In America now, the Left and the Right could be speaking two different languages, so little do they understand each other.

We on the conservative right are convinced that the mainstream media are heavily biased towards the Left. Confirmation of our view has just been handed to us by the Daily Caller in an article by Jonathan Strong, titled Documents show media plotting to kill stories about Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama-supporting journalists – a huge majority in the profession – knew all too well that Jeremiah Wright, the pastor whose church Barack Obama had been attending for twenty years, was an America-hating bigot, a fiercely anti-white racist, and a sympathizer with the 9/11 terrorists. Obama’s association with him was so likely to be harmful to his election prospects that they would have suppressed any news of it reaching the voters. But pesky right-wing reporters who did not think that one of Wright’s faithful flock would be a good choice for the presidency of the United States were insistently spreading the information. It made the Obama supporters spitting furious. They sent written advice to each other on how to deal with the threat that the exposure of the truth was posing.

One example from the Daily Caller:

Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

The whole article and all the quotations are worth reading. They prove not just a desire but an active conspiracy to deceive the public and help Obama into the White House.

And yet this is to be found in an article by Eric Alterman in the The Nation, in which he discusses the disappointment progressives are experiencing over Obama’s failure – as they see it – to effect a radical left transformation of America. He tries to explain the failure, and among other snags and hitches (mainly set, he insists, by the Bush administration) he finds that the mainstream media have not sufficiently supported Obama and trumpeted his successes, and that their “reflective prejudices” are against him!

Of course progressives need to keep up the pressure they have begun to place on the mainstream media not to adopt the deliberately misleading and frequently false frames foisted on readers and viewers by an increasingly self-confident and well-funded right-wing noise machine. Media Matters, FAIR and other organizations have done this in the past but it needs to be kept up. And in an age of instant, personal communication, there’s no reason it can’t be. … Done properly, such pressure is an effective means of forcing journalists to rethink some of their reflective prejudices, particularly in today’s punishing economic environment. But if progressives continue to pressure them to live up to the promises of their profession — to refuse to cater to the lowest common denominator of tabloids or the right-wing cesspool of talk radio/cable television discourse — such pressure on these organizations should strengthen reporters’ and editors’ backbones to do the kind of work that made them proud to be journalists in the first place. (This is, happily, a fundamental difference between right and left wing media criticism. The right seeks to undermine the messengers of news that does not comport with its worldview; the left wants journalism to stick to its guns and resist such pressures to color the news, believing, as Stephen Colbert once said, that the facts “have a well-known liberal bias.”) And on the positive side, we need to support those journalistic enterprises and experiments that attempt to live up to their values as it becomes harder and harder to do so, whether with subscriptions, clicks or direct donations. A campaign for taxpayer-funded high-quality journalism on the model of the BBC — and recently suggested by a study published by the Columbia School of Journalism — should not be off the table.

Alterman is apparently perfectly sure that right-wing journalists deliberately distort the news, while ever more obstacles are put in the way of straight factual reporting which would inevitably endorse liberal opinion.

One of the remedies he suggests is “taxpayer-funded journalism”. In other words, government-funded. (As were Pravda [Truth] and Izvestia [News] in the Soviet Union –  about which some Russians dared to joke that there was “no news in Truth, no truth in News”.)

Where can discourse across the political divide even begin? Any attempt at it can only be a dialogue of the deaf.

Who or what now holds the office of President of the United States of America?

The answer to the question is itself a question mark.

David Solway asks the question and his answers are questions. Here is part of what he writes:

Who is this guy? And what does so enigmatic a figure augur for the United States and, indeed, for the future of us all? No matter what hypothesis or conviction one espouses concerning his definitive DNA, it seems fair to say that a shadow of the clandestine — or if one prefers, the inscrutable — envelops this president.

Even Obama’s most avid supporters, if they are honest, must allow that, compared to his POTUS predecessors, unambiguously little is known about his antecedents or, for example, the salient facts of his academic career — many of his records are still under seal, his college and university transcripts have not been released and, broadly speaking, his significant documentation is rather flimsy. There is not much of a paper trail here; for that matter, there is scarcely a Hansel-and-Gretel bread crumb trail. How such a man could be elected to the presidency … remains a riddle for the sphinx. …

In any event, there can be no doubt that the dossier is scanty and that this is a truly amazing deficiency. We simply do not have a clear portrait or a crisply factual biography of the president. But what we do know about his close affiliates — America-and-Jew bashing Reverend Jeremiah Wright, former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi, hysterical and racially divisive Cornel West, unrepentant Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, unscrupulous entrepreneur Tony Rezko — is profoundly unsettling. … [T]he asymmetric relation between what we know and what we don’t know must distress any rational person curious about so influential an actor on the current political scene.

That Louis Farrakhan, like millions of others, feels that Obama was “selected” for our times should give us further pause. On the contrary, it may not be out of place to suggest that we are now afflicted with the worst possible president at the worst possible time, with Iran darting toward the nuclear finish line, the Palestinians as intransigent as ever, the Russians moving back into the Caucasus region, negotiating with Venezuela and solidifying ties with Iran, Syria and Turkey, terrorism … on the rise and U.S. citizens increasingly at the mercy of the jihadists, China holding massive quantities of American Treasury notes, Obama considering ruinous cap-and-trade legislation at a time when the AGW consensus is collapsing, the American debt estimated to hit 100% of GDP in 2011 and its unfunded entitlement liabilities totaling over $US 100 trillion, leading to the prospect of monetary collapse. None of these critical issues have been substantially addressed by the president, except insofar as his actions in some cases, lack of action in others, have only exacerbated them. The collateral fact that we really have no valid and comprehensive notion of who exactly is leading us at this crucial historical juncture boggles the mind.

Yes, this riddle of a man, this living quandary named Barack Hussein Obama is so unlikely a president of the United States, it’s as if he has gate-crashed into history.

Some weeks ago the White House claimed that a William Ayres and a Jeremiah Wright had come in as part of a tour group, and were not to be confused with the notorious Jeremiah Wright and William Ayres associated with the president’s past.

Were they lying? (And if they were, would it be uncharacteristic of the present administration?)

From Atlas Shrugs:

There are consequential, disturbing revelations to be found when flipping through the visitors list at the White House. Bill Ayers is there no less than three times, Louis Farrakhan at least once, but there is also a separate visit for his family, and the infamous hater Jeremiah Wright is there at least five times (four times under Jeremy, one under Jeremiah). Contemptuously, Farrakhan’s visit is tagged as “MEETING WITH SCIENCE CLUB MEMBERS”… Al Sharpton is there twice, and Jesse “hymietown” Jackson is a regular (six times).

It bears noting that despite solid evidence that Obama was tight with these haters, inciters and revolutionaries and traitors, he distanced himself from them during the campaign and outright lied about his ties to them. Mr. Ayers, for example, was dismissed as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood” and “somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know.”

Obama lied about his friends and nefarious colleagues because he knew that his connection to them was deadly. He knew these were bad characters, and that his being involved with them would not sit well with the American people. He knew. And so he lied. And now they are regulars at the White House (while the Dalai Lama and Netanyahu are begrudgingly ushered in the side door or seen chilling with the trash).

These are terrorists, inciters to genocide, America haters, the underbelly of an ugly America — and they are in the House.

For everything that is going wrong for America, John McCain must share the blame, along with the ignorant, incompetent, petty-mindedly vengeful, Alinsky-marinated Chicago clique now in the White House.

Barack Obama was not presidential material, and some of us – some tens of millions of us in all probability – believe he won the election because John McCain let him win. Not intentionally, but foolishly.

This was how he did it. The voters were kept ignorant about Obama by the deliberate choice of those whose job it was to inform them. McCain, and McCain alone, was in a position to bypass the highly partisan media and tell the country, every time he stood before the TV cameras and addressed tens of millions of attentive ears, just whom Obama’s political faction consisted of: subversives, such as, most prominently, the America-hating terrorist-supporting Jeremiah Wright, pastoral leader of thousands, and the actual terrorist Bill Ayers,  ‘educator’ (read indoctrinator) of generations of children.

But McCain chose not to do it.

Why he chose not to do it must remain forever among the darkest of dark mysteries to those who suppose he had a reason. Only those of us see the light who believe that McCain – undoubted hero and patriot that he is, man of extraordinary courage and endurance – was simply not savvy enough to play the cards he held, and was surrounded by advisers who were also not good at thinking, or just didn’t think.

An innumerable portion of us among the tens of millions knew from the moment McCain was chosen as the Republican candidate (instead of the eminently electable Mitt Romney) – yes, from that very second – that the election was lost. It was then that our hearts sank, not to rise again on the helium of hope until very recently. (The hope, expressed at vast tea-parties, is that Obama can yet be stopped from steering the ship of state on to the rocks.)

The one person in his campaign who could and did think, had all the political astuteness necessary to use the ammunition available to win the fight, was Sarah Palin.

In her book, Going Rogue, she relates how she wanted to raise the damning facts about Obama but was ‘told to sit down and shut up’. Eventually she was reluctantly allowed by ‘headquarters’ to touch on his ‘associations with questionable characters’  but only in the form of a ‘sound bite written into a rally speech’, about Obama ‘palling around with terrorists’ (pages 306-307). One gathers that her will in this matter, as in others, was snaffled and curbed almost to impotence. She does not blame McCain, she is consistently respectful of him, but after reading her account we can and should blame him.

Slight and mild as the little stabbing sound-bite was, ‘the left went nuts, accusing me of lowdown rhetoric unworthy of presidential politics’. (Remember the cruel, lowdown, untrue things the left said about her that they must have deemed worthy of presidential politics?)

But of course the opposition reacted like that. The little stab went home. They knew her reference was potent against them. They feared that if it were made much of, if it were to be emphasized, repeated, insisted upon, their candidate was sunk.

So did McCain read the signs aright and follow up the small victory? Not he. It was always, it seems, more important to McCain to be perceived as a gentleman than that he should win the election for his party, its principles, and its policies. May he long bask in a complacent gentlemanliness as the country endures the consequences of his choice!

His whole organization aided him in making it. ‘Although,’ Palin writes, ‘it was headquarters that had issued the sound bite, the folks there did little more than duck’ when the left reacted with its whining and insolent abuse.

If Palin had been allowed to say whatever she knew needed to be said, or even better if she had been the one to plan the tactics of the campaign, it is possible that McCain would have won. He would most likely not have made a good president, but he couldn’t be as bad as Obama.

If Palin were ever to run her own campaign, signs are she would know how to do it. The autobiographer of Going Rogue emerges from the pages as not only competent, commonsensical, brave, honest, strong, unselfish, knowing her own worth without vanity, but also a born leader, a conservative who understands and shares the values that made America great, and a natural politician who at the same time is a person of integrity. A very rare phenomenon!

The Republican party should appreciate that her exceptional abilities are gifts to it, assets to be grateful for, and should help her make the most of them.

Jillian Becker   November 28, 2009