Daily Archives: Friday, December 12, 2008

The hunting of the president resumes – The right is trying to link Obama to Blagojevich and corruption – and the mainstream media is playing along.  The Clinton rules are back.

Dec. 12, 2008 | Questions are raised. Connections are drawn. Conspiracies are theorized. Guilt is imputed, implied, asserted and very widely associated. And more of the same feckless fingerpointing is exactly what Barack Obama should expect from the Republicans, the right-wing propaganda machine and their enablers in the mainstream media — even after Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has met whatever fate he deserves.

From the kooky obsession with his place of birth on WorldNetDaily to insinuations about his Chicago pedigree by the Associated Press, all of the attacks launched lately on Barack Obama give off the same familiar smell. Even a quick sniff is enough to bring back memories from a decade ago, when no perfidious accusation against Bill or Hillary Clinton was too crazy to deserve attention.

The madness that was eventually classified under the quasi-clinical rubric of “Whitewater” began, in no small degree, with the dubious idea that Arkansas, the Clintons’ home state, was a peculiarly corrupt place — and that any politician from Arkansas by definition was suspect (but only if he or she happened to be a Democrat).

Many of the familiar figures and institutions that should be permanently discredited by their roles in the Clinton drama have emerged again to smear Obama. Newsmax, the big right-wing Web site founded by Richard Mellon Scaife, sugar daddy of the Arkansas Project, dispatches daily news alerts with blaring headlines: “Obama Birth Certificate Battle Not Over” and “Obama, Blagojevich Tied to Same ‘Godfather.’” Rush Limbaugh, who has never stopped hinting that the Clintons murdered Vince Foster, no matter how many investigations concluded that Foster’s death was a tragic suicide, now wonders how Obama could be unaware of “all this stuff swirling around him.”

full article here… http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2008/12/12/obama/

This will be the pattern on-going.  The left is now better prepared, in terms of organization and in terms of experience, to counter the slime campaign that will be unceasing and which has unseating any Dem president as it’s goal, than it was in 92 as Clinton took office.  But do not make the mistake of believing that the modern right will suddenly become a contructive and responsible civic agent or that the mainstream media has concluded that it ought to perform more responsibly than it did re Clinton or re the Bush administration.   One positive new phenomenon is citizen journalism but its efficacy is yet to be proven.