Getting Out the Message

posted at 12:21 pm on October 8, 2009 by Howard Portnoy
[ Media ]    printer-friendly

This past weekend, Saturday Night Live proved to the masses what many of us on the right have known and written about for some time: That Barack Obama is mortal, flawed, and that there’s plenty about him to make fun of. I mean, come on now, what past president, assuming one knew how to use Twitter, would have Tweeted with a straight face, as Barack Obama did on September 9, “I still believe we can do great things, and that here and now we will meet history’s test”? Part of this guy’s problem is that he’s so busy crafting comments like this which he assumes will some day appear in Bartlett’s Quotations that he doesn’t have time to do his job. Dorothy Parker famously said, “I don’t like writing; I like having written.” It might be said of Barack Obama, here in the infancy of his misbegotten presidency, that he doesn’t like being president; he likes having been president.

Well, Mr. President, you haven’t been president yet — not for a full term — and the natives on both sides are growing restless. Although Obama’s favorability ratings continue to hover around 51%, SNL’s send-up was a distress signal from the left, who feels Obama hasn’t kept enough of his promises to them, such as passing government takeover of health care, bringing the troops home from Iraq, and ending the military’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy regarding gays. The right, who in large measure didn’t vote for him, haven’t been all that thrilled with his performance either. Many of us have long viewed him, to quote David Paul Kuhn at RealClearPolitics, as “both ineffective and meek; a man who is loved by all and feared by none.” (Well, I’m not sure about the “loved” part. I for one have had a lot of trouble getting past the combination of haughtiness and thin skin.)

But once you stop giggling about all the silliness attending Obama — his continuously posing for the statues and paintings of him that he is sure will someday be done or his relentless pretense as “just another guy” who appears on late-night TV and such — there are issues that are no laughing matter. On these, the left-controlled media remain eerily silent. There is no mention — not a word — in the New York Times or Washington Post or on ABC, CBS, or NBC about Kevin Jennings, for example.  As my colleague J.E. Dyer chronicled in a must-read post on these pages here today, Jennings, Obama’s “Safe Schools Czar,” is a long-time advocate of teaching about homosexuality in kindergarten and spoke glowingly of a long-time supporter of the North American Man-Boy Love Association in a speech in 1997.

This is just the latest in a series of head-scratchers concerning Obama’s hand-picked advisers and associations that have been ignored by the mainstream media. The MSM refused to cover the still-growing ACORN scandal until it became too big to ignore, and the first — and only — time any of them mentioned Van Jones was when he “resigned” — and that was with a shrug of the shoulders.

And yet the majority of Americans, those in flyover country, remain largely ignorant of these and other clear and disturbing tendencies on the part of the man currently in the White House. They aren’t aware for the most part that Obama’s Science Czar, John Holdren, thinks that to save the planet we need forced abortions and mass sterilization or that his Regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein, believes pets should have the right to “lawyer up” against their owners. I guess he also believes that animals should receive a generous stipend from the government to finance their legal aid.

Why are these stories off the radar of Middle America? Because their main source of news is broadcast TV and newspapers. Even as the Internet’s role as a primary news medium burgeons, broadband connections are available to less than 40% of most rural American communities. In about half of all rural areas, it is much lower than that.

Whether or not you share Glenn Beck’s fears about what Obama meant when he spoke of “radically transforming” the country as president, there is no getting around the fact that Obama has been the most radical president in the history of the country. Many of his ideas and goals are inconsistent with those of the majority of Americans, including many Democrats. It is vitally important that all of America knows who this man is and what he is about. Thanks to the MSM, many do not.

During the election, the MSM missed no opportunity to miss covering, much less investigating, a scandalous chapter of Obama’s past, whether it was his shady land deal with Tony Rezko or his associations with the likes of Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, or Jeremiah Wright. Despite many blank pages in Obama’s biography, including his years at Columbia, the MSM went out of its way to avoid vetting him. They continue to turn a blind eye on any aspect of his presidency that is the least bit controversial.

It is high time the American people, and especially those in the hinterlands, met their president. I have no clue how to force that desperately needed meeting. I am open to and grateful for suggestions, which I will write about in this space.

Cross-posted at Zombie Contentions

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