October 29, 2008 - by Abraham H. Miller
http://pajamasmedia.com/
Wealthy New Yorkers are renting homes in Ohio and putting twenty people in them so they can all vote illegally in a critical battleground state. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that story to appear on CNN or anywhere else in the electronic media.
Tony Rezko and Barack Obama
Instead, expect to see, ad nauseam, a store-by-store dissection of the money spent by the Republican National Committee on Sarah Palin’s wardrobe. Of course, we are told this is news because it’s not what you’d expect of a hockey mom.
Hockey moms, soccer moms, or metro-feminists that would turn down a shopping spree at Neiman Marcus just don’t exist. (OK — I once had an angry, feminist graduate student who wore the same gray cords everyday and was not washing her hair so as to conduct an ongoing entomological experiment on how many species of insects she could nurture on her scalp. But the exception proves the rule.)
Chicago blogs are chirping away about Tony Rezko’s meetings with the federal prosecutor. Tony is singing like a songbird. You’d think that the electronic media would be more interested in what Tony might be saying than in how much it cost Sarah Palin to fly her children to state events, something every other Alaskan governor seems to have done.
Tony, you will remember, was Barack Obama’s financial mentor, the guy who subsidized the purchase of Obama’s Hyde Park mansion, and the guy who created the “pay for play” hospital construction scheme that was the end result of legislation Obama sponsored in the Illinois legislature.
Tony was overdrawn $450,000 at a Chicago bank with alleged ties to organized crime. You’d think CNN might send Anderson Cooper to Chicago to investigate why the bank doesn’t have the same kind of check verification technology you encounter at your local supermarket.
And here is another hint for Anderson’s story: What Illinois senator, currently seeking higher office, kept his senatorial campaign funds there and why? Rest assured, it wasn’t because he enjoyed the rush-hour commute across town from his Hyde Park mansion to make deposits.
But maybe CNN and the rest of the electronic media won’t send anyone to Chicago because it is blowing its investigative budget flying reporters to Alaska to explore why anyone would fire a public safety director who refused to dismiss a state trooper who tasered a twelve year old boy — a trooper who was reported to be drunk while on duty, and who allegedly threatened someone’s life. Now, there is a story we all can believe in — “Troopergate.”
Obama gets a pass because nothing is more important to the electronic media than getting Obama elected. Obama gets a pass on Bill Ayers because, at some level, most of the people in the media business can identify with what Ayers did. That’s why they won’t even mention the Weather Underground’s planned bombing of the Fort Dix dance. That’s why the name “Diana Oughton,” the naïve girl who became Ayers’ revolutionary partner and lover and who blew herself up in the Manhattan townhouse bomb factory, is never mentioned in any report on Ayers. This despite Diana’s story being well known, as a result of award-winning journalist Thomas Power’s book, Diana: The Making of a Terrorist.
Let’s face reality: If Bill Ayers had been blowing up black churches and belonged to some neo-Nazi organization, do you think his long-time association with someone who might be the next president would be so cavalierly dismissed? Do you think that Dean Stanley Fish of the University of Illinois would consider penning a letter on behalf of some non-repentant neo-Nazi? Imagine if that neo-Nazi had said: “I did not do enough bombings. I did not kill enough blacks.”
The left is so wrapped up in its own high-minded sophistry that it is incapable of distinguishing between being self-righteous and being politically obscene. There is no difference between fascism and communism. They are two sides of the same totalitarian currency. They lead to the same excesses. Yet, communism is palatable to the point of being chic, while fascism is appropriately despised.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was as natural an alliance as one between Britain and the United States. The media’s failure to see Ayers as indistinguishable from the terrorists who bombed the Birmingham Church is a poignant and terrible commentary on where journalism — especially electronic journalism – is today.
Bias exists not only in the obvious such as what we are told and how it is told to us, but also in what we are not told.
As the electronic media plows its resources into examining Sarah Palin’s wardrobe and repeats Democratic talking points as news, more important subjects for real investigative reporters are ignored. What was Obama’s role in Rezko’s pay-for-play scheme? What did Rezko expect in return for the $300,000 subsidy for Obama’s Hyde Park mansion? What is Rezko now telling the federal prosecutor?
Also, is it merely coincidental that Weather Underground leader Bernardine Dohrn (Mrs. William Ayers) worked at the same law firm as Michelle Obama? How far back does the relationship with William Ayers go and how close is it? And does the relationship stem from both seeing America through similar ideological prisms, one based on hate, and the other — as Michelle Obama so clearly articulated — based on shame?
Don’t hold your breath for answers.
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science and a former head of the Intelligence Studies Section of the International Studies Association.
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