The Liberal Media's Fickle Temperament

Michael Leahy's Washington Post temperamental hit job on Senator McCain shows just how fickle the mainstream media wing of the Democratic party can be.

Coverage of Leahy's hit job, ignores Senator Lieberman's downplaying McCain's temper and focuses instead on former senator Bob Smith's, made for television, negative campaign sound bite:

"Does he get angry? Yes," said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, a Connecticut independent who supports McCain's presidential bid. "But it's never been enough to blur his judgment. . . . If anything, his passion and occasional bursts of anger have made him more effective."

Former senator Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican, expresses worries about McCain: "His temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him."

It isn't until twenty-something paragraphs later that Leahy reveals that Smith admits to not liking McCain, and mentions that Smith has held a grudge against McCain from the time they both served in Vietnam, some forty years ago. Smith can obviously hold a grudge a long time.

In the following video Fox News' Carl Cameron describes the inaccuracies in Leahy's attack on McCain, highlighting Smith's allegations:

That's right, Cameron reports Smith said that what is reported in the Leahy article "never actually happened."

One has to wonder if the mainstream media, which admittedly suffers from Obamania, would even consider writing a similarly negative story about Obama. If a reporter did write such a story, would it get the same front-page treatment as Leahy's hit piece, or even worse, the New York Times' "journalism by innuendo" slanderous hatchet job on Senator McCain.

John Fund offers some thoughts that get right to the point in explaining why:

While John McCain is popular with reporters, they have clearly chafed as they see him adopt more-conservative positions on taxes and immigration in the past year. His coverage is much less favorable than it used to be.

But Mr. Obama, who sports the most liberal voting record of any senator according to the nonpartisan National Journal, has avoided much criticism of that record by implying that any conventional critique of his issue positions represent the tired politics of the past. If he had his way, questions about character and questions about issues would be off-limits.

The mainstream media only seems to take on Obama after nonpartisan fact checkers and an army of bloggers point out egregious "distortions," "rank falsehoods," "seriously misleading," statements and "outright lying" from Obama. How long will the American electorate allow the mainstream media to get away with this lack of even-handedness -- giving Obama a free ride while publishing hatchet jobs on McCain? Enough is enough.