Mainstream media fleeing Obama

I've always thought of the editorial slant of the NYDN as a sort of NY Times for the working class, so this is very harsh from a usually liberal source. (Image, story and editorial linked at Instapundit).

Editors know their readers. The paper that is most widely read on Chicago's South Side is also a tabloid, the Chicago Sun Times.  Here is what an op-ed in that paper concluded about the Bergdahl trade. 

The greatest offense here may not be to our security but to our intelligence. The White House has attempted to present this trade as some sort of victory. The president held a Rose Garden ceremony to tout his accomplishment in bringing home an American fighting man. Rice claims that Bergdahl served with “honor and distinction.”

Either they are lying and hoping few will learn the real story about Bergdahl, or they really believe that such a misguided fool was honorable. Which, I wonder, is worse?

I suspect the Daily News readership probably contains a higher percentage of veterans and people with offspring in the armed forces than the New York Times readers.   I also suspect the same is true of the Sun Times when compared to the Chicago Tribune.   As retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters noted in National Review about the Bergdahl deal

I have never witnessed such outrage from our troops.

One of the huge fault lines currently in the body politic is between those who serve and their presumed masters in the halls of political power who are wont to say things like:

“…suck it up and salute,”

even as they ignore well-meaning and informed advice about intelligence and military issues. 

The Obama years have always been about narrative and the use of image to override concerns about substance.  But in a series of memorable images that serve to remind us that the term weird is derived from the Anglo Saxon concept of destiny, cracks appear to be widening in the Obama legend.   This twist in the narrative began with the bizarre-looking and -sounding father of Sergeant Bergdahl standing next to Obama in the White House. 

I am still not certain what that fleeting look on Obama's face as he heard Robert Bergdahl's Islamic prayer meant.  About the only real skill Obama has is for political posturing.  It may have been a premonition that the ceremony he was participating in had just backfired across the electorate.  The political strategists in the administration may have thought the Bergdahl exchange would make voters forget the shoddy manner this administration has treated veterans.  They may have thought they could sell a suspected military deserter as a hero because of all the other distortions they have been able to sell with the cooperation of the media.  What they may not have anticipated was that viewers might have thought that was a member of the Taliban itself sharing the mic with the President.  With few other images of this President meeting with the parents of servicemen and women available, it was telling moment.  As an apolitical friend noted, as soon as he saw the guy with the scraggly beard talking Arabic as he stood next to the President, he became suspicious of everything else said. 

While few people in 2008 took Obama's faux Greek columns or his claims about stopping the rise of the oceans personally, a great many people seem to be taking the celebration of a man who got other soldiers killed very personally.  For once it seems a competing narrative has trumped what the Obama team was trying to sell.  They made a huge miscalculation.  Not only does the American military enjoy far more respect than does anyone in our current crop of political leaders, but as every movie fan knows, the rat who crosses to the other side is the lowest of animals.  For some on the left, the incompetence of embracing a rat seems to have finally stopped them, at least temporarily, from defending everything Obama says and does.  Others have taken the gloves off and are finally pillorying the biggest political target of opportunity since Richard Nixon. When you’ve lost Mad Magazine….

 Fate goes ever as she shall -Beowulf

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