The MSM will sell no news before its time. Or as Jennifer Rubin writes, “Washington Post Confirms More Than a Year of Conservative Reporting:”
Yes, that’s right. On Saturday’s front page, in a well-documented piece, the Washington Post did a very credible job in reporting the details of the New Black Party Panther case and, in large part, vindicating the witnesses and conservative outlets which have reported that: 1) the administration concealed that political appointees influenced the decision to dismiss a blatant case of voter intimidation; 2) the Obama administration does not believe in equal enforcement of civil rights laws; and 3) this single incident is indicative of a much larger problem than one case of voter intimidation.
As to the administration’s mindset:
Civil rights officials from the Bush administration have said that enforcement should be race-neutral. But some officials from the Obama administration, which took office vowing to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement, thought the agency should focus primarily on cases filed on behalf of minorities.
“The Voting Rights Act was passed because people like Bull Connor were hitting people like John Lewis, not the other way around,” said one Justice Department official not authorized to speak publicly, referring to the white Alabama police commissioner who cracked down on civil rights protesters such as Lewis, now a Democratic congressman from Georgia.
Translation: J. Christian Adams and Chris Coates, two former trial attorneys, testified truthfully under oath on this point; civil rights chief Thomas Perez did not.
And then there’s this:
I said before that Wikileaks’ Julian Assange was clearly a tool, but whose? Well, so far the two biggest scoops from the latest document dump are that the infamous Lancet study was bogus, and that WMDs were found in Iraq in quantity. Neither of these stories is actually news to people who were paying attention, but now — conveniently enough just before an election, and even nicely timed for George W. Bush’s new book release — these stories are getting a fresh round of play. . . .
Wait, there were WMDs in Iraq? Who knew? Ed Morrissey adds:
To the extent that the media covered these at all, these finds were generally treated as long-forgotten leftovers that somehow never got addressed by the Iraqi military in twelve years of UN inspections. That, however, disregards completely the kind of totalitarian state that Hussein had imposed on Iraq, up to the minute that circumstances forced him into his spider hole in 2003. Had Saddam Hussein wanted those weapons destroyed, no lower-ranking military officer would have dared defy him by keeping them hidden. It would have taken dozens of officers to conspire to move and hide those weapons, as well as a like number of enlisted men, any and all of whom could have been a spy for the Hussein clique.That would have had to have happened a number of times, not just once, organically arising in the ranks. And why create a vast conspiracy of defiance to save the weapons that Saddam Hussein liked the most while Hussein himself complied with the UN? Why not a conspiracy to just remove Hussein and his sons and let the military run the country instead? Obviously, Hussein wanted to keep enough WMDs to use as terror weapons, not against the US, but against Iran in the event of an invasion from the east.
After discussion a Soros-connection to the Lancet study, Tigerhawk writes:
The first really objective history of the Iraq war will have to wait until somebody who did not live through the propaganda around that war is old enough to write it. When that book is written, its main conclusion will turn on the path of Iraq and the greater Middle East in the years following the war, a story that has not yet unfolded. The discussion of the human costs of the war will be particularly interesting, however, because it will judge the competing claims of those who oppose the war — that American and Coalition soldiers fought a dirty war that inflicted an unacceptably large number of civilian casualties — and those who support it — that civilian casualties were almost unbelievably low given the ferocity and duration of the counterinsurgency and in any case lower than the deaths attributable to Ba’athist rule over a similar number of years.
See also, Vietnam.
Not to mention, the French Revolution.
But funny how the MSM, which in some quarters still bitterly clings to a penumbra of an aura of paying lip service to pretending to be objective keeps Getting It Wrong, to coin a phrase, when it benefits the other side of the aisle.
Update: “On Climate Change, Tea Partiers Get It, New York Times Doesn’t.”
Ahh, but on one level, the New York Times does get it — they’re just getting it from industry house organ Editor & Publisher, which ran an article in 2007 titled, “Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers.” But then, objectivity is something that the Gray Lady put in the rear-view mirror ages ago.
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