When was the last time the MSM took a Republican’s side in a
fight over credibility with a Democratic opponent? Well, it has
been a while. However, conservatives have little to grumble about
in the recent face-off between Barack Obama and John McCain over
McCain’s statement that troops might have to remain for “100 years”
in Iraq “as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or
wounded or killed” after fighting had concluded, as they have done
in South Korea and Germany.
Most recently, ABC’s Jake Tapper
noted that at least on three occasions Obama had personally
said that McCain favored continued fighting in Iraq for 100 years.
Tapper concluded that “Obama has in the past distorted McCain’s
comments” and “that he is violating his own stated
aspirations…[b]ecause not only has he distorted what McCain said,
he is not being honest about having made those distortions.”
Tapper is not the only MSM reporter to point this out, of
course. It is not every day that the RNC sends around e-mail blasts
quoting Frank Rich (“Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should be
ashamed of themselves for libeling John McCain”) and reports from
the Chicago Tribune, Atlantic Monthly, AP,
New York Times, Washington Post, Slate
and other MSM outlets, all for the same proposition: Obama is
lying.
This episode is revealing both about Obama the man and about the
misconceptions he may have about the media.
NOW IT IS NOT UNUSUAL for candidates to fudge (that is political
parlance for lying), get caught, and then wriggle out of their
prevarication by claiming it was all a “misunderstanding” or their
words were “taken out of context.” But Obama has not done that
here. Instead, he has doubled down again and again to repeat his
lie. What this tells us is the candidate who is all about “change”
is more likely a sly huckster who believes he can con the public
and the media alike.
If he persists after being revealed as lying, it must be,
reasonable people might conclude, because he thinks he can get away
with it. Coming from the cocoon of liberal academia and the left of
the Democratic Party, he has lived a charmed political life,
relying on guile and evasion, determined in his belief he is more
clever and swift-footed than his foes. After all, he emerged from
the Reverend Wright controversy without being pinned down as to
exactly what controversial statements he had personally heard or
why he selected Wright’s church in the first place. All it took was
a flowery speech to knock the media hounds off the trail.
So, in large part his “100 years” tactic may be plain arrogance.
This is a man convinced of his own wisdom, goodness, and messianic
appeal. For what other neophyte Senator would declare that “foreign policy is the area where I
am probably most confident that I know more and understand the
world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain”?
PART OF WHAT MAY be fueling this strategy of lie-lie-and-lie again
also may be the belief, well founded on years of experience, that
the MSM rarely calls out a Democrat, a liberal one at that, for
distorting a Republican’s words. Obama and his advisers, who have
grown accustomed to kid glove treatment from the MSM, certainly
expected a different response, perhaps at best a “the sides differ
on what he meant” conclusion, which would allow Obama to repeat his
distortion with impunity.
But we are in new media landscape where MSM outlets face
competition from conservative news media and every interested
person can watch McCain’s statement and the Obama responses for
himself on YouTube. It is odd that the candidate who is so new, so
farsighted and so adept at parroting the mantra of “change” should
have missed a wholesale change in media coverage of political
campaigns. Did he miss Rathergate? Was he unaware of the Baghdad
diarist’s unmasking?
In short, he seems, either due to ignorance or arrogance, to
have missed the new rule in American politics: it is much harder to
lie than it used to be.
And for those who have fancied Obama as a harbinger of a new
style of politics and a savvy exemplar of a new generation of
political leaders, they may want to reconsider. He seems pretty
much like the last of a generation of dishonest, clueless
politicians.
