure on Barack Obama is their brain-child. So they happily join in the slapping and make their headline: “Mansion ‘mistake’ piles the pressure on Barack Obama” and Gerard Baker asks his rapt readership “Obama: Is US ready for this dangerous left-winger?” (Note: This is “The Times” not “The Daily Prophet”). The Times’ first article claims:
A British-Iraqi billionaire lent millions of dollars to Barack Obama’s fundraiser just weeks before an imprudent land deal that has returned to haunt the presidential contender, an investigation by The Times discloses.
All the investigative prowess of “The Times” has unearthed a land deal by Senator Obama with Tony Rezko, who in turn was buddy to this “British-Iraqi billionaire”, or maybe wasn’t. If you read carefully what “The Times” has to say, there are insinuations about the relationship Tony Rezko – Nadhmi Auchi, Senator Obama didn’t know Auchi. The land deal in question is the one Barack Obama has already admitted to as a “boneheaded mistake” and was initially brought up by the Clinton campaign. The Clinton campaign, however, dropped this ball when a photo surfaced, showing her along with said Tony Rezko.
The second article centers around Michelle Obama’s statement that her husbands campaign was the first time in her adult life when she felt proud of her country and contrasts it with:
For most ordinary Americans, those not encumbered with an expensive education or infected by prolonged exposure to cosmopolitan heterodoxy, patriotism is a consequence of birth.
Their chests swell with pride every time they hear the national anthem at sporting events. They fill up with understandable emotion whenever they see a report on television about the tragic heroics of some soldier or Marine who gave his life in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Now, if you go and have a look at US papers, what do you find there? A great stir about these scandalous revelations? Not really, it’s water under the bridge already. And other English newspapers? Nope. Nothing. “The Telegraph” quotes Eugene Robinson, who calls Barack Obama’s campaign organization superior to Hillary Clinton’s and “The Independent” analyses the somewhat cult-like campaign of Barack Obama, but concludes:
I think Barack Obama understands this risk. For all the fever of his rallies, his own oratorical style never descends into ranting, still less foam-flecked hysteria. Yet the frenzy he has engendered contains within it the seeds of bitter disappointment, or even tragedy. There is the question of his own physical safety. Less morbidly, what will be the reaction of his supporters if he should fail to be elected President? Perhaps most troubling of all, what will be their reaction if he is elected, but the celestial choirs fail to appear and the world refuses to be perfect?
But, still the European media doesn’t really concentrate on facts and platforms in the campaign of Barack Obama, nor that of Hillary Clinton and John Mc Cain. It is the “Washington Post” in it’s elections blog “The Trail” that provides us with an insight into the substance of the candidate’s policies and this is really what it all should be about.
TheZoo 