We have been listening to stories about a liberal bias in the MSM for years now. All the while we have been witnessing an MSM that has become  so afraid to be labeled as liberal, that they no longer can do their job. The Iraq war itself is the worst consequence of this situation. And I believe the coverage of the McCain campaign is the culmination of this phenomenon. While it is hard to get traction complaining about the MSM giving a pass to McCain on his plethora of gaffes, the recent CBS attempt to cover up one of McCain's more spectacular rewrites of history, rises to a new level. It's time to turn the tables and start doing some very loud intimidating of our own. The evidence now exists and it is incontrovertible. I would like to see KO start a new countdown, number of days since CBS and Katie Couric joined the McCain campaign.

Heirs to Freedom

Obama was trying to unite people together on one of the most divided pieces of ground in western history.  

I'll attempt to set aside my own political bias here (obviously in favor of Obama) and make an objective prediction about the upcoming election: it will be a comfortable win, if not landslide victory, for Obama and the Democrats in Congress. From whence comes this prognostication? I have four reasons.

As you're all well aware, John McCain enjoys repeating over and over and over that:
-he will never surrender in Iraq
-we must achieve victory in Iraq
-Barack Obama advocates defeat in Iraq (Joe LIEberman frequently repeats this statement as well)
-Barack Obama cares more about winning an election than the wellbeing of the American people.

Of course John McCain has never sufficiently defined what victory in Iraq would look like, and even if he has done that to some extent, he certainly has not offered any course we can chart to achieve that victory. It is fairly obvious that McCain wants to stay the course of the last 5-6 years, hoping things will fix themselves.

The real deal about the MSM being pro-Obama is the old strategy of shooting the messenger when all else fails. And failing is the best description of the McCain and GOP. So, shoot the messenger. Evidence is mounting. Take a look at CBS News, headlined "House Republicans Fire Off Letter to New York Times":

http://www.cbsnews.com/...

More below the fold

You can criticize John McCain for a great many things.  Media relations hasn't been one of them -- up until now.

Over the last eight years, McCain has taken pains to cozy up to the media.  It proved to be a devastatingly effective strategy, as a tidal wave of glowing news reports allowed a broke McCain campaign to neutralize and overcome the immense cash warchests of Romney and Giuliani.

This relationship was McCain's most potent weapon against Barack Obama -- and his best chance of victory in November.

This week, John McCain did the unthinkable -- he threw his media allies under the bus for short-term political gain.  Remember this decision well, for it likely marked the end of any hope John McCain had of winning the 2008 election.

Apologies upfront for this being a fairly short diary but I am sick to death of Andrea Mitchell.

last night CBS struck a blow against honesty, integrity, and ethics in journalism.  here's how we hit back.

Listening to the Conservatives whine about how "Liberally biased" the MainStream Media is, you would think they'd know not to give their enemies any ammunition. I've seen so many times they have done just that, either they know it's a big lie or they're masochistically begging to be humiliated.

First up, the Citizens United ad campaign. The NY Times reports today that "Senator Barack Obama" is "an overhyped media darling."

What makes this such a spectacular display of chutzpah is that the commercial features Kenneth Blackwell, former Secretary of State for Ohio and other characters that you wouldn't think the Republicans would want to be linked to by this media.

She is really, really stupid. That is why her stint as CBS has been such a disaster. Her handling or the Obama and McCain interviews highlights her ignorance and lack of intellectual rigor.

Obama provides her with nuanced answers to her repeated (3x) questions about the success of the 'surge' in Iraq. Katie don't do nuance. She needs to have the answers in preferably monosyllabic responses like 'yup' and 'nope'.

Update:  Keith Olbermann just reported that CBS edited out McCain's first response to Katie's questioning in which McCain demonstrated his confusion about the origin and impact of the 'Surge'. McCain claimed that the Sunni Awakening occurred as a result of the Surge, even though it begab two months before anyone had even mentioned the idea of the Surge. McCain goes so far as to accuse Obama of lying, when in fact he is the one who is either lying or extremely confused.

Amazingly CBS edited McCain's gaffe from the video they used on the air! They actually substituted another McCain answer instead of his lie/distortion. This is an egregious violation of every canon of journalistic ethics. Katie and CBS are covering up for McCain's gaffes.

Ok, so by now you've probably heard about the McCaign campaign's ad, "Love Is In The Air", which whines about the MSM's supposed ""love affair" with Obama.

As Jake Trapper from Political Punch puts it,

"This is like Britney Spears complaining that the hype around Miley Cyrus far exceeds her talent."

Dear American Media,

I understand 39 journalists and Andrea Mitchell are currently overseas with Sen. Barack Obama.  But did you know that there's another person also running for president?  

His name is John Sidney McCain, and he is old.  I have also discovered that he was a POW in something called "Vietnam".  While researching McCain, or, as I've come to refer to him: "The other, White Candidate" [TOWC], I've realized that it's difficult to understand what his positions are on a number of important issues.

This is where you come in.  One you remaining non-chosen stateside journalists should do an in-depth interview with John McCain.  On the issues.  Not his bio, not Obama, but the issues. McCain needs to tell us, in detail, what his plans are for this country and its people.  Because I don't think he's done that yet.

Apparently upset that the media has reluctantly acknowledged that Obama's foreign policy trip has been a resounding success beyond anyone's expectations, McCain has now started throwing a petulant hissy fit that his lies about Obama's position on Iraq and al-Maliki's statements are not getting perpetuated uncritically by every journalist in the business. Hoping to replicate a successful play made by Senator Clinton, he has now initiated a campaign to bully any non-compliant members of the press into his service. Apparently, anything less than complete, pathological hostility to Barack Obama is unacceptable. Of course, McCain is acting less like the oppressed outcast than the paranoid, jealous lover. It's not that the media has been particularly negative towards him. Rather, he simply cannot handle the faintest indication that they might be anything less than completely devoted to his campaign.

Barack Obama is giving a live press conference right now in Jordan.

And after his opening statements, Andrea Mitchell, desperate for attention, baraged him with a number of ambiguous question, prompting Obama to respond:

"How many questions is that Andrea?"

They had another black Republican pundit guy on MSNBC this afternoon. That's two completely new black Republicans I've seen on TV news in the last week. It seems the industrial/news complex has single-mindedly dedicated itself to this on-air diversity because, apparently, Joe Watkins, J.C. Watts, Larry Elder, Ron Christie, Amy Holmes, Armstrong Williams, Mike Steele, Michelle Bernard, et al. ad nauseum, just aren't enough, combined, to offset, say, the awesome Gene Robinson. CNN even brings Ken Blackwell on-air sometimes and he's a fucking felon.

By my admittedly rough breakdown of nationwide numbers, we now have one African-American Republican on the air for every three actual African-American Republican citizens in the country, presumably via some mainstream media iteration of the affirmative action they so loathe.

Remember last August when everyone was REALLY jumping on the callowness of Barack Obama after he misstated that Canada has a President instead of a Prime Minister And how the media certainly didn't want this one to go away real quick.

The blunder created some buzz among observers of the battle for the Democrat nomination, earning Obama a correction in Wednesday's edition of the New York Times -- "Canada has a prime minister, not a president," the paper reported -- and prompting The Atlantic magazine's blogger on the campaign, Marc Ambinder, to remark: "Well, congratulate him on his promotion, because Canada has a prime minister."

Just imagine if he continued to have those consistent "misspoken" moments.

He doesn't have a plan for Afghanistan. He doesn't have a clear foreign policy platform.  He has a sound byte (VICTORY) and a strategy (STAY!) that is actually far more intellectually bankrupt than the Bush Administration's mishandling of events. Today the McCain campaign leaked to the Drudge Report that the big bad NYT wanted their candidate to parrot OBAMA'S plan! HOW UNFAIR! It actually would be a huge shocking story if that were the case; only guess what, it isn't!

Shipley, who is on vacation this week, explained his decision not to run the editorial. 'The Obama piece worked for me because it offered new information (it appeared before his speech); while Senator Obama discussed Senator McCain, he also went into detail about his own plans.' Shipley continues: 'It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama's piece. To that end, the article would have to articulate, in concrete terms, how Senator McCain defines victory in Iraq.'

See that: basically Sen. Obama fleshed out his plans for Iraq in the editorial he made, in addition to of course taking shots iat his opponent. Sen. McCain meanwhile simply attacked Sen. Obama's editorial without laying out any concrete vision for the future.

Let's discuss this more below the fold.

We finally got a look at Barack Obama's June numbers and they are impressive but not unexpected. The 30 mil. reported by the WSJ was initially seen as disappointing. Once the actual numbers were released and it showed a 54 mil. haul, the MSM was obviously impressed. On all of the major news channels you heard the same thing over and over, that it appears Obama lost no support after his "move to the center". The media was also assuming that the FISA vote didn't have any effect on fundraising. Many pundits made statements that made it appear as though this was indeed fact based on the June numbers.

But hold on a second. Didn't the FISA vote happen in July?