The Smear Continues Apace
The NY Times presses forward in its participation with Smear Obama As An Anti-Semite campaign, which began with Little Timmy Russert’s Farrakhan nonsense earlier this week.
Greenwald:
One of this week’s hysterical press scandals was that Minister Louis Farrakhan praised Barack Obama’s candidacy even though Obama had previously denounced numerous Farrakhan remarks and the Obama campaign did nothing to seek out the Farrakhan praise. Nonetheless, Tim Russert demanded that Obama jump through multiple hoops to prove that he has no connection to — and, in fact, “rejects” — the ideas espoused by Farrakhan deemed to be radical and hateful.
Yesterday, though, the equally fringe, radical and hateful (at least) Rev. John Hagee — a white evangelical who is the pastor of a sprawling “mega-church” in Texas — enthusiastically endorsed John McCain. Did McCain have to jump through the same hoops which Russert and others set up for Obama and “denounce” Hagee’s extremism and “reject” his support? No; quite the opposite. McCain said he was “very honored” to receive this endorsement and, when asked about some of Hagee’s more twisted views, responded: “all I can tell you is that I am very proud to have Pastor John Hagee’s support.”
So: what does the New York Times have to say?
The challenge of meeting the concerns of the Jewish electorate, a cornerstone of the Democratic base, was evident Tuesday when Mr. Obama was asked at the Democratic debate in Cleveland about Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has endorsed him.
Mr. Obama called Mr. Farrakhan an anti-Semite and denounced his support, but was pressed to go further by his rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, an experienced hand at Democratic politics who herself has been on the defensive with Jewish voters after an encounter in 2000 with Suha Arafat, the wife of the Palestinian leader.
There’s no mention of the fact that Obama didn’t solicit this endorsement, didn’t accept it, and doesn’t have any personal direct connection to Farrakhan. Or that Russert didn’t ask similar questions of Hillary Clinton, who that same week appeared on “The 700 Club”, hosted by Pat “Feminism is witchcraft” Robertson.
But other issues he faces arise from his newness to national politics. While his positions hew to mainstream Democratic views, some critics have expressed concerns that they are not heartfelt.
“His record is relatively sparse, so I want to look at the totality of influences that might bear on Senator Obama,” said Ed Lasky, news editor of the online magazine, American Thinker, whose criticisms of Mr. Obama for aligning himself with allegedly anti-Israel advocates have been widely circulated among Jewish voters.
American Thinker’s table of contents this month includes the articles
Jihadists and Progressives: An Affair to Remember
Miguel A. Guanipa
General Douglas Macarthur once quipped that it was “…fatal to enter any war without the will to win it”. Few epithets more accurately reflect the prevailing default setting of the majority of this country’s Democrat contingent MoreThe Fallacy of Shared Values
Janet Levy
On February 7, 2008, Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, issued what amounts to a capitulation to the encroachment of Islam
Other articles have included:
Previous Articles
February 29, 2008* Here Come the Green Car-Jackers – Marc Sheppard
* Military Recruiters Necessary for our Common Defense – Kyle-Anne Shiver
* Buckley and Reagan: The Qualities of Conservative Greatness – Bruce Walker
and
February 27, 2008
* Walter Cronkite, Vietnam, and the Decline of Media Credibility – Lee Cary
* George Soros and the Alchemy of ‘Regime Change’ – Kyle-Anne Shiver
click for full-size.
Is a pattern starting to emerge? Of a right-wing magazine with an axe to grind described as “some critics”, without ever mentioning their open biases? After All, Ed Lasky is the author of “a href=”http://www.isranet.org/DataBank/US_Jewish_Affairs_Positions_in_Politics.htm#Lasky”>Why Americans Must Vote for Bush, which claimed that Senator John Kerry is “selling out Israel”. He’s a contributor to the wingnutty Campus Watch, which claims to “monitor Middle Eastern studies” and is led by Daniel Pipes.
Think maybe there’s a bias you should be mentioning, New York Times? Just a little?
After suggesting that Obama is having trouble with the Jewish community in the first few paragraphs, the rest of the article is disappointingly substance-free, lots of references to “some Jews” who are concerned but never named, and unsourced emails that claim (inaccurately) that “Zbigniew Brzezinski and diplomat Robert Malley, figures loathed by many Jews, are top advisers to his campaign.” I get emails like that all the time: most of them want me to send my bank account number to someone in Nigeria, while others come from obviously biased sources, like the Clinton campaign’s attacks on Obama and the Obama campaign’s attacks on Clinton. I don’t take them seriously, because I consider the source.
In sum, this is another obvious, shallow, and disingenuous attack piece on the Senator, of the same family as “Clinton’s awful cackle” and “John Edwards got a haircut.” It should be beneath the Times to participate. Apparently it isn’t.
