Former President Jimmy Carter didn’t start out bashing the media, as he often does today. In fact, prior to the election of Barack Obama, and after the media’s early-sixties love affair with all things Kennedy, it was Jimmy Carter’s turn to be the media’s annointed one. Post-Watergate and Vietnam, his consultants and their liberal media accomplices created everybody’s every man, Plains’ peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter.

It was a cold and rainy October night when my mother and I stood outside a Skokie, Illinois Synagogue to hear and hopefully meet Georgia Governor James Earl “Jimmy” Carter. My parents and most Americans were still sickened over Watergate, President Gerald Ford’s unconditional pardon of Richard Nixon and the disaster of the Vietnam War. They hungered for “change” and “new hope”. Many Americans believed they found what they desperately yearned for in a peanut farmer turned politician from Georgia.

Carter started out by milking it for all it was worth from day one. Flashback to 1977. Carter didn’t fail because the media turned on, or was somehow out to get, him. Carter failed because the walks, talks and cardigans were mere pomp and circumstance. America demands a little bit more of its presidents once they get to the end of Pennsylvania Avenue they call home. But the combination of his liberal policies and naivete, if not incompetence, left Carter completely unable to deliver it – leadership. It took four years and Ronald Reagan to return that quintessential American quality to the White House. Pardon me if I look at Washington today and feel a sense of deja vu all over, again.

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It’s happened before, this tendency of the MSM to walk away from an incomplete story when something new, and usually more political, comes along.  Like sheep moving en masse, the eager correspondents run off in a pack to chase the new news.

It happens…it did back in 1979.

On November 4, 1979, when Iranian “students” took over the U.S. Embassy in Teheran, a 444-day saga began. If you weren’t tuned-in then, here’s just one image from that day.

Although little happened for months on end, the network evening news-readers counted up the days of the “crisis” like we count up the deficit these days. For President Jimmy Carter, the no-news of the daily-news brought political death by 444 cuts. (more…)