It's taken a while, but Ronald Kessler has finally figured out a way to work some of his trademark Bush administration fluffing into his attacks on Barack Obama: by claiming in his March 26 Newsmax column that Condoleezza Rice suffered more racism than Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
No, really:
Yet while Wright, 66, no doubt had brushes with discrimination growing up in Philadelphia, it was nothing compared with what Condoleezza Rice faced — or, for that matter, what six million Jews who were slaughtered by Adolf Hitler faced.
In contrast to Wright, who attended an integrated school, Rice grew up in segregated Birmingham, Ala. Denise McNair, one of Rice’s friends and classmates, was one of the four girls who was killed in the Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
Rice's Unbridled Courage
Rice had to sit at the back of buses. When more whites got on, the driver would move a “Colored” sign farther back in the bus, making less room for blacks. Rice could not eat at the same restaurants as whites unless the restaurant had a separate room with a separate entrance for blacks.
She was not allowed to use the same drinking fountains or public restrooms as whites. But Condi Rice, a descendant of slaves and white slave owners, had something else going for her: Her middle-class black neighborhood had developed a culture separate from the rest of the city, one that shut out the racism all around and taught children they had to be “twice as good” to pull even with whites.
Instead of teaching Rice to carry a chip on her shoulder, as she has told me, Rice’s parents amplified those positive values, giving her a strong sense of self-worth.
Rice’s father, the Rev. John W. Rice Jr., instilled in his daughter the faith that she brought with her into the White House and the State Department.
While Rice is comfortable with her own heritage and often speaks before black groups, she does not dwell on the racism she experienced growing up. Above all, Rice is proud of America and the opportunities that everyone now has. Witness the fact that she is secretary of state.
What a contrast to the poisonous atmosphere at the church that Obama has chosen to attend for more than two decades and the demagoguery of the man he calls his friend, sounding board, and mentor.
In his March 25 WorldNetDaily column, Mychal Massie called Barack Obama's speech on race "a transpicuous opprobrium intended to obfuscate."
Massie also claimed that Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, "in effect said Natalie [sic: Natalee] Holloway got what she deserved." Actually, no. According to a Jan. 27 WND article, which first hyped Wright's statement:
"Black women are being raped daily in Darfur, Sudan, in the Congo and in Sub-Saharan Africa. That doesn't make news," Wright said in the August 2005 edition of Trumpet Magazine, a publication of his Trinity United Church of Christ.
But, "One 18-year-old white girl from Alabama gets drunk on a graduation trip to Aruba, goes off and 'gives it up' while in a foreign country, and that stays in the news for months!" he added. "Maybe I am missing something!"
Wright never said Holloway "got what she deserved" -- not even "in effect." Massie needs to do a little less thesaurus-mining and a little more fact-checking.
It's An Anti-Obama Frenzy! (And Naked Women!) Topic: WorldNetDaily
How much does WorldNetDaily hate Barack Obama? At this writing, WorldNetDaily has no less than six anti-Obama articles on its front page.
The lead article, by Jerome Corsi, proclaims: "Revealed: Obama's dad polygamist, alcoholic." But there's nothing new. As Corsi admits, his information is more than a year old, from a January 2007 article in London's Daily Mail.
The Daily Mail, by the way, is currently featuring nude photos of Carla Bruni, wife of French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. WND, if you'll recall, stopped linking to articles at Salon.com because the website contained "erotic art" -- you know, photos of naked women. Guess we can forget about that ban.
This is not the first time Joseph Farah and WND have abandoned their professed moral standards to indulge in hatred of a Democratic presidential candidate. In 2004, WND repeated never-verified rumors of a John Kerry affair, even though they originated with the British tabloid The Sun, notorious for its naked Page 3 Girls.
One Free Ride, Coming Right Up Topic: Media Research Center
A few weeks back, the MRC's Tim Graham was chortling at the idea that the then-upcoming book by David Brock and Paul Waldman of Media Matters (disclosure: our employer) claiming that John McCain has been given a free ride by the media wasn't conforming with current events (even though his and Brent Bozell's book claiming much the same thing about Hillary Clinton wasn't either). Graham added regarding the Brock-Waldman book: "It should be fun to rifle through their pages when we can locate a copy."
Well, this is Graham's lucky day: The book was released yesterday. Learn more about it here, and check out the nifty video introducing it:
WND Still Not Telling the Truth About Elmira Prayer Protest Topic: WorldNetDaily
A March 24 WorldNetDaily article stated that an appeal "has been filed on behalf of four Christians who were fined for praying in a public park in Elmira, N.Y." The article continues:
The case stems from a visit by seven Christians to a homosexual festival in a public park in Elmira last year. They were convicted of "disorderly conduct" even though the police officer who arrested them testified their actions were peaceful.
[...]
The Christians were arrested June 23 after they entered Elmira's Wisner Park with their heads bowed to pray for the participants of the homosexual festival going on. Materials advertising the event stated it was open to the public and all were invited to attend.
[...]
The Elmira Star-Gazette reported police Sgt. Sharon Moyer told the court she warned Julian Raven that his rights at the event were limited..
"He said he was there to preach the word of God," Moyer told the court, the newspaper reported. "I explained he was welcome to be there (at the festival), but he would not be allowed to confront the participants."
The officer accused the street preacher of being antagonistic.
[Street preacher Julian] Raven, however, said it was Moyer who was "aggressive from the get-go" and said her orders amounted to a deprivation of his rights.
WND, as it has previously done, fails to tell the full truth about the incident. Merely "praying," as WND repeatedly asserts, was not the issue here; nowhere does it describe the specific circumstances in which the group did so. According to the Elmira Star-Gazette: "The four protesters claimed their right to free speech was violated when they were arrested June 23 after laying prostrate on the lawn in front of a temporary stage in the park."
The article also repeated WND's previous false claim that "A local newspaper reported the judge determined Raven was reckless for going to the park." In fact, what the Star-Gazette stated that Elmira City Judge Thomas Ramich "said in his decision that Julian M. Raven, the leader of the protest group, was being reckless when he inserted the four into the midst of the event participants" -- that is, having them lay prostrate on the lawn in front of a temporary stage in the park, not simply the act of "going to the park."
St. John Cherry-Picks Stats to Attack Gays Topic: WorldNetDaily
In a March 25 column warning that homosexuals are "using the public airwaves, public parks and public schools to push deviant sexual practices into the faces of our innocent children," Olivia St. John writes:
Dr. Gene Abel, medical director of the Behavioral Medicine Institute of Atlanta, compared groups of self-confessed homosexual and heterosexual molesters. A sampling of molestation rates indicated that the homosexuals averaged molesting 150 children each, while the heterosexuals molested 19.8 victims each.
St. John falsely assumes that all same-sex pedophiles are homosexual. In fact, as Mark E. Pietrzyk points out, Abel has written:
[M]ost men who molest little boys are not gay. Only 21 percent of the child molesters we studied who assault little boys were exclusively homosexual. Nearly 80 percent of the men who molested little boys were heterosexual or bisexual, and most of these men were married and had children of their own.
This is a distortion of Abel's work that WND has propagated as far back as 2000. David Bresnahan wrote in an article "excerpted from an in-depth exploration of pedophilia, homosexuality and the Boy Scouts of America in the October edition of WND's sister publication, the monthly WorldNet Magazine [now Whistleblower]": "Based on data from a study of non-incarcerated child sex offenders, Gene G. Abel, M.D., has found that homosexuals 'sexually molest young boys with an incidence that is occurring five times greater than the molestation of girls.'" But Abel did not label all same-sex pedophiles as homosexuals.
The MRC's efforts to downplay inflammatory statements by right-wing preachers continues apace: A March 24 NewsBusters post by Justin McCarthy states:
['The View" co-hosts Joy] Behar and Whoopi Goldberg justified Barack Obama’s connection to Jeremiah Wright by pointing to Bush’s association with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and their many controversial remarks. It could be a valid point if Falwell or Robertson were Bush’s pastor for 20 years. Neither of them ever were.
As we've noted, the MRC has been apologists for Falwell's history of statements -- as well as those made by John McCain endorsers John Hagee and Rod Parsley, calling them insignificant (when they mention them at all) compared to those made by Wright.
On a related front, a March 24 NewsBusters post by Seton Motley (reprinted at Human Events) accuses the media of engaging in a "Plan to Protect Obama" without noting the MRC's own Plan to Protect McCain by downplaying remarks by the pastors who have endorsed him. In fact, Motley doesn't mention Hagee, Parsley or any other right-wing pastor at all. And Tim Graham complained that, during an interview with Obama, CNN's Larry King "didn’t ask a single question about [Wright] until 32 minutes had elapsed on the show, and then devoted just 20 minutes to it." Which, of course, is 20 minutes more than Graham has spent on Hagee and Parsley.
WND Adds Reporter Who Shares Its Bias Topic: WorldNetDaily
A March 23 WorldNetDaily article announced that it has added Chelsea Schilling, a former WND reporting intern and current (apparent part-time) assistant commentary editor, "as a full-time general assignment reporter upon her graduation from college in May." The article touts her "perfect 4.0 grade point average in pursuit of her journalism degree."
So, what can we expect from Schilling? Will her work be any more fair and balanced and accurate than that of, say, Bob Unruh? A perusal through the ConWebWatch archives during the time of Schilling's WND reporting internship suggests not:
Schilling has unquestioningly parroted Alliance Defense Fund press releases without making an effort to gather the full story.
Schilling called Hillary Clinton a "clown" for having purportedly "cried three times to gain voter sympathy." Schilling claimed Hillary answered one questioner with "a pathetically contrived tremble" and anonther with "crocodile tears," as if she could divine Hillary's true emotions. Schilling also tossed out a casual smear of John Edwards as "Miss Sunshine Breck."
Further, the other two news outlets with which Schilling has claimed professional experience -- USA Radio Network and the Sacramento Union -- are both conservative (the latter with its own bias problems).
That's what you have to look forward to when Schilling goes full-time -- in other words, exactly what we've come to expect from WND. A perfect GPA doesn't make you less biased.
AIM Tries Playing the Manchurian Card on Obama Topic: Accuracy in Media
A March 18 AIM Report tries to play the Manchurian Candidate card against Barack Obama. It carries the headline, "Is Barack Obama A Marxist Mole?" and claims there is "mounting public concern about a candidate who has come out of virtually nowhere" that he's, well, a commie.
It's largely a rehash of a Feb. 18 column by Cliff Kincaid making a big deal out of the claim that an Obama mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, was purportedly an unrepentant commie. The AIM Report builds on that by ramping up the anti-communist paranoia with subheads like "Fellow Travelers" and "The Nature Of The Threat" and, most ominously, "OBAMA’S SECRET SOCIALIST CONNECTIONS."
Kincaid and AIM seem a tad desperate to portray Obama as a secret commie, since portraying him as a secret Muslim didn't work out so well.
WND Repeats Personal Smear of Schaeffer Topic: WorldNetDaily
A March 21 WorldNetDaily article by Art Moore is aimed at attacking Frank Schaeffer, son of late "evangelical thinker" Francis Schaeffer, and Moore is not afraid to throw a personal smear or two in the mix.
Moore was responding to an article by Frank Schaeffer "in the Baltimore Community Times" -- in fact, it first appeared at the Huffington Post -- stating that the controversial statements made by Barack Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are no different from those made by "thousands of right-wing white preachers," who say, "as my dad often did, that we are, 'under the judgment of God.' They call America evil and warn of imminent destruction. By comparison Obama's minister's shouted 'controversial' comments were mild."
Moore makes no apparent attempt to contact Frank Schaeffer to explain himself or respond to criticism -- a practice familiar those who have observed his whitewashing of professional Clinton-bashers Peter Paul and Kathleen Willey. Indeed, Schaeffer's basic point is never rebutted. Rather, he cites a personal attack "evangelical writer and social critic Os Guinness," who panned Frank Schaeffer's book on his break with the evangelical movement in a Christianity Today article:
Guinness says the "real truth is that Franky, as he then called himself, was spoiled. He was more like a poster child for Benjamin Spock than the son of 'fundamentalist missionaries.'"
"Having been born well after his sisters, and having survived polio as a child, he was rarely challenged, disciplined, or denied," he writes. "As a result, he grew up a 'little Napoleon,' as some of the L'Abri students called him. He would boast that he could twist his parents around his little finger, and time and again he proved it."
That's right -- personal attacks, not intellectual arguments, are an acceptable form of rebuttal in a WND "news" article.
A March 23 NewsBusters post by Noel Sheppard cited a poll by InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion Research claiming that a majority of people poll said that Barack Obama's speech on race and the controversial statements made by his pastor made them "less likely" to vote for him. This, Sheppard said, contradicts "media member after media member" who "gushed over Barack Obama's performance in Philadelphia on Tuesday."
But what the heck is InsiderAdvantage/Majority Opinion Research, and what is the Southern Political Report, which first reported the poll? We've never heard of 'em.
Turns out that InsiderAdvantage and the Southern Political Report are both divisions of a company called Internet News Agency, the chairman and CEO of which is Matt Towery. Towery is -- according to his bio at the conservative Townhall.com, where he writes a weekly column -- is a former "campaign chairman for Newt Gingrich and chief strategist for numerous national political campaigns." He is also a "former National Republican legislator of the year."
In other words, he appears to be exactly the kind of guy who has an interest in advancing the idea that Obama's speech hurt him.
Indeed, the poll has a major hole in it: While it accounts for those who were aware of Obama's speech and the situation regarding his pastor, it does not further break down responses for those to actually watched the speech. The press release on the poll does sort of acknowledge this:
Barack Obama’s speech about race on Tuesday impressed many who witnessed it or read it. But most of America did neither, and many of them -- white and black -- were less persuaded of the speech’s capacity to heal racial wounds, or to put the issue of race behind Obama as he continues his quest for the White House.
The release goes on to add: "It’s easy to read too much into this poll." Yet that's what Sheppard seems to be trying to do.
Why didn't Sheppard mention any of this? Perhaps because it would undermine his own argument against liberal media bias.
WorldNetDaily's regulardenials that it's a conservative website have always been laughable, as its pro-conservative, anti-liberal bias has always been self-evident.
WND has apparently decided to abandon even the pretense now: It's now selling a bumper sticker (below) that reads, "Defeat Obama, Osama and Chelsea's Mama."
Presumably WND understands that by taking explicit sides in a political race -- not to mention equating political candidates to terrorists in a manner more suited to partisan hacks than a "news" organization -- it gives up any remaining credibility as a news source, that its news reports on said race will be forever seen as trafficking in bias. Of course, WND has always done this, as its repeated, factually dubious (if not outright false) attacks on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama attest.
Needless to say, a real news organization would never sell such a bumper sticker.
Apparently, with the admission that it published false information about Al Gore, Joseph Farah and Co. have stopped caring about the issue of bias, or even the truth. It's a site that peddles lies, distortions and hate, and damn proud of it.
A March 21 WorldNetDaily article by Bob Unruh claiming that "The Canadian government has ordered a Christian ministry that teaches doctrine and the differences between Christians and cults shut down because its reference materials were 'critical' of the beliefs of those who are not Christian" is curiously vague on some details.
Unruh talks only to Lorri MacGregor, head of MM Outreach Media Ministries, formerly MacGregor Ministries, who claims she was forced to move her operation to the United States as a result of the alleged problems in Canada. Unruh does not talk to any representative of the Canadian government; heck, there's not even a mention of which specific government agency purportedly had a problem with MacGregor's ministry.
Would Unruh have been able to get away with such a one-sided, one-source article if he had still been working for the Associated Press? Absolutely not.
Unruh also whitewashes MacGregor's group, painting it as a benign group that criticizes, among other things, "fads" in church worship, "including a 'creeping Eastern mysticism' appearing in some churches," with a particular focus on Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. But Unruh doesn't mention the numerous other groups MacGregor objects to -- such as Catholics. One article on MacGregor's website calls the Catholic Church an "idolatrous Harlot" and "deceivers." Another denounced the Catholic veneration of Mary.
Does this mean that, by giving MacGregor such fawning coverage, that Unruh is anti-Catholic too? After all, we've seen evidence of WND's anti-Catholicism before, most recently in its silence on John McCain endorser John Hagee's Catholic-bashing, so it wouldn't be surprising.
MacGregor's ministry has also attacked Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church -- of particular issue for WND since it has had relationships with some of the church's operations in the past, relationships it has never quite renounced -- indeed, last year WND uncritically praised the Washington Times without mentioning anything about Moon.
Unruh has a history of telling only one side of the story; add this one to the list.
MRC's Knight Joins the Equivocation Party Topic: Media Research Center
We've noted that even as writers at the Media Research Center demanded that Barack Obama break off all ties with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, they refused to distance themselves from Jerry Falwell over his numerous controversial statements.
That equivocation continues in a March 20 piece (published at CNSNews.com and Townhall.com) by Robert Knight, director of the MRC's Culture and Media Institute. Responding to a Washington Post column by Michael Gerson in which he likened Wright to "my friend Jerry Falwell," which Knight called "scurrilous" and "vile." Knight claimed:
First, unlike Wright, Jerry Falwell was no hater. After his most controversial moment, when he blamed pro-abortion and pro-homosexual groups for 9-11 as God’s punishment on America for abandoning moral standards, he apologized. In his many years of opposing abortion and homosexual activism, he also offered the good news that Christ died for everyone and that no one is beyond the possibility of grace. He did not use profanity, nor did he repeatedly degrade any group of people the way Wright routinely castigated white people. He did not spin wild conspiracy theories, such as Wright’s conjecture that the U.S. government created AIDS to wipe out black people.
So all's forgiven because Falwell "apologized"? In fact, Falwell's "apology" was a rather tepid one:
"I do believe, as a theologian, based upon many Scriptures and particularly Proverbs 14:23, which says 'living by God's principles promotes a nation to greatness, violating those principles brings a nation to shame,'" he said.
Falwell said he believes the ACLU and other organizations "which have attempted to secularize America, have removed our nation from its relationship with Christ on which it was founded."
"I therefore believe that that created an environment which possibly has caused God to lift the veil of protection which has allowed no one to attack America on our soil since 1812," he said.
[...]
Falwell told CNN: "I would never blame any human being except the terrorists, and if I left that impression with gays or lesbians or anyone else, I apologize."
In other words, it's more of a non-apology apology, since he didn't retract the basic claim, only the "impression" he left.
And wasn't the "Clinton Chronicles" video, which Falwell hawked in late-night infomercials, a bunch of "wild conspiracy theories"?
Like his boss Brent Bozell, Knight is a longtime apologist for Falwell. In a May 2007 CMI column eulogizing Falwell, Knight proclaimed that "The Rev. Falwell did a lot of things well, ticking off liberals right up to the end" and asserted that Falwell's critics were "utterly distorting his Christian message into a caricature of hate."
As near as we can tell, neither Knight nor anyone else at CMI has mentioned the anti-Catholic rantings of John McCain endorser John Hagee -- thus fitting in with the rest of the MRC.
Clinton Derangement Syndrome Watch Topic: WorldNetDaily
At least Eliot Whoremonger paid for his adulterous sex. Bill Clinton, in only one of reportedly hundreds of extra-marital affairs, paid nothing to a White House intern whom he had perform oral sex on him while he was telephoning a congressman in the Oval Office.
And, in one of the most unbelievably stupid and morally bankrupt actions ever undertaken by any serious candidate for the White House, Hillary actually invited this enormously oversexed rogue to campaign for her – until what surely have been his predictable antics caused another Bill Clinton national sensation. Reportedly, Hillary's desperate campaign advisers finally persuaded her to rein him in.
But, if Hillary possibly wins both the nomination and the presidency, is there any reasonable person willing to predict that the Hillary Clinton administration will never, ever have any sex scandals (I mean from anybody else except heavily Secret-Serviced Slick Willie)?
All this is why Mrs. Clinton should now withdraw her candidacy. I say this out of concern for her insurmountable problem, since she has stayed married to Slick through so much of his serial adulteries.
