Shadow Play: The Man...and the Economy...Who Wasn't There

Today John McCain suspended his campaign in order to return to Washington to address what is purportedly the worst financial crisis in our history, while Obama stubbornly refused to agree to a postponement of Friday's debate [this after months of dodging debates and town hall meetings]. It finally took an order from the POTUS, summoning him to Washington to attend a meeting about the dire straits in which Wall Street has put us.

As so often happens in a rich news climate, today provided such a rich array of sage observations that I find myself compelled to pay homage to some of them here.

Andy Martin noted that the timing of this crisis of faith is enough to make one wonder whether Obama's Wall Street benefactors manufactured the meltdown on the eve of the election to help elect their man. Why a crisis now? The dire NINJA mortgage situation has been going on for a long time, and in fact, it was Hillary Clinton who attempted to effect a solution a year ago. What of the cash Obama received from Wall Streeters, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae? This entire campaign should turn on exposing Obama as the man who was Wall Street's favorite before the "collapse," and is still the man Wall Street wants to win. Why has Wall Street been so consistently behind Obama? Only those Wall Street banks who funded 60% of his campaign can answer that.

Tony Blankley wrote that "mainstream media have gone over the line and are now straight-out propagandists for the Obama campaign. While they have been liberal and blinkered in their worldview for decades, in 2007-08, for the first time, the major media consciously are covering one candidate for president and consciously are knifing the other. This is no longer journalism; it is simply propaganda.

Worse, however, than the unfair, distorted reporting and image projecting are the shocking gaps in Obama's life that are not reported at all. The major media simply have not reported on Obama's two years at New York's Columbia University, where, among other things, he lived a mere quarter-mile from former terrorist Bill Ayers... " and the National Journal's Stuart Taylor wrote, 'The media can no longer be trusted to provide accurate and fair campaign reporting and analysis' ."

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/09/the_man_who_never_was.html

The sum total of this is that the American public finds itself again between the proverbial rock and hard place: starved for real information about their candidates, they can find little more than a host of media propaganda machines in the tank for Obama, despite glaring gaps in his history, judgment and positions; feeling the squeeze of economic meltdown, they can find neither hard information on it nor even determine the position of the Democratic presidential candidate, until the current Republican President is forced to collar him and drag him, kicking and screaming, back to Washington to serve his constituency, perhaps for the first time since he took office as a United States Senator.