Early this month, Barack Obama said that, over 15 months, he’d campaigned… (thinking about it)… in all 57 states.

A week later, he confused Sioux Falls (South Dakota) with Sioux City (Iowa).

Last Friday, Obama continued his pattern of confusion, repeatedly referring to the name of the Florida city, Sunrise, he was visiting, as “Sunshine.”

Also, in Florida on the same Friday, while addressing the Cuban American National Foundation,

Since the Bush Administration launched a misguided war in Iraq, its policy in the Americas has been negligent toward our friends, ineffective with our adversaries, disinterested in the challenges that matter in peoples’ lives, and incapable of advancing our interests in the region. No wonder, then, that demagogues like Hugo Chavez have stepped into this vacuum.

Hugo Chavez was, of course, elected president of Venezuela December 6, 1998, while William Jefferson Clinton was in the White House.

32:15 video (Chavez comment appears at 2:50)

Earlier in his Miami speech, Obama cast his own background (17th century WASP colonist plus politically-prominent Kenyan) as similar to that of Cuban refugees from Castro’s tyranny, his Kenyan father as a poor immigrant seeking the American Dream of Freedom and Opportunity.

0:33 in the video:

Miami’s promise of Liberty and opportunity has drawn generations of immigrants to these shores, sometimes with nothing more than the clothes on their back. And I was talking to Jorge
about his father, and the story… the immigrant story that he embodies, and his family embodies, and the extraordinary success… That is the story of America. It was the similar hope that drew my father across an ocean in search of the same promise.

Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. didn’t come to America seeking Liberty and Opportunity. He was sent to America as part of a program created by Kenyan Black Nationalist leader Tom Mboya
to obtain Western educations for future Kenyan government leaders and officials. After he attended the University of Hawaii, bigamously married Stanley Ann Dunham, abandoned her and his son and went to Harvard, he returned to Kenya with yet another American wife, where he took up an economist’s position in a government ministry.

Obama Senior had obviously never intended to work or settle in the United States, so he was hardly an immigrant “drawn across an ocean” by the Land of Opportunity. And Obama Sr. was hardly an admirer of Liberty, being a Marxist. His government career in Kenya stalled and he grew bitter, it is reported, after he published an incendiary paper taking the pro-Communist side against the Kenyatta government.

Compare the absence of coverage the MSM of all these errors and an impressive falsehood, with the microscopic and obsessive coverage of the public statements of Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

H/t to Noel Sheppard and Charles Johnson.

Noah Pollak, at Commentary, notes that the blockade is on with respect to reviews of Douglas Feith’s book in the leading organs of the liberal establishment.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are the book review editor of a major newspaper, and a book has been written by someone who was a high-level public official deeply involved in what has been the biggest and most controversial story of the past half-decade.

This official has been mentioned in news stories in your paper on hundreds of occasions, your paper’s editorials have regularly railed against him and his colleagues, and your paper’s op-ed columnists have penned an entire oeuvre of scathing indictments of the policies he helped implement. The official, subjected to years of obloquy in your pages, writes an account of his involvement in the story that by any fair estimation is not just detailed and serious, but one of the most important and useful of its kind to date. Do you choose to review the book, or do you simply pretend that it was never written?

The book I’m talking about, of course, is War and Decision, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith’s account of his role in the Iraq war. And it is being subjected to an astonishing and shameful blackout from many of America’s biggest newspapers. Noting the decision of the Washington Post and New York Times not to review the book, Rich Lowry wrote, “Apparently it’s OK to heap every failure in Iraq on Feith’s head, but then to turn around and pretend he’s a figure of no consequence when he writes a book.”

Curiosity got the better of me, so I checked to see whether the book has been reviewed by other large newspapers. The MSM does not disappoint: There has been no mention of War and Decision in USA Today, the LA Times, NY Daily News, Houston Chronicle, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, or Miami Herald. What charming behavior from our nation’s journalism professionals. You would think the book interfered with the preferred narrative or something.

Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk (Church of Our Dear Lady) in Dendermonde, Flanders (Belgium) features a late 17th century pulpit, sculpted in wood by Mattheus van Beveren, upheld by angels treading underfoot the false prophet Mohammed, who is leaning on the Al-Koran.

As we see above, the inhabitants of Christendom used to have no scruples about expressing their opinion of Islam and its founder.

New York Slimes story

Can anyone imagine an American general during the late 1940s apologizing to local Germans for a private in his command using Hitler’s Mein Kampf for target practice? Can anyone imagine a similar apology being made to the Japanese for a Marine shooting up a photo of the Emperor?

And can anyone imagine US news organizations from coast to coast publishing reports treating an incident of this kind as a major news story, vehemently reproaching a US soldier serving in harm’s way overseas for insulting the enemy, and turning a trivial personal expression of opinion at a shooting range into an international brouhaha, specifically in order to embarrass their own country?

Of course, the treason of the media elite finds its expression in this particular incident upon the foundation of an almost even more objectionable habitual moral cowardice which precludes ever affirming one’s own nation, country, race, religion, culture, or cause over that of the Other. All the American left can do confronted with a hostile enemy or a rival religion is apologize and cringe.

I’m not sure New York City, and similar ideological enclaves, wouldn’t be better off if an army of Muslim primitives swept down and occupied them, beheaded a few, and imposed a more manly (if barbarous, bigoted, and primitive) faith on the rest. It would at least be a step up from their current sniveling political correctness.

Everybody knew that Hillary would win in Pennsylvania, and when she did, the media yawned and declared the result was long predicted. Obama winning in North Carolina, a major African American population state, with 91% of blacks voting his way, was also absolutely predictable, but Barack Obama’s success in North Carolina has been hailed by the MSM for two days now as a decisive event on the scale of Marathon or Waterloo.

The International Herald Tribune describes the avalanche of analysis declaring the race over and urging Hillary to get out of the way..

Very early Wednesday morning, after many voters had already gone to sleep, the conventional wisdom of the elite political pundit class that resides on television shifted hard, and possibly irretrievably, against Senator Hillary Clinton’s continued viability as a presidential candidate.

2:08 “It’s Over” video

Today, open bribes are on the table.

A prompt withdrawal from the contest for the Democratic nomination offers Sen. Hillary Clinton the prospect of major rewards.

One of the most inviting is the near certainty that the Obama campaign would agree to pay back the $11.4 million she has loaned her own bid, along with an estimated $10 million to $15 million in unpaid campaign expenses.

In addition, Democrats, both those who are loyal and those who are opposed to her campaign, say the odds of her winning a top leadership spot in the Senate would improve dramatically if she gracefully conceded now.

But, just look at the upcoming calendar:

MAY 2008
May 13: Nebraska, West Virginia
May 20: Kentucky, Oregon

JUNE 2008
June 3: Montana, South Dakota

Obama is likely to do well in left-coast Oregon, where moonbats nest densely in the forests of Portland and Eugene, but Hillary will trounce him in Kentucky and West Virginia, and she ought to have the edge in all the others.

The Left’s cheer-leading press wants to proclaim it’s over, but the decision is not so simple for serious adult democrat party functionaries who would like to win. Obama has the leftwing base, the media, and the Kennedys on his side, but he remains the most leftwing state legislator in Illinois transported to the US Senate by a fluke, burdened with a variety of radical personal associations, and jeopardized by a ticking time bomb of Chicago machine politics scandal. The “friend” who paid for Obama’s yard is currently on trial for fraud and extortion, and might spill something ripe to save his own skin any day.

Ed Koch says: “the (democrat) party is walking needlessly and unaware into a general election buzzsaw.”

Obama is a smooth article, but he is your typical leftwing elitist snob of Ivy League background, straight out of a one-party democrat urban stronghold, with a closet full of skeletons. He’ll be running against a genuine war hero in a time of national emergency. Obviously no one can predict what will happen in the course of months of intense campaigning, but the chances are very good that as the American people see more of Obama, week after week, all that smooth charm and glib rhetoric may begin to pall. Obama has an excellent chance of pulling off a McGovern-sized debacle for his party.

So those superdelegates will have to think long and hard about electability.

Howie Carr identifies the message of the hour you’ll soon be reading in the MSM.

These next few days are going to be a terrible time for Hillary Clinton. The title of our next episode is, “Get Out Already, Hillary!” It becomes ever clearer just how much the mainstream media is in the satchel for Barack Obama. It’s not just Chris Matthews who gets a tingle up his leg when he hears Barack. They all swoon.

And now they are going to demand that Hillary quit. The din will be incessant. They want to get down to what they consider the real Lord’s work, bashing John McCain. The trust-funded Ivy Leaguers of the press corps want to make the Rev. John Hagee the same household word that Jeremiah Wright has become.

The Clintons know this. Why do you think Paul Begala sounded so bitter on CNN last night?

“We cannot win with eggheads and African-Americans,” he said. “That’s the Dukakis coalition.”

Time will tell if the democrat party’s Rube Goldberg Superdelegate system is really capable of functioning as a safety mechanism to prevent that party’s radical activist base from selecting yet another George McGovern-style leftwing candidate to lead them to electoral disaster.

Despite Obama’s victory in North Carolina (based on a little-reported 91% of the black vote), it is too soon to count Hillary out. Yesterday’s news of the Clinton Campaign identifying the elimination of OPEC as a policy goal constitutes the single best strategic insight of the 2008 campaign so far.

Obama has the media, the Kennedys, and the activist nutroots on his side, but the Clintons still have a loyalist group representing a strong percentage of their party’s most proficient professionals.

——————————————-
BREAKING NEWS

The Clinton Campaign canceled public appearances today, and is reportedly going into private conference with superdelegates to see if there remains any possibility of victory.

Rick Moran identifies the key factor behind Obama’s advantage:

Clinton’s major problem showed in Pennsylvania and especially in Indiana; she is being outspent by Obama everywhere. Turnout in rural areas was not quite what the Clinton camp was banking on while Obama’s voters showed up in record numbers. It could be that her campaign is now suffering a bottleneck in funds which is beginning to tell at the ballot box. And with hope for victory becoming ever fainter, there is a good chance that her ability to raise money in the amounts that would enable her to compete effectively with Obama may be at an end.

She can’t keep being outspent 3 or 4 to 1 in every state and get the blow out victories she absolutely needs to close the delegate gap with Obama. Instead, that gap widened last night to where it is now, almost 150 delegates and climbing, thanks to Obama’s continued success in wooing Superdelegates.

Is this the end of the line for Hillary Clinton? The consensus among the talking heads on cable appears to be coalescing around the idea that she should wind her campaign down and get out of Obama’s way.

——————————————-
THEY Begin To Decide

As the Journalism industry opens a Washington museum dedicated to its own glory, Andrew Ferguson notes the symbolic role played by Walter Cronkite, whose misreporting of the 1968 Tet Offensive did more for the cause of Communism in Southeast Asia than General Giap.

If Walter Cronkite’s mom was going to put together a scrapbook of her son’s career–well, it would be a miracle, because she’d be about 125 years old by now. But if she did, I doubt that it would contain more admiring images of the former CBS newsreader than you’ll find in the Newseum, the new journalism museum that held its boffo grand opening this month in Washington, D.C. Cronkite is everywhere in the Newseum. He hovers over it like a guardian angel, or a patron saint. You can’t turn around without hearing his phlegmy baritone rumbling out from a hidden speaker or see some grainy footage of him announcing President Kennedy’s death or wiping his eyes at the moon landing or definitively pronouncing the Vietnam war a “stalemate.”

And that’s the way it is–at the Newseum, anyway. But why?

I don’t know how the Newseum’s curators would explain Cronkite’s omnipresence (I do know they would use the word “iconic”), but I have an explanation of my own. Cronkite is a kind of synecdoche for American journalism. His career traces the arc of the news business over the last 70 years, from the grubby, slightly disreputable trade of the early 20th century to the highly serious, obsessively self-regarding profession it has become, here in the first decade of the twenty-first. A college drop-out, plucky but unimaginative, Cronkite knocked around a series of newspaper jobs in the 1930s, followed the troops into Normandy, worked for a wire service after the war, and filed workmanlike copy all the while that was notable for nothing in particular. Then came television, and celebrity, which he acquired thanks to the unprecedented reach of mass media rather than through any peculiar merit of his own. From the 1960s onward Cronkite was transformed by some mysterious process into a figure implausibly larger than a newspaper hack, a spiritual force as imposing and weightless as a dirigible. He was an oracle, a teller of truths, the conscience of a nation, “the most trusted man in America.”

American journalism followed the same trajectory into self-importance, borne aloft on the same draft of hot air and vanity. Our terrific country offers lots of ways to make a living, but with the possible exceptions of movie acting and architecture, only modern journalism would have the nerve to celebrate itself with something as gaudy and improbable as the Newseum. The Freedom Forum, a nonprofit foundation seeded with money from the Gannett newspaper chain, conceived and underwrote the museum for $450 million, and a half dozen newspaper and media companies kicked in another $122 million to pay for exhibits and other trimmings. That’s $572 million–a lavish sum by any measure. It’s especially impressive from an industry that is, according to its own incessant complaints, going broke.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Bruce Bawrer has a fine article in City Journal identifying the principle of Free Speech as the first to go in the Left intelligentsia’s orchestration of Western societies’ surrender to Islam.

Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.

What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, Kho­meini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.

The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.

Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.

The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia.

Read the whole thing.

Poor Hillary! Now that she is the less-leftwing alternative for the democrat party, she might just as well return to her Youth-For-Goldwater conservative roots. The democrat’s nutroots base of ultra-leftists hates her these days with a passion normally reserved for Republicans.

Wearing its heart upon its editorial sleeve, the New York Times was mincing no words:

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

Hillary must have bribed Charles Gibson and secretly advised George Stephanopoulos to ask the annointed candidate of Change all those nasty and completely irrelevant questions which cost him the debate and, with it, the Pennsylvania primary. It’s so unfair!

Max Boot had a spot-on response to the New York Times’ Sunday Big Story.

Hold the front page! Heck, on second thought, hold three full inside pages as well. Notify the Pulitzer jurors. The New York Times has a blockbuster scoop. Its ace reporter, David Barstow, has uncovered shocking evidence that . . . the Pentagon tries to get out its side of the story about Iraq to the news media.

Are you surprised? Outraged? Furious? Apparently the Times is: it’s found a new wrinkle in what it views as an insidious military propaganda campaign. You see, the Defense Department isn’t content to try to present its views simply to full-time reporters who are paid employees of organizations like the New York Times. It actually has the temerity to brief retired military officers directly, who then opine on TV and in print about matters such as the Iraq War.

As I read and read and read this seemingly endless report, I kept trying to figure out what the news was here. Why did the Times decide this story is so important? After all, it’s no secret that the Pentagon–and every other branch of government–routinely provides background briefings to journalists (including columnists and other purveyors of opinion), and tries to influence their coverage by carefully doling out access. …

I think I got to the nub of the problem when I read, buried deep in this article, Barstow’s complaint that the Pentagon’s campaign to brief military analysts “recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism.” But the Times would laugh at anyone who claimed that activities “subversive” of America’s national interest are at all problematic. After all, aren’t we constantly told that criticism–even “subversive” criticism–is the highest form of patriotism? Apparently it’s one thing to subvert one’s country and another thing to subvert the MSM. We can’t have that!

How dare the Pentagon try to break the media monopoly traditionally held by full-time journalists of reliably “progressive” views! The gall of those guys to try to shape public opinion through the words of retired officers who might have a different perspective! Who might even be, as the article darkly warns, “in sync with the administration’s neo-conservative brain trust.”

The implicit purpose of the Times’s article is obvious: to elevate this perfectly normal practice into a scandal in the hopes of quashing it. Thus leaving the Times and its fellow MSM organs–conveniently enough–as the dominant shapers of public opinion.

The “Progressive” camp’s media hitmen are out in force attempting to avenge Obama’s loss of the recent debate as the result of critical questions about the democrat Left’s annointed candidate’s background and associations by ABC moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson.

The Left likes to dish it out, but it doesn’t like to take it very much. Commentary’s Peter Wehner wonders just how “despicable” and “shameful” the same sort of questions would be if the shoe were on the other foot.

In an article today, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post cites various media figures–from Tom Shales of the Post to Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher to Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News to MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann–who are outraged at the performance of George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson during Wednesday’s Democratic debate. The ABC News duo’s performance, we are told, was “despicable,” “shameful,” and “disgraced democracy itself.”

And what did Stephanopoulos and Gibson do to earn this scorn? Why, they asked Barack Obama some probing questions, including one about his past relationships with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr. and a former leader of the Weather Underground, William Ayers.

Consider this thought experiment: Assume that a conservative candidate for the GOP nomination spent two decades at a church whose senior pastor was a white supremacist who uttered ugly racial (as well as anti-American) epithets from the pulpit. Assume, too, that this minister wasn’t just the candidate’s pastor but also a close friend, the man who married the candidate and his wife, baptized his two daughters, and inspired the title of his best-selling book.

In addition, assume that this GOP candidate, in preparing for his entry into politics, attended an early organizing meeting at the home of a man who, years before, was involved in blowing up multiple abortion clinics and today was unrepentant, stating his wish that he had bombed even more clinics. And let’s say that the GOP candidate’s press spokesman described the relationship between the two men as “friendly.”

Do you think that if those moderating a debate asked the GOP candidate about these relationships for the first time, after 22 previous debates had been held, that other journalists would become apoplectic at the moderators for merely asking about the relationships? Not only would there be a near-universal consensus that those questions should be asked; there would be a moral urgency in pressing for answers. We would, I predict, be seeing an unprecedented media “feeding frenzy.”

As John F. Harris & Jim Vandehei observe, the Left is using its entrenched position atop the mainstream media’s high ground to punish deviation and to intimidate those not perfectly loyal.

My, oh my, but weren’t those fellows from ABC News rude to Barack Obama at this week’s presidential debate.

Nothing but petty, process-oriented questions, asked in a prosecutorial tone, about the Democratic front-runner’s personal associations and his electability. Where was the substance? Where was the balance?

Where indeed. Hillary Rodham Clinton and her aides have been complaining for months about imbalance in news coverage. For the most part, the reaction to her from the political-media commentariat has been: Stop whining.

That’s still a good response now that it is Obama partisans — some of whom are showing up in distressingly inappropriate places — who are doing the whining.

The shower of indignation on Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos over the last few days is the clearest evidence yet that the Clintonites are fundamentally correct in their complaint that she has been flying throughout this campaign into a headwind of media favoritism for Obama.

Last fall, when NBC’s Tim Russert hazed Clinton with a bunch of similar questions — a mix of fair and impertinent — he got lots of gripes from Clinton supporters.

But there was nothing like the piling on from journalists rushing to validate the Obama criticisms and denouncing ABC’s performance as journalistically unsound.

The response was itself a warning about a huge challenge for reporters in the 2008 cycle: preserving professional detachment in a race that will likely feature two nominees, Obama and John McCain, who so far have been beneficiaries of media cheerleading.

Thomas Lifson explains how Obama’s press honeymoon came to an end. The Left is still screaming about how unfair it was for George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson to ask all those questions about Obama’s character and associations, instead of getting out of the way and allowing him to make broad, vague, and general policy promises.

Barack Obama’s campaign has been all about image. The well-dressed, impeccably groomed, and elegantly articulate speaker was able to speak of hope, change, and unity, and for awhile the public bought it. Capitalizing on the huge store of guilt, compassion, and hope for better racial relations among the vast majority of Americans of all races, Obama posed as the man who might heal the wounds of the past.

The bonhomie lasted for months, as the press corps, no strangers to their own guilt and hope and leftist inclinations, averted its eyes from those elements of his politics and life story that were discordant with a unifier’s mission, and portayed him as almost supernaturally virtuous. Obama long ago learned how to disarm strangers who might find him an unusual or perhaps threatening figure, and as long as the scrutiny didn’t get too detailed, the game worked splendidly.

But that was before Hillary Clinton’s campaign took him seriously. Before the Clinton war room wizards, past masters of planting stories and themes in friendly media hands, got to work on him. American Thinker and other conservative websites long have been pointing to his Alinskyite past, noting his Senate voting record and his propensity to associate with left wing extremists like Bill Ayers. But until very recently, the major media were content to allow his chosen narrative of centrism and unity to prevail. No messy qualms about actual policies disturbed the aesthetic of hope and optimism and unity.

The press collaboration with Obama’s PR became so sickening obvious that Saturday Night Live was able to mock it savagely, and receive kudos for puncturing the bubble. With the impetus of scornful laughter haunting them, mainstream journalists began to pay more attention to Obama’s dubious associations. Video of Pastor Wright hit ABC, and from there the rest of the mainstream media began to pay attention to discordant notes in his rhetoric of reassurance to middle Amercia.

The ABC News-sponsored debate Wednesday night featured unprecedentedly tough questioning (at least for a liberal) by George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson. Obama stumbled in his responses, comparing admitted terror bomber Bill Ayers to United States Senator Tom Coburn, a physician who has delivered thousands of babies. Even more astonishingly, when reminded that capital gains tax increases actually decrease tax revenue while cap gains tax cuts increase them, he actually retreated to the realm of class warfare, insisting that regardless of the consequences, he wants to punish the owners of capital in the name of “fairness.”

Welcome the new aesthetic of Barack Obama, the left wing ideologue. The signs have long been there, for those with the eyes to see them.

It is no accident that Obama has become the candidate of the Democrats’ left wing fringe, typified by the Daily Kos crowd, despite his continuing efforts to sound a centrist note. The kind of people who are comfortable working with a poster of Che Guevara looking over their shoulders have been attracted to Obama because they read the little signals belying his centrist pose. …

Barack Obama has been able to preach racial harmony while attending and donating to Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church for two decades. He has been able to masquerade as a centrist while hobnobbing with the radical chic activists and unrepentant terrorists of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He has been able to pose as a centrist while believing in the necessity of punsihing owners of capital. But with Hillary Clinton and her minions aggressively pursuing him, and an awakened press chagrinned at giving him a pass for so long, those days may be numbered.

He lost yesterday’s debate.

I didn’t actually watch it myself, and have not even read a transcript, but the Net is echoing today with howl of outrage from lefties.

Greg Mitchell calls it “A Shameful Night for the U.S. Media,” which is a clear indication that the MSM failed to do their job and did not deliver for the Left. They even irresponsibly went right ahead and asked “the candidate of Change” damaging questions on “trivial issues,” things like Senator Obama’s condescending remarks about small-town Americans, his relationship with the race-baiting Reverend Wright, and his refusal to wear the conventional political candidate’s American flag pin.

Mitchell cannot understand why the media’s representatives didn’t devote all their questions to the Left Blogosphere’s talking points, opposition to the War, class warfare, complaints about free trade, and so on. What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they understand what their job really is?