McCain affair: NY Times criticizes itself

One of the weird things about the New York Times is that its staff is so huge (and its shoddy reporting growing so rapidly), it actually has an editor in charge of apologies.

Whenever it publishers a real boneheaded story, like the one last week alleging Sen. John McCain had an affair with a lobbyist eight years ago, instead of the responsible editors or reporters apologizing, the Times unleashes the ombudsman, who gets to critique the paper’s actions on the paper’s front page.

This past Sunday, we were all treated to just such an outing.

The Times’ ombudsman, Clark Hoyt, admitted the paper had no business publishing the salacious allegations and had no evidence to back up its claims.

Being a Times employee, Hoyt has to cut his fellow editors and reporters some slack just so he doesn’t have to eat alone in the break room, so he insists they were on to a good story about McCain seeming to do a favor for a lobbyist while publicly campaigning against special interest influence.

However, Hoyt said, editor Bill Keller’s insistence that the story was not about an alleged affair was disingenuous:

“I think that ignores the scarlet elephant in the room. A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did. And if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than The Times was able to provide.”

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign reports that fundraising since the article’s publication is way up.

The Times has been blatantly partisan for years, and a good chunk of the country knows it. Any time the Times gets egg on its face is a blow struck for truth in the media.

Obama nation — the devil you don’t know?

Liberals hate to be accurately identified. Call them socialists for proposing wealth-redistribution schemes (tax the rich), call them unpatriotic for acting against American interests (not renewing FISA), call them pawns of big corporations (global warming), and you’ll get an indignant response that is about as genuine as a crocodile who just polished off a family of four protesting being called a maneater.

They don’t even like to be called liberal — the PC term is “progressive,” as if any part of their agenda would mark progress by any sane measure.

Now comes Barack Obama, liberal chameleon par excellence. The man presents himself as a blank slate and through vacuous platitudes like “change” and “hope” invites his followers to write their own version of what he stands for.

But throughout the campaign, clues have come out about the real Obama, and the picture they start to form is not a pretty one, and it may even portend dire consequences should he ascend to the Oval Office.

There were the little things, like not wearing a flag pin like other candidates, or not putting hand over heart during the Pledge of Allegiance, or the way his wife said last week that she had never been proud of her country before.

There was the confusion about his religion, how he was born Barack Hussein Obama, attended a Muslim school according to his own book, was raised by a Muslim stepfather, but now claims to be a Christian, though his is a decidedly radical church.

Then there are the people he claims as role models: the anti-Semitic pastor Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who admires Louis Farrakhan; his self-described mentor “Frank,” who turns out to be the communist poet Frank Marshall Davis.

Also consider some of the people he has been associated with: communist college professor William Ayers, with his wife Bernadine Dorhn, was a founder of the Weather Underground, a group that planted bombs at the Capitol and Pentagon and committed robberies in the seventies. In 1995, Obama attended a function at their house. According to the New York Sun, Ayers and Obama served together on the board of the nonprofit Woods Fund for three years beginning in 1999, and they have also appeared jointly on two academic panels, in 1997 and in 2001.

In 2001, Obama accepted a $200 contribution from Ayers, according to officials with his campaign. On the day the Twin Towers were destroyed, 9/11/2001, Ayers was quoted by the New York Times: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Ayers, who was never convicted of the Weather Underground bombings, is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Obama’s inclinations also appear in his choice of staff. According to columnist Debbie Schlussel, despite Obama’s campaign denouncement of Louis Farrakhan, Obama continues to employ a number of Nation of Islam members in high positions. When a former associate of Obama’s raised objections to Nation of Islam acolytes being put in positions of power, “Mr. Obama’s position was that he saw nothing wrong with the Nation of Islam and didn’t think it was a problem.” If true, then Obama’s denouncement of Farrakhan is a transparent lie.

According to Schlussel, the same informant says that Obama is strongly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. The Web site of Palestinian activist and Obama acquaintance Ali Abunimah features photos of Obama and his wife attending a fundraiser for the late Edward Said, an adviser of Yasser Arafat’s. The accompanying article documents Abunimah’s dismay that Obama publicly changed his stance on Israel to win Jewish votes and contributions.

And there is his opposition to fighting against terrorism, with his express plan to plunder the U.S. military budget to pay for his $800 billion (and counting) of proposed new spending.

Obama’s following is almost cultlike in its character and in its inability to tolerate discussion of what the man truly stands for. And Obama himself isn’t forthcoming.

But there are plenty of signs that whatever is truly in Obama’s heart, the good of the country is not at the top of the list.