Hagel as Obama enabler disgusts Nebraska GOP
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
It’s a toss-up whether some Nebraska Republicans are more disgusted by Chuck Hagel’s shilling for Democrat Barack Obama’s presidential campaign or by the Omaha World-Herald’s annoying habit of treating all things Hagel as page 1 news.
The latest instance came Sept. 18 with the headline “Hagel doubts Palin is ready,” accompanied by a 43-square-inch color close-up of the senator’s face, eyebrows to chin.
A smaller sub-headline quoting Hagel complained about Palin, “She doesn’t have any foreign policy credentials. You get a passport for the first time in your life last year? I don’t know what you can say. You can’t say anything.”
We can say something – about Hagel and the newspaper’s judgment.
Graphically, the photo decision was atrocious in view of the subject matter it was intended to illustrate.
Journalistically, considering this was presented as a “news” story and not editorial page opinion, the editors owed the readers perspective on Hagel as an anti-Bush, pro-Obama partisan, preferably high up in the story, but at least somewhere.
Yes, we know that Hagel claims he has no plans to endorse Obama or McCain, but we’ll see. He probably had no plans to turn on President Bush in 2003 when he voted in the Senate to support the Iraq War, but he soon turned on Bush anyway.
For years, Hagel has gotten his juice on television and in headlines as an anomaly – the long-recognized “Democrats’ favorite Republican.”
Nowhere did the Palin attack story note the frequent mentions Hagel gets as a likely cabinet choice in an Obama administration. Also omitted was the relentless TV speculation and headlines in the national press that Republican Hagel warranted a serious look as an across party lines, Democrat vice presidential choice, right up to the time Obama picked Biden.
Hagel added to his pro-Obama credentials by traveling with the Obama retinue on a ballyhooed swing through the Middle East in July.
This the World-Herald mentioned, but it was the only hint that could have helped readers peg where Hagel really is coming from. In the national media, Hagel undoubtedly comes across to the uninformed as just another Red State Republican simply expressing the views of the people who sent him to Washington.
Well, hardly!
Obama surrogates are regularly popping up on talk shows to the effect that Palin must really be lousy since “even Republican Chuck Hagel” puts her down.
To this writer, Palin’s executive experience looks good indeed compared with Obama’s, which is nil except for his stint as chairman of a rich foundation project devoted to radicalizing students in the Chicago schools, their parents and their teachers. (See the Wall Street Journal opinion pages of Tuesday, Sept. 23: “Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism on Schools.”)
As a former small town mayor and governor of an energy important state, Alaska, the nation’s largest state in size, she stacks up well in the company of two acclaimed former presidents, one a Democrat, one a Republican, who moved up.
Vice President Harry Truman, a one-term Missouri senator and former clothing store merchant, went into the Oval Office reportedly never having met Franklin D. Roosevelt before FDR picked him as his running mate. Truman was so much in the dark that until Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, he knew nothing of the atomic bomb which he then ordered dropped on Japan in July to end World War II.
Republican Theodore Roosevelt had about the same two-year tryout as a governor as Palin, albeit in the more populous New York.
But then, Teddy had never been down on the ground as the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska.
Tasering trooper of the tundra
We’ve always admired in a disgusting sort of way the Democrat leadership’s skill for political dancing.
On issues great and small, it’s a sort of, “You say swing, I’ll say sway. You say potato, I’ll say potaato.”
Sarah Palin has taken partisan flack for supposedly trying to get her brother-in-law fired as an Alaska state trooper after he admitted tasering his 10-year-old son, an intervention which, by the way, she strongly denies.
Imagine what fun the Democrats and the Obama campaign could have had going the other way with a headline:
“Palin refused to fire trooper who tasered 10-year-old.”
Media can’t find Obama humor
Some humorists are complaining they just can’t find jokes in Barack Obama. They seem to find them everywhere in McCain – his age, his disability, his solitary mix-up of Muslim religious sects, etc.
Maybe the Lettermans et. al just can’t find the jokes in themselves, media bias in favor of the Democrats being what it is.
Here’s a line, courtesy of your columnist:
The nuttier fringe of the Obama-as-messiah wing is out with a campaign slogan that “Jesus was a community organizer. Pilate was a governor.”
How about, “Jesus only raised the dead, Obama got them registered to vote in Chicago.”
September 2008
