Racism in the coverage of the presidential race?
As late John McCain is complaining about him being negatively treated by the media. I think this next bit of information will highlight that John boy is getting extremely favorable treatment. Imagine if the roles were reversed…take a read below, this is institutionalized racism ladies and gentlemen…
What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, following the debate, including a three month-old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?
What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?
What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his college graduating class?
What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a divorcee?
What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?
What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?
What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?
What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger
Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)
What if Obama couldn’t read from a teleprompter?
What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?
What if Obama was the one who was known to publicly display a serious anger management problem?
What if Michelle Obama’s family had made their money from beer distribution?
You could easily add to this list. If these questions reflected a reality, if the tables were turned, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?
This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative characteristics in another when there is a color difference.
And, think of this – the candidates’ educational backgrounds:
Barack Obama:
Columbia University – B.A. Political Science with a specialization in International Relations.
Harvard – Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude
Joseph Biden:
University of Delaware – B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
Syracuse University College of Law – Juris Doctor (J.D.)
John McCain:
United States Naval Academy – Class rank: 894 of 899
Sarah Palin:
Hawaii Pacific University – 1 semester
North Idaho College – 2 semesters – general study
University of Idaho – 2 semesters – journalism
Matanuska-Susitna College – 1 semester
University of Idaho – 3 semesters – B.A. in Journalism
Education isn’t everything, but this is about the two highest offices in the land as well as our standing in the world.
You make the call
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October 24th, 2008 at 9:37 am
I’ll reply to this with someone else’s blog post…
What if ‘SNL’ mocked Michelle Obama?
by Pat Buchanan
Perhaps the only institution in America whose approval rating is beneath that of Congress is the media.
Both have won their reputations the hard way. They earned them.
Consider the fawning indulgence shown insider Joe Biden with the dripping contempt visited on outsider Sarah Palin.
Twice last weekend, Biden grimly warned at closed-door meetings that a great crisis is coming early in the term of President Obama:
“Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. … Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said … we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
A “generated crisis”? By whom? Moscow? Beijing? Tehran?
This is an astonishing statement from a chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who has access to the same intelligence as George Bush. Joe was warning of a crisis like the Berlin Wall of July 1961, where JFK called for a tripling of the draft and ordered a call-up of reserves, or the missile crisis where U.S. pilots like John McCain were minutes away from bombing nuclear missile sites in Cuba and killing the Russians manning them.
Is Russia about to move on the Crimea? Is Israel about to launch air strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites? What is Joe talking about?
If one assumes Joe is a serious man, we have a right to know.
Instead, what we got was Obama’s airy dismissal of Joe’s words as a “rhetorical flourish” and a media – rather than demanding that Joe hold a press conference – acting as Obama surrogates parroting the talking points that Joe was just saying that new presidents always face tests.
Had John McCain made that hair-raising statement, he would have been accused of fear mongering about a new 9/11. The media would have run with the story rather than have smothered it.
Contrasting McCain with his hero, Joe declared a few weeks back, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and … said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’”
Nice historical reference. Except when the market crashed in 1929, Hoover was president, and there was no television.
Can one imagine what the press would have done to Sarah Palin had she exhibited such ignorance of history. Or Dan Quayle?
Joe gets a pass because everybody likes Joe.
Fine. But Joe also has a record of 36 years in the Senate.
Has anyone ever asked Joe about his own and his party’s role in cutting off aid to South Vietnam, leading to the greatest strategic defeat in U.S. history and the Cambodian holocaust? Has anyone ever asked Joe about the role he and his party played in working to block Reagan’s deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe, and SDI, which Gorbachev concedes broke the Soviets and won the Cold War?
In the most crucial vote he ever cast – to give Bush a blank check for war in Iraq – Joe concedes he got it wrong.
Is Joe’s record of having been wrong on Vietnam, wrong in the Cold War, wrong on the Iraq war, less important than whether Sarah Palin tried to get fired a rogue-cop brother-in-law who Tasered her 10-year-old nephew to “teach him a lesson”?
“I’ve forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know,” says Joe humbly. Given his record, it is understandable Joe has forgotten so much of it.
Saturday, the New York Times did a takeout on Cindy McCain that delved back into her problem with prescription pills. Yet when Hillary’s campaign manager, Mark Penn, brought up Obama’s cocaine use on “Hardball,” he was savaged by folks for whom the Times is the gold standard.
The people apparently had a “right to know” of Bush’s old DUI arrest a week before the 2000 election, but no right to know about how and when Obama was engaged in the criminal use of cocaine.
The media cannot get enough of the “Saturday Night Live” impersonations of Palin as a bubblehead. News shows pick up the Tina Fey clips and run them and run them to the merriment of all.
Can one imagine “Saturday Night Live” doing weekly send-ups of Michelle Obama and her “I’ve never been proud” of my country, this “just downright mean” America, using a black comedienne to mimic and mock her voice and accent?
“Saturday Night Live” would be facing hate-crime charges.
How do we know? When the New Yorker ran a cartoon of Michelle in an Angela-Davis afro with an AK-47 slung over her shoulder, New Yorker editors had to go on national television to swear they were not mocking Michelle, but the conservatives who have so caricatured Michelle and the Messiah.
Is there a media double standard? You betcha.
October 24th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Nice counter point…I agree that we are probably overly sensitive towards the Obama’s…I am betting that changes dramatically when they are in office, at that point the gloves will come off…
McCain’s first appointee, Sarah Palin, is not at all ready to handle the Presidency should John McCain go down…bad, bad, bad choice…poor sign of things to come.
Its time to do something different.
October 24th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
I am one of the 11% of the UNDECIDED voters who is most likely going to vote Obama. =)