By: Herb Denenberg, The Bulletin
09/16/2008
There's growing evidence that Sen. John McCain's choice for vice president, Gov. Sarah Palin, has caused the Barack Obama campaign and its partners and cheerleaders in the mainstream media to have the equivalent of a campaign nervous breakdown.
Consider what is happening to the Obama campaign with all the cheerleaders urging him to get tougher. The campaign must have figured whatever it's doing isn't working, so let's try getting tougher. Bill Burton, Sen. Barack Obama's national press secretary accuses Sen. McCain of "cynically running the sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential history. His discredited ads with disgusting lies are running all over the country today. He runs a campaign not worthy of the office he is seeking."
Here is this different kind of politician, who wants to run a different kind of politics, who wants to stick to the issues, who wants to avoid the "old" politics, doing exactly the opposite of what he is committed to do. If anything, I would guess neutral observers would say that Sen. McCain has leaned over backwards to be gentle in his criticism of Sen. Obama and on several occasions has sharply criticized his own supporters when he thought they went over the line ... even though many of his supporters were just making legitimate arguments. But when Sen. Obama's people call one of our great national heroes "sleazy" and "dishonorable" they may be stepping over the line and heading into backlash territory.
Here are more of Sen. Obama's new, more civil brand of politics - the remarks of an Obama spokesman in response to a McCain advertisement pointing out Sen. McCain has always fought earmarks and pork barrel appropriations while Palin has slashed budgets by half a billion in wasteful spending and cut earmark requests by hundreds of millions. The response from Sen. Obama: "The McCain campaign's lies make it clear that John McCain would rather lose his integrity than lose this election."
This great uniter who claims he is above politics as usual in a few short hours said war hero Sen. McCain is sleazy, dishonorable, a liar and a man without integrity. And what authority does Sen. Obama have to complain about earmarks, having been responsible for $800 million of that pork barrel abuse and bribery. And that includes earmarks for the University of Chicago Medical Center, which pays his wife $300,000 a year. She is as hypocritical as her husband, as she tells students to go into public service instead of the moneymaking sector. Incidentally, Michelle Obama's salary went from $100,000 to $300,000 as soon as he was elected to the Senate.
What this all adds up to is that Sen. Obama and his campaign are top-of-the-line hypocrites with thin skins who think they are above criticism. They whine at whimper at the slightest hit - however honest and justified -and they can dish it out but not take it.
After getting the almost total support of the mainstream media throughout his campaign, you would think Sen.Obama could stand up to a few knocks, hard or otherwise, but he demonstrates he believes in his own press clippings and in his mainstream media status as somewhere between Abraham Lincoln and God.
Can you imagine how the Obama campaign would react if Sen. McCain got as tough as he could and as he should? Sen. Obama is so deeply flawed that tough commercials could make mincemeat of him in short order. You could make dynamite commercials on his endless gaffes, his anti-American associates and antics, his proposed spending that would bankrupt the country, and on and on.
Here's a few campaign spots I'd run if I were calling the shots for Sen. McCain:
* Commercial one: Here are the people Sen. Obama hangs out with and even supports: Terrorists Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dorhn, the racist, bigot and anti-American, Rev. Jeremiah "God Damn America" Wright, convicted felon Tony Rezko and racist Father Michael Pfleger.
* Commercial two: Here are some his foreign policy ideas: Negotiate without precondition with all the genocidal, terrorist dictators of the world. Set a moral equivalence between the Russian aggression and invasion of Georgia and American liberation of Kuwait. Send the Russia/Georgia dispute to the U.N. Security Council where Russia has a veto and any action would be a total waste of time. He said if president, he would tell our Joint Chiefs of Staff to arrange for our withdrawal from Iraq. He doesn't even know how to surrender and retreat in defeat. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have no operational authority and wouldn't be able to carry out that order.
* Commercial three: And he has some amazing domestic policies, too: Oppose a bill that would give protection to infants who survive botched abortions instead of letting them die. In other words, cutting through all the legal niceties, Sen. Obama is firmly on record in support of infanticide and murder. Raise the capital gains rate, which would not only hurt the economy, retard savings, investment and job creation, but would also cut the government's tax revenue. He admitted the move would cut tax revenue but wants to do it out of "fairness."
* Commercial four: His views on small towns: They are just people clinging to their guns and Bibles. As Gov. Palin pointed out, Sen. Obama says one thing to elitists in San Francisco and another thing to small town voters.
* Commercial five: His action to reform the political system and end political corruption. He gives sweet sounding speeches but he is part of the corrupt Cook County Chicago political machine and when there was an attempt to reform it, Sen. Obama would not help. He claimed to support public financing of elections and put great emphasis on it as one way of reforming and changing the system. He promised that his campaign would accept public financing. But the minute he figured out he could raise more money by rejecting public financing, he broke his promise. In the tradition of the corrupt Chicago political machine, you do anything to get elected.
* Commercial six: His record on bipartisanship. He is going to bring us altogether but he has never given any evidence of bipartisanship and has always followed the hard-left, liberal party line. When asked to give examples of bipartisanship and reaching across the aisle, he gave two cases, both involving matters that passed the Senate almost unanimously. So he reaches across the aisle when the issues are apple pie and motherhood.
* Commercial seven: His ability to distinguish between good and evil. Shortly after 9/11, he wrote a piece in which he said we should not overreact, we should not discriminate against our neighbors from the Middle East and we should understand those who murdered 3,000 Americans as they are victims of poverty, ignorance, etc. He was wrong on all counts. Those who flew the planes into the World Trade Center were wealthy and well educated. Sen. Obama seemed to have more concern for the people who want to murder Americans than the victims of that murder. He raises all kinds of issues, questions and qualifications and does everything but indicate we have to smash and defeat those who want to kill us. If we follow Sen. Obama's views, we should be supplying terrorists with Fulbright scholarships and meals on wheels. When it comes to understanding our enemies and fighting and winning the war on terror, Sen. Obama and his party simply do not get it.
* Commercial eight: What are his programs for energy? He doesn't want to take advantage of our own domestic energy sources, which are greater than those of Saudi Arabia. His most memorable proposal is that we all check our tires and tune-up our cars. And he said that with a straight face.
* Commercial nine: What has he accomplished and what does his resume show. He has accomplished almost nothing and has never been responsible for an important piece of legislation. He spent his time in the United States Senate either writing his book, The Audacity of Hope or running for president. He gives speeches and dresses up his resume but he doesn't get around to actually accomplishing anything. He is a dilettante without any substantial record of accomplishment during his working life. Hillary Clinton was close to being right when she said his main accomplishment is giving one speech before the Democratic National Convention.
* Commercial 10: How does Obama make the first and most important choice of his campaign? He selects as vice president Sen. Joseph Biden for his foreign policy experience. But Sen. Biden has been wrong on virtually every foreign policy decision he's ever been called to make. He was wrong on the Vietnam War and voted with fellow Democrats to cut off funds to the indigenous South Vietnamese who wanted to defend themselves after we withdrew; he opposed Reagan's brilliant and successful management of the Cold War; he voted against our liberating Kuwait after Saddam Hussein invaded it; and he was against the surge. He voted for the war in Iraq, but can't claim credit for that correct decision, as Sen. Obama considers such a vote an unforgivable sin (remember Hillary). The only thing he is known for is his withdrawal from the presidential campaign the first time he ran, because of plagiarism (for which he has a history going back to his law school days in Syracuse). In contrast, Sen. McCain picked a vice president who has had a more positive impact on his campaign and what it stands for than perhaps any other vice-presidential pick in history.
* Commercial 11. Sen. Obama claims to be the post-racial candidate but he's been playing the race card. He warned his followers that Republicans would say he looks different, he's black, he doesn't look like the other presidents on our currency. This is the most despicable aspect of his despicable campaign, proving he is just another race hustler and race baiter. No one has made race an issue or inserted racism and bigotry into this campaign other than Barack Obama.
* Commercial 12: Sen. Obama's campaign spot says Sen. McCain is out of touch because he doesn't use computers and e-mail. That's true, but it is because of his war wounds that make it difficult to access and use a keyboard. If Sen. McCain had taken Sen. Obama's route and avoided military service, he would be able to e-mail. Of course, if there was still a war going on when it was time for Sen. Obama to serve, Sen. Obama claims he would have enlisted. He didn't say that in either of his memoirs when he poured out all his thoughts, but now he has decided he would have enlisted had there been a conflict raging. You can believe that if you want, just as you can believe he sat in the pews at Rev. Jeremiah "God Damn America" Wright's church for 20 years (with his wife) and didn't figure out what was going on ... or he didn't figure out what Rezko, Ayres, Dohrn, Pfleger, etc. really stood for ... until he found out while campaigning. Believe him if you want, but if not, you may believe me when I say he's the biggest phony, faker, fraud, liar and four-flusher to come upon the political scene in many a year.
Enough of the Obama campaign. There's one more matter I have to call to your attention to show how the mainstream media is also having a campaign nervous breakdown. This is from Newsweek, one of Sen. Obama's staunchest campaign managers. Newsweek seems to have a permanent place for him on the cover. Read what appeared in Newsweek of Sept. 1:
"If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth. His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we choose not to. In this event the world's judgment will be severe and inescapable: The United States had its day, but in the end couldn't put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race."
Now that's sheer insanity. The writer is saying we have to elect Sen. Obama or there is not equal opportunity in America. We have to elect Obama or we are a bunch of racists with our history of slavery still in evidence. We have to elect Sen. Obama or we are irrational about race. Newsweek is totally irrational in its assertion, but in the process slanders America, the one land that gives unparallel opportunity to all of its citizens. If it did not, Sen. Obama would not be the nominee for president.
That is the purest form of journalistic idiocy I have ever encountered and it shows the insane bias of Newsweek and the mainstream media. It is hard to conceive anyone writing such crapola, but even more amazing is that Newsweek is a heavily edited magazine. So this thinking came out of the writer and got by a group of editors. I will give Newsweek credit for one thing: Often the biased, dishonest and fraudulent reporting of the mainstream media is subtle and hard to detect by the casual reader. But in this case, the Newsweek idiocy is literally popping out all over. Sean Hannity is right. The year 2008 marked the death of the mainstream media.
Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at [email protected].
