Guilt by participation
Melanie Phillips
Monday, 6th October 2008
Whichever way this American election ends, it will surely be remembered as the one in which big media threw aside all pretence of objectivity and flung itself into the campaign as committed partisans for Obama. I have been documenting on this blog some of its more egregious acts of commission and omission – the double standards in the treatment of the two opposing sides, and above all the almost total silence over, or even endorsement of, aspects of Obama’s background, attitudes and associations, the exposure of any one of which would have surely sunk a white Republican candidacy in five seconds flat.
It is only in the blogosphere where proper journalism has been doing its job in bringing to the surface the deeply troubling evidence of Obama’s dubious associations and the misleading way in which he has sought to play them down. As I have noted before, it’s as if there have been two elections going on – the one in big media which (with some honourable exceptions) has been portraying Obama entirely on his own terms as the antidote to the old, failed political order; and the one in the blogosphere, which has steadily joined the dots in Obama’s background to reveal the network of radical, subversive, threatening and corrupt activists who have influenced him all his life and who have brought him to power – and about whom he continues to dissemble.
The fact that such a man may well become President of the United States is simply astounding. The fact that if this happens it will be because big media has ignored the evidence excavated by the blogosphere which requires the most urgent and thorough interrogation of Obama -- questions which simply have not been asked – is as terrifying as it is appalling.
At the weekend, Sarah Palin brought some of this into the open by questioning Obama’s connection with
William Ayers, the unrepentant former Weather Underground terrorist (pictured above in Chicago Magazine in 2001 stamping on the American flag). The McCain camp was clearly responding to a growing clamour – noted here -- from those who are aware of the mountain of damning evidence now available, but which has been censored out of big media, to tell people about the ‘real Barack Obama’.
Immediately she did so, the media responded not by acknowledging there was a major issue here but by claiming that the McCain campaign was now playing dirty. This with a straight face by those who have airbrushed out of their mental processes the attack ads claiming McCain’s connections with assorted dubious lobby groups, not to mention the unprecedented amount of ordure being thrown at Palin. The extent of this venomous media doublethink was revealed in an astonishing AP story which, apart from making the demonstrably false claim that the reference to Obama’s relationship with Ayers was exaggerated at best if not outright false actually accused Palin of a ‘racially-tinged subtext’ for bringing it up at all.
And in what appeared to be a pre-emptive strike to neutralise what it knew was coming, the New York Times finally published a story about the Obama-Ayers connection – only to dismiss it, disgracefully, as a relationship that had been exaggerated and, even worse, to sanitise Ayers as having been ‘rehabilitated’ in Chicago. The laziness and dishonesty of this piece was quite breathtaking. It produced this stinging response from Stanley Kurtz, the journalist who has been bringing the full extent of this troubling connection to light ( – once again in the blogosphere, on NRO):
There is nothing ‘sporadic’ about Barack Obama delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars over a period of many years to fund Bill Ayers’ radical education projects, not to mention many millions more to benefit Ayers’ radical education allies. We are talking about a substantial and lengthy working relationship here... The point of Ayers’ education theory is that the United States is a fundamentally racist and oppressive nation. Students, Ayers believes, ought to be encouraged to resist this oppression. Obama was funding Ayers’ ‘small schools’ project, built around this philosophy. Ayers’ radicalism isn’t something in the past. It’s something to which Obama gave moral and financial support as an adult. So when Shane says that Obama has never expressed sympathy for Ayers’ radicalism, he’s flat wrong. Obama’s funded it.
The line of counter-attack is clear. Dismiss all these associations as sporadic or exaggerated – hey, we might all be on a board sometime with someone we don’t approve of! – and categorise all this mountain of evidence and questions as a ‘smear’. Which is of course itself a smear. The whole point about a real smear, however, is that it isn’t true. The evidence that is being so painfully dragged into the light has yet to be refuted and looks pretty damn solid. The smear by Camp Obama is that the evidence of their man's radical connections amounts to ‘guilt by association’. Wrong. This is guilt by participation. And big media is in collusion to keep it quiet.
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It's mind-boggling that Obama has come this far . . .