Yesterday I made the point that, as the media converges on Obama’s past, he’ll have to answer to it. I found it particularly troubling that he admitted in print to youthful racism, and that he identified with his rather questionable father growing up.
Some lefties jumped all over me at BNN; see their hysteria and my response here. Apparently a Democrat’s past doesn’t matter.
Brent Bozell III makes a similar point on Townhall today:
“Let’s be clear about this. The liberal media don’t care what Democratic love objects do when they’re in grade school, even in Indonesia, just as they didn’t care what Bill Clinton was doing touring Russia and the Soviet bloc in his 20s, just as they didn’t care how he dodged the draft or whether he inhaled, just as they didn’t even want to know if Clinton raped a woman when he was 32.
“But Obama ought to thank his lucky liberal stars that he’s not a Republican. This is not the standard the media had for George W. Bush in 1999, when the entire liberal media ran in a pack suggesting Bush was a cokehead.
…
“But the richest irony in the contrast is this: Obama has admitted in his biography to using cocaine in high school and college. CNN doesn’t care. While they scour the globe to rebut madrassa stories, they’re not asking him about this settled truth. Serious journalism, indeed.”
Personally, I don’t care whether either used drugs in college — I think racism would affect governance on a much deeper level — but Bozell is right that the double standard is obvious.
Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com.
Loading ...
2 users commented in " Brent Bozell III weighs in on Obama’s past "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI don’t know that the “liberal media” (I’m not exactly sure who exactly this denotes) just don’t care about all of those things, rather that they don’t care that much, and don’t obsess over them because, as you point out, there are other things that are much more important than many of these trivial (and often typical) histories. I wouldn’t doubt that many supportive writers on Obama use a double standard, and are wrong to do so, but it’s just trivial to point out, since so many unsupportive writers do too. The solution is pretty simple, even if it is hard to always practice: Why not just try to use regular common sense and apply consistent standards? As much as I may disagree with you after reading some of your blogs and comments, you seem to at least realize this is a problem and attempt to do something about it, even if you are, like all of us, not always successful.
Robert…what do you mean precisely when you call me a leftie and hysterical? That I disagreed with you? And expressed that disagreement without reference to political party or affliation? I don’t understand what you mean. I suppose I could have used a more measured tone and less rhetorical technique to express my disagreement…I will try to refrain from that in my upcoming reply.
Hi Peter,
Thanks so much for the response. I, too, wish I hadn’t gotten so sarcastic with the comments.
My problem wasn’t that you disagreed (I’d have a pretty rough life if that was the case, as I just got through with four years in a very liberal college, six months into which I began dating my liberal-but-becoming-less-so girlfriend); it was that it didn’t come across that you took my problems with Obama seriously.
I guess my overall point is that most politicians apologize for their past mistakes, and Obama’s time has come. He will have to say, flat out, that as president he would represent all Americans’ interests, black and white, equally. I have very mixed feelings about him — I disagree with him politically and worry about his racial beliefs, yet he strikes me as a very decent guy who sincerely believes the liberal worldview and reaches across the aisle when he can. (The original draft of the TWS article had more of that in it, but the editor thought it would be more cohesive by sticking to the main, critical point.)
Also, I agree that “liberal media” is a little unclear. I guess the obvious targets are the NYT, the LA Times, the AP and the Washington Post, but Bozell would have been better to cite specific examples.
Leave A Reply