Guilty (4 page)

Once the government has muzzled speech on talk radio and the Internet, we can happily return to a world called “1984.” The establishment media will heave a sigh of relief and say, “Thank God that's over!” Then they can go back to insisting that the idea of the “liberal establishment” is a kooky conservative conspiracy theory. There's your liberal establishment that Gergen says “doesn't exist anymore.”

THE MEDIA ARE SO PARTISAN THAT MANY PEOPLE ARE UNDER the impression that they must take their marching orders directly from the Democratic National Committee. But journalists aren't merely the willing recipients of information from campaign consultants: They are active participants in Democratic campaigns. As difficult as it is to separate them, the Democratic Party is beholden to the media, not the other way around.

It wasn't the Kerry campaign calling in the Bush National Guard hoax in to CBS News. It was the reverse: Dan Rather's producer at CBS, Mary Mapes, called Kerry campaign official Joe Lockhart about Bush's fake National Guard scandal, imploring him to call CBS's trusted source and proven liar Bill Burkett.
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And it wasn't House Democrats who launched the Mark Foley e-mail scandal,
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that was ABC News. House pages had complained
about receiving inappropriate e-mails and instant messages from Republican representative Mark Foley as far back as 2000 or 2001. House Democrats didn't care. The media did—precisely one month before a hard-fought midterm congressional election and one day after the deadline for removing Foley's name from the Florida ballot. (All I can say is, thank God a good, faithful Democrat took Foley's old seat so there won't be any more sex scandals in Palm Beach County!)

True, the Democrats and the media are generally fighting for the same thing: the total destruction of the United States of America. But when their interests collide, as they did when Hillary was in a primary against spine-tingler Obama, we see who wins.

In the 2008 election season, it wasn't the Obama campaign but the
New York Times
that put a thinly sourced article about an alleged John McCain affair on its front page. It wasn't the Democratic National Committee but a newspaper reporter, David Singleton of the
Scranton Times-Tribune,
who invented the story about Republican crowds yelling “Kill him!” about Obama at a Palin rally.
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It wasn't the Obama campaign but the
Times
that put an angry, and yet still pointless, Alaska ethics report on Governor Sarah Palin on its front page.

On the main charge against Palin, the firing of her public safety commissioner, the investigators found it “was a proper and lawful exercise of her constitutional and statutory authority” to fire her own department head. Though the report doesn't dwell on it, this particular public safety commissioner was badly in need of firing. In the midst of the Palin family's formal complaints about state trooper and former Palin brother-in-law Mike Wooten for threatening her family, drinking on the job, and Tasering Palin's nephew, the public safety commission asked the governor to sign a photo of a state trooper, in uniform, saluting the flag for the purpose of turning the photo into a poster. The trooper chosen for this photo was none other than … Mike Wooten!
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But the report also accused Palin of “abuse by inaction” for not preventing her husband from complaining about Wooten. Notwithstanding Palin's stated fear of the trooper, the report concluded that this was not a genuine fear because according to the geniuses on the investigating panel, getting Wooten fired would not make him any less dangerous. “On
the contrary,” the report advised, “it might just precipitate some retaliatory conduct on his part.”

So whatever you do, do not complain about abusive cops: They might retaliate! Though I still think it might make them a little less dangerous to take away their badges and guns.

Out of more than forty newspaper and wire stories on the legislature's report the day after it was released, most with banner headlines declaring Palin GUILTY, only twenty documents even mentioned that the trooper in question had Tasered his ten-year-old stepson. The
New York Times
was not among them.

Instead,
Times
reporter Serge F. Kovaleski described the Palin family's interest in the trooper as resulting from “a harsh divorce and child-custody battle” with Palin's sister.
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This would be like describing Justin Volpe's sodomitic broomstick attack on Abner Louima as an “enhanced interrogation.”

One imagines a normal person trying to grasp what happened after reading the
New York Times
version of the story:

No wonder the establishment media are so frustrated with the Internet.

In any other connection, a woman going through a divorce from a cop who had made threats against her father and Tasered her son would be a Lifetime TV (for women) movie. The media had to do a highly unusual 180-degree turn on cops to make Sarah Palin the villain
in this story. My own position is that sometimes cops are innocent and sometimes they are guilty, but I need to know the facts. It's good to know that the Left's new default position is: “We always believe the cop.” That represents a major policy shift.

The smear tactics used by the media against McCain and Palin show the absurdity of the Left's claims of perpetual victimization at the hands of the Republican Attack Machine. While Republican “attacks” went out on little Web videos and in campaign stump speeches—just like the Democratic attacks on Republicans—liberal attacks on McCain and Palin went out in AP wire reports,
Saturday Night Live
sketches, and CBS News interviews.

Again: it wasn't the Democrats who started calling Sarah Palin a racist: It was the media. On October 5, the objective, nonpartisan Associated Press reported that Palin's statement that Obama was “palling around with terrorists”—referring to the white, privileged, cretinous member of the Weather Underground Bill Ayers—“was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.”
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The following week, Democratic politicians joined the media bandwagon, when Representatives Gregory Meeks, Ed Towns, and Yvette Clarke all called Palin a racist.

Apparently, in addition to raising Obama's fraternizing with a white domestic terrorist, Palin had used the racist code words “Joe Six-Pack” and “Hockey Mom.” If those were code words, they were extremely subtle. In fact, I think the NAACP would give you a pass on “Joe Six-Pack” and “Hockey Mom.”

But Representative Clarke demanded to know “Who exactly is Joe Six-Pack and who are these hockey moms?” The same people who said they couldn't have a conversation that didn't include the phrase “lipstick on a pig” now claimed they had never heard the expression “Joe Six-Pack.” Clarke continued, “Is that supposed to be terminology that is of common ground to all Americans? I don't find that. It leaves a lot of people out.”
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Many had hoped that the nomination of the first black man for president would end the playing of the pinot noir card, but it was not to be.

It's a symbiotic relationship the Democrats and the media have,
with the media sometimes concocting their own rogue attacks on Republicans and sometimes getting their arguments directly from Democratic talking points. Take the
New York Times's
Katherine Q. Seelye, for example.

On October 15, 2008, the Obama campaign's internal predebate talking points were inadvertently released to the media. They said:

This is John McCain's last chance to turn this race around and somehow convince the American people that his erratic response to this economic crisis doesn't disqualify him from being president.

Just this weekend, John McCain vowed to “whip Obama's you-know-what” at the debate, and he's indicated that he'll be bringing up Bill Ayers to try to distract voters.

So we know that Senator McCain will come ready to attack Barack Obama and bring his dishonorable campaign tactics to the debate stage.

John McCain has been erratic and unsteady since this crisis began, staggering from position to position and trying to change the subject away from the economy by launching false character attacks.
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Katharine Q. Seelye's October 15, 2008,
New York Times
article, “What to Watch for During the Final Debate,” included the following points in her news analysis—observations that were uncannily similar to the Obama campaign's talking points:

“Tonight's debate provides Senator John McCain with his last, best hope of reversing the tide that appears to be running against him.”