The sacrifice of truth to power

What's happening in this terrifying, Orwellian US presidential race is the
flip side of the madness that's been on display since 9/11 itself, when
swathes of the UK population decided that 'America had it coming to it'
because it supported Israel, and that George W Bush was the most dangerous
man on the planet. After the Iraq war started this irrationality swelled
into pathological proportions on both sides of the Atlantic, when the 'Bush
lied, people died' narrative fuelled a hatred of Bush and 'the neocons'
exceeded in its hallucinatory and murderous venom only by the truly deranged
way in which the media and intelligentsia systematically either ignored
evidence that did not fit this narrative or, even more astoundingly,
reported it in such a way that it delivered the opposite of what was
actually happening or being said.

In this way not only has history been rewritten, not only have Britain and
America been to a greater or lesser extent turned against themselves and
demoralised by the propaganda of their mortal enemies recycled as truth by
our fifth-column Big Media, but they have been incited to an ugly and
dangerous  level of irrationality, hatred and hysteria which history tells
us presages the twilight of freedom. It is that media class which, in
refusing to tell the public what it needs to know about Barack Obama, may
now finally install in the White House the man who personifies the
repudiation of the American power and western values that the media and
left-wing intelligentsia (of which the media is the mouthpiece) have
themselves spared no effort to destroy these past seven years.

As ABC columnist Michael Malone protests:
What I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack
of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively
serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama,
D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del. If the current polls are correct, we are about
to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a
cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that
at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography....
Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's
grad school drug dealer -- when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction?
Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter
registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden's endless
gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two
weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber. Middle America, even
when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart
the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough
question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the
little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the
afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other
catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.
So much indeed. That's why, as Mark Steyn observes, the media has had a
feeding frenzy over Sarah Palin's clothes allowance while all but ignoring
the evidence of criminal fundraising for the Obama campaign being
facilitated by the Obama campaign :
 
The gentleman who started the ball rolling made four donations under the
names 'John Galt', 'Saddam Hussein', 'Osama bin Laden', and 'William Ayers',
all using the same credit card number. He wrote this morning to say that all
four donations have been charged to his card and the money has now left his
account. Again, it's worth pointing out: in order to enable the most basic
card fraud of all - multiple names using a single credit card number - the
Obama campaign had to manually disable all the default security checks
provided by their merchant processor.
 
Now look at this. Back in April, the LA Times ran this story reporting on
the going-away party for Rashid Khalidi, Obama's close friend, who justifies
Palestinian violence against Israel and who was leaving for a job in New
York. Khalidi is a deeply troubling individual, a former PLO operative and
close friend of unrepentant former Weatherman terrorist William Ayers. As I
have reported before, in 2000 Khalidi and his wife Mona held a fundraiser
for Obama's unsuccessful congressional bid. The next year, an Arab group
whose board was headed by Mona Khalidi received a $40,000 grant from the
Woods Fund of Chicago when Obama was on the fund's board of directors. Obama
has said that his many talks with the Khalidis "had been consistent
reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases... It's for that
reason that I'm hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that
conversation -- a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and
Rashid's dinner table, but around this entire world."
 

The LA Times reported:
During the dinner a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the
Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply
criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own
land, she said, 'then you will never see a day of peace.' One speaker
likened 'Zionist settlers on the West Bank' to Osama bin Laden, saying both
had been 'blinded by ideology.'
 

The paper reported that not only had Obama been present at the party but had
praised Khalidi – and it actually had obtained a videotape of the whole
event. Yet it has refused to make this video public – even though it would
be of great interest, to put it mildly, to see who else was there. Indeed,
as the now defunct New York Sun reported:
In Chicago, the Khalidis founded the Arab American Action Network, and Mona
Khalidi served as its president. A big farewell dinner was held in their
honor by AAAN with a commemorative book filled with testimonials from their
friends and political allies. These included the left wing anti-war group
Not In My Name, the Electronic Intifada, and the ex-Weatherman domestic
terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers (my emphasis).

As Gateway Pundit comments:
It's hard to imagine that the LA Times would hold onto a video of Sarah
Palin praising an antisemitic radical and former PLO operative...But, that
is today's mainstream media.
But now look at what happens when the media does begin to do its job
properly. As the Orlando Sentinel reported:
WFTV-Channel 9's Barbara West conducted a satellite interview with Sen. Joe
Biden on Thursday. West wondered about Sen. Barack Obama's comment, to Joe
the Plumber, about spreading the wealth. She quoted Karl Marx and asked how
Obama isn't being a Marxist with the 'spreading the wealth' comment. 'Are
you joking?' said Biden, who is Obama's running mate. 'No,' West said. West
later asked Biden about his comments that Obama could be tested early on as
president. She wondered if the Delaware senator was saying America's days as
the world's leading power were over. 'I don't know who's writing your
questions,' Biden shot back. Biden so disliked West's line of questioning
that the Obama campaign cancelled a WFTV interview with Jill Biden, the
candidate's wife.
In that interview, Biden also flatly denied that the Obama campaign was
funding corrupt Acorn to deliver voter registration. But as the Investor's
Business Daily has reported, it did – and then tried to hide it:
Obama paid ACORN, which has endorsed him for president, $800,000 to register
new voters, payments his campaign failed to accurately report. (They were
disguised in his FEC disclosure as payments to a front group called Citizen
Services Inc. for 'advance work.')
At NRO Mark Levin identifies a terrifying historical echo when he shudders
that, such is the tide of irrationality running in this campaign, the
American public appears to be falling under the cult-like spell of an
authoritarian demagogue. He is surely correct. For all Obama's laid-back,
attractive appearance this election is being fought in an atmosphere of
menace. Menace in the way ACORN is intimidating voters into multiple
registrations. Menace in the way criminal donations to the Obama campaign
have been institutionalised. Menace in the serial lies being told by Obama,
Biden and the campaign rebuttal team. Menace in the way the few remaining
proper journalists such as Stanley Kurtz are finding sources of information
shut down and themselves shut out when they attempt to probe Obama's deeply
dubious associations. Menace in the smears and hysterical abuse directed at
anyone who questions The One. Menace in the threat of violence if Obama
doesn't win. Menace in the pre-emptive smear that the only thing that could
bring about an Obama defeat is the inherent racism of the American voters –
a smear that potentially identifies all those who vote against him as public
enemies.
Over the past seven years, the media has created the Big Lie that America is
the biggest rogue state in the world, with Israel its proxy.  Now it is
ensuring that a man who will act on that very premise to crush America and
destroy Israel will be placed in the White House to do so. It is not just
that the west's Big Media can no longer be trusted. It has become the most
important weapon in the arsenal of the enemies of the free world.