In an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times, Aaron David Miller admits the obvious: “Unlike his two predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, Obama isn’t in love with the idea of Israel.”

But Miller doesn’t address Barack Obama’s immersion in the anti-Israel, antisemitic views of his pastor and mentor, Jeremiah Wright, in whose Trinity United Church of Christ Obama worshipped for two decades.

Nor does Miller note Obama’s friendship with former Palestine Liberation Organization advisor Rashid Khalidi, whose anti-Israel views are a matter of public record, or Obama’s eager association with Arab causes early in his political career.

The Obamas with Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, 1998 (Source: Electronic Intifada)

Instead, Miller cites Obama’s “logical,” “intellectual” and “moral” approach to Israel–as opposed to the “emotional” approach of previous occupants of the White House, whose views were allegedly informed by simplistic faith and fables:

Obama’s views came from another place: his own logic, the university environment in which he developed intellectually and his own moral sensibilities. And according to this view, the Arab-Israeli dispute isn’t some kind of morality play that pits the forces of good against the forces of darkness. Instead, it’s a more complex tale, not of heroes and villains but of a conflict between two rights and two just causes. It’s also a conflict that is vital to American interests. And those interests are being threatened by the divide between those who want a solution and are serious about moving toward one, and those who aren’t serious about finding a solution and throw up obstacles. After three years, the president has clearly placed the Israelis in the latter category and the Palestinians in the former.

Miller adds that the sour relationship between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a result of Obama’s allegedly “intellectual” approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He seems to forget that it was Netanyahu who famously gave Obama an “intellectual” lesson in the history of the conflict and Israel’s borders in May 2011:

The truth is that Obama’s antipathy towards Israel is rooted in a passionate, radical left-wing ideology that thrives in both the academic cloisters and the radical pulpits that gave Obama his political inspiration and foundation. And the Los Angeles Times knows it, for it is in possession of a key piece of historical evidence: the “Rashid Khalidi tape.” (more…)

Examiner:

How much is too much? Politico broke the Cain sexual harassment story last Sunday night, launching organization wide coverage filling up a full week of heavy coverage on their scoop.

Since the scandal broke, the political reporting juggernaut has published at least 90 online stories on further developments and public reaction to the story.

That’s 90 stories in less than a week.

By contrast,  according to a good faith count using Politico’s own search engine….

…there have been exactly two stories with the words “Rielle Hunter” in them not only during the time it mattered, the Year of our Lord 2008, but still months after John Edwards dropped out of the race.

…there were only 16 stories about Jeremiah Wright the week that bombshell dropped, and more than a few were favorable to Obama.

…there have been fewer than 40 total stories about Fast and Furious since that story broke months ago.

…there have been only 65 stories about Solyndra over the last six weeks.

…and there have been fewer than 30 stories surrounding anything involving the New Black Panther Party.

Need I go on? Must I make the gun smoke a little more?

(more…)

Barack Obama, the sitting president of these here United States, is a man who …

… spent 20 years in a racially divisive church.

… called the racial demagogue Jeremiah Wright his mentor.

…shared a stage with the openly racist New Black Panther Party as a presidential candidate.

… also shared that stage with Malik Shabazz, the head of the New Black Panther Party.

… has yet to tell us if the Malik Shabazz who signed the White House guest book in 2009 is the same Malik Shabazz who heads the New Black Panther Party.

… appointed an Attorney General who all but dropped slam-dunk charges of voter intimidation against this very same New Black Panther Party.

Obama’s racially divisive past and present and his associations with the some of the worst racial demagogues in our nation right now is appalling and indefensible. And yet, over the past three-plus years we’ve only watched the corrupt MSM cover this stuff up, excuse and dissemble it — the same MSM that declares opposition to ObamaCare or attending a tea party as racist.

The MSM has us living in an upside down world where everything’s racism except, you know, racism.

A perfect example of this is the latest anti-Perry hit-piece from the New York Times that takes guilt-by-association to a whole new level:

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who often waxes nostalgic about his small-town roots, grew up in an almost all-white rural area where many referred to slingshots as “niggershooters.” One elderly black resident recalls being introduced by her boss at a party decades back as “my maid, Nigger Mae Lou,” while just four years ago, a black high school student found a noose in his locker.

In 1968, Mr. Perry left home for Texas A&M, a deeply conservative university whose yearbooks early in the century included Ku Klux Klan-robed students and a dairy group called the Kream and Kow Klub. The school, having just graduated its first two black undergraduates, was in the early throes of desegregation; at the end of Mr. Perry’s four years there, blacks still made up less than 1 percent of the student body.

By the time he inherited the governorship from George W. Bush in 2000, Mr. Perry appeared to have moved well beyond his racially sheltered background.

One of his early acts was to appoint the first black justice to the Texas Supreme Court. A few months later, flanked by the parents of a black man who had been dragged to death behind a pickup truck, he signed a hate crimes bill that Mr. Bush had blocked. Over his three terms as governor, he has nurtured relationships with black leaders, including the head of the Texas N.A.A.C.P., who extols the governor’s open-mindedness.

The worst that the Times can come up with is that Perry defends keeping the history of the Confederacy alive. But laced like a poison in-between examples of how Perry isn’t racist, we’re beat over the head with scary stories about how everything around him is. Which boils down to the following:

Even his fiercest critics in Texas say that racism is not on their short, or even long, list of Mr. Perry’s sins. But Mr. Perry, whose advocacy of states’ rights sounds to some like a yearning for the Old South, has now been forced to show that he has overcome his early surroundings.

Perry’s been governor for a decade now. So who exactly is forcing him to suddenly prove he’s not racist?

(more…)

- MMfA’s new slogan, hate groups for  me, but not for thee? How many pea brains can you fit in a pod? I don’t know. How many employees does Media Matters have these days?

But of course MMFA immediately jumps to President Obama’s defense and makes every excuse for him. So far we haven’t heard anything from the MSM about the photos published at Big Government showing candidate Obama with the New Black Panther hate group.

- Forget the reindeer, GrandMa just got run over by a Commie!

ABC and NBC Champion Left-Wing Anti-Capitalist Protests, Fueled by Cookies from a ‘Grandmother in Idaho’

- Want to appear on MSNBC? Write a Bush-bashing book and don’t worry about inconvenient facts. If you get good enough at bashing the Right, they may even hire you as a regular one day.

Despite Pillar’s criticism of the Bush administration, he acknowledged to Wolf Blitzer that “There was a strong consensus, not only here in the United States but overseas, that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

- Lest we forget, Obama didn’t have to paint over Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The media did the painting for him.

(more…)

In this weekend’s featured interview in the Wall Street Journal, Juan Rangel, the leader of United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), attempts to sanitize the history of what was once one of the most notorious Alinskyite “community organizing” groups in Chicago.

Rangel paints his group as the moderate, patriotic alternative to the victim-mongerers at the National Council of La Raza and other Hispanic groups.

WSJ: Juan Rangel of UNO

The truth is more complex.

UNO is the Mexican-American ACORN, founded in 1980 by radicals who were tied to the left-wing academic/activist Chicago clique that would later produce Barack Obama. (more…)

This weekend, President Obama’s senior advisor David Plouffe stepped into the Donald Trump MSM-birther fray, dissing – what he termed – Trump’s “sideshow” public appearances.

“There may be a small part of the country that believes these things, but mainstream Americans think it’s (Trump’s birther remarks) a sideshow,” said Plouffe.

“Birther,” is, of course, the media’s pejorative term for those that believe the President is not a natural born U.S. citizen. Back in June 2008, after months of speculation, then candidate Barack Obama succumbed to the political pressure and released a “Certification of Live Birth” from the State of Hawaii. Unfortunately for Team Obama, a certification is not the original record of live birth, the document has only continued to fuel the controversy.

Enter Donald Trump.

(more…)

From today’s story, assuring America that, despite what the polls say, President Obama really truly is a Christian:

The White House says Mr. Obama prays daily, sometimes in person or over the telephone with a small circle of Christian pastors. One of them, the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, who was also a spiritual adviser to former President George W. Bush, telephoned a reporter on Wednesday, at the White House’s behest. He said he was surprised that the number of Americans who say Mr. Obama is Muslim is growing.

“I must say,” Mr. Caldwell said, “never in the history of modern-day presidential politics has a president confessed his faith in the Lord, and folks basically call him a liar.”

Now where would anybody get that idea? (more…)

It’s unfair to analyze Spencer Ackerman, arguably the most immature and ugly contributor to the now infamous JournoList, through the hyperbolic battlefield exchanges of prosaic political warfare that exist between pundits of the Left and Right on the Internet. But there is ample reason to view him as one of, if not, the worst of the offenders.

The record reveals that he was all too happy to light the torches for a mob of journalistic-malpractitioners intent on leaving integrity behind on this, or that, malevolent and persecutive march - so long as it advanced their political agenda. Evidence of his more notable transgressions has been widely reported. Another example of Ackerman’s orgasmic-like fantasy plate glass window tossing fetish behavior towards his political opposition was reported by the Daily Caller.

Having taken the time to try and understand who he was and the forces that shaped man-child Spencer Ackerman back before he became nestled snug in his singularly-minded D.C. womb, I think I understand his need for a womb with a plate glass window Washington, - call it, Spencer Ackerman’s Washington womb with a view. It may be the only environment in which he can exist, given the abuses and rejections the less than talented scribe believes he has endured over his still young years.

At one point, Ackerman suggested that fellow members of the listserv should fight the way the right is fueling the Rev. Jeremiah Wright story by choosing one of Obama’s conservative critics, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” … , “what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”

… In other words, find a right winger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear.

(more…)

…an insulated space where the lure of a smart, ongoing conversation would encourage journalists, policy experts and assorted other observers to share their insights with one another. The eventual irony of the list was that it came to be viewed as a secretive conspiracy…

That’s founder Ezra Klein’s description of JournoList, what it was and what people thought it to be. Turns out the real irony here is that people who viewed it as a “secretive conspiracy” were right.

More archives of the now-defunct JournoList have surfaced at the Daily Caller. All of the leaks focus on the aftermath of a debate in mid-2008 where the specter of Jeremiah Wright threatened to damage Obama’s image. The leaks show exactly what you’d expect a secretive group of liberal journalists to be doing, i.e. plotting how to work the refs for their guy. Here’s a sample: (more…)

JournoList is back.  As Jonathan Strong makes clear in the latest Daily Caller revelations from the Journolist archives, the (publicly) unspoken strategy of the MSM mandarins is to support and protect their liberal/left favorite politicians and policies.  Understanding the tactics they use to achieve their goals – tactics I deal with frequently in litigation – is the first step in the counterattack.

The template for responding to breaking news that undermines their political favorites is almost always the same, a three step process designed to undercut the validity of the story, destroy the credibility of the storyteller, and then ensure that no one outside the new conservative media ever hears about it – or at least about the most important elements.  And the Daily Caller’s story illustrates them all.

The first step is to minimize the story.  So, the arm of the Democrat Party named ACORN feels it’s just fine to give advice to would be child sex traffickers?  It’s nothing – it’s just a side show that happened in once…okay, twice…I mean three times…I mean… anyway, it’s not important.  How about New Black Panthers intimidating voters?  Well, it’s just one precinct in Philadelphia and all the voters there were probably voting for Obama anyway so it’s really not that important.  Maybe a government bureaucrat admitting – publicly and proudly – that she treats white farmers in need of assistance worse than black ones?  Well, that’s one woman and she’s off in the boonies of Georgia!  It’s not important. (more…)

Over at National Review Online, the brilliant and tenacious Jim Geraghty has long held that every statement by Barack Hussein Obama comes with an expiration date. Every one of them.

Now, he’s assembled his complete collection of no-longer-operative declarations by the President of the United States into one handy cyber clip-’n-save, which you can read here.  A sampling:

STATEMENT: “We’ve got a philosophical difference, which we’ve debated repeatedly, and that is that Senator Clinton believes the only way to achieve universal health care is to force everybody to purchase it. And my belief is, the reason that people don’t have it is not because they don’t want it but because they can’t afford it.” Barack Obama, speaking at a Democratic presidential debate, February 21, 2008.

EXPIRATION DATE: On March 23, 2010, Obama signed the individual mandate into law.

And: (more…)

U.S.-Israeli relations have hit a 35-year low over the contentious east Jerusalem building project. Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren said: “Israel’s ties with the United States are in their worst crisis since 1975…a crisis of historic proportions.” This is because, according to Barack Obama, Jewish homes in the Jewish homeland “hinder peace” with Muslims. According to the Associated Press:

Israel’s already strained relationship with the U.S. hit a new low last week when it announced the construction plans during a visit by Vice President Joe Biden. The timing of the announcement deeply embarrassed the Obama administration and put plans for indirect peace talks with the Palestinians in jeopardy.

What about the timing of the Palestinian Authority’s “honoring” of a mass-murdering female genocidal bomber, for whom the Palestinians are naming a square in Ramallah? The Jerusalem Post reported: “The ceremony was scheduled to take place on the 32nd anniversary of the attack, the worst terrorist incident in Israel’s history, in which terrorists commandeered a bus and murdered 37 people, including 10 children.” It too was scheduled to take place during Biden’s visit, but was postponed for a week after Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu asked Obama’s Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, to get the Palestinians to cancel it.

“The announcement of the settlements on the very day that the vice president was there was insulting,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Obama adviser David Axelrod also said: “This was an affront, it was an insult, but most importantly, it undermined this very fragile effort to bring peace to that region. For this announcement to come at that time was very, very destructive.” (more…)

As everyone knows – everyone, that is, excepting those sophisticates who revere The New York Times – the former “paper of record” routinely plays fast and loose with news that bears on its ideological agenda, both by how (and whether) such stories are reported and, more subtly, by the emphasis they’re given (or not given) by their placement in the paper. Thus it was, for instance, most infamously, that Abu Grahaib was on the paper’s front page for an astonishing 32 straight days; while The Times somehow managed to report on Barack Obama’s dropping a certain Reverend Jeremiah Wright from the ceremony announcing his candidacy for the presidency without getting into the ugly details of precisely what it was that made his self-identified mentor so embarrassing. And, by the way, even then, burying the story on page 19.  The Wright story was there for the taking – he’d already been quoted in all his inflammatory viciousness by Rolling Stone – but, given The Times’s outsized influence with the lemmings of the mainstream media, the practical effect of its indulgent coverage was to bury for a full year the story that would  have surely derailed the freshman senator’s candidacy before it got started.

Then, again, sometimes ideologically difficult stories never get run at all. Which brings us to the curious case of Eric Massa, the upstate New York Democratic congressman who’s just resigned in the face of an ethics investigation for having allegedly harassed an aide. Last Thursday, the Times covered the story the same way as everyone else – okay, they stuck it on page 28, and they didn’t specify the aide was male, (except via a single reference to the aide as “him”), the same way males and females are interchangeable in their wedding announcements, but that sort of lunatic p.c. is pro forma. So, for that matter, was that Massa’s resignation seemed as much a concern for Timesmen David Halbfinger and Raymond Hernandez as for “blindsided Democratic leaders in Washington, who are already facing a brutal political climate as they try to defend the party’s majority in the midterm elections in November.”

Nor was the paper’s Saturday follow-up story on Massa’s mea culpa – “there is no doubt that this ethics issue is my fault and mine alone” –  problematic. Indeed, for Times readers that seemed the end of the story. As usual, they dwell in smug ignorance. (more…)

“I have been affiliated with the Cuban Council of Churches since the 1980s,” boasted Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a sermon on July 16, 2006.

I have several close Cuban friends who work with the Cuba Council of Churches and you have heard me preach about our affiliation and the Black Theology Project’s trips to Cuba. The Cuban Council of Churches has been a non-partisan global mission partner for decades. I have worked with them for two decades.

“Non-partisan,” Reverend Wright? Not according to Cuban intelligence defector Juan Vives, who from hands-on experience reports that the Cuba Council of Churches is in fact an arm of Cuba’s ICAP (Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos) itself an arm of Cuba’s DGI, Cuba’s secret police, founded and mentored by the KGB and East German STASI. The ICAP’s long-time chieftain was Rene Cruz Rodriguez, perhaps one of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s “friends.” (more…)

Back in September, after the Giles-O’Keefe ACORN reveal had blown through the alternative media with Katrina-strength winds, the New York Times‘ public editor, Clark Hoyt (Mr. Collins to the Gray Lady’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh), wondered if just maybe the paper had tuned in a bit late to the story.  Managing editor for news Jill Abramson joined him in the public fret-fest, conceding the Times was “slow off the mark,” blaming “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” Hoyt then disclosed that Abramson and executive editor Bill Keller “would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies.”

“Clueless Clark”

Who was this individual assigned by the Times to give them a window on the alien universe of Fox, talk radio and the conservative blogosphere? Keller – the Times‘ transparency and all that — announced he/she would remain anonymous, since he wanted to spare “X” “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”

Oh, and here’s how Hoyt concluded his column:  “Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias.”

And they say the Times has no comics section! (more…)

I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. It felt like a scene from a movie that conveniently ties plot points together when two critical characters in the storyline share a moment of implausible significance – where the intrepid reporter finally runs his target to ground.

So at first I had trouble getting my words out. “I’m Andrew Breitbart,” I exhaled. Instead of hanging up, Bertha Lewis laughed like someone I would probably like in a different setting – but certainly not in this lifetime now that we are permanently and publicly tied to one another as media-based adversaries.

I knew the awkwardness of the moment would turn into trouble when I started asking her pointed questions and, sure enough, we soon we found ourselves in trouble.

“Did you go to the White House last year?” I asked.

Bertha Laughed heartily.  ”No,” she said.

“Really?” I pushed.

“No. One hundred percent not. Not this year. Not last year. Not ever,” she stated firmly, all the while maintaining an awkward and ironic joviality that was likely born of the weirdness of our impromptu exchange. (more…)