Our Sick Edwards-Excusing Media
By Brent Bozell
August 13, 2008
You know there are some in the liberal media who have simply lost touch with reality when the headline reads "John Edwards Cheats on Wife With Cancer" and they ask with great detachment whether he'll be able to run for office again soon. These people's morality is so bizarre that they showed more outrage at John McCain featuring a picture of Paris Hilton in a commercial for two eye-blinks than for Edwards catting around on a dying spouse.
For months (and more hotly in the last two weeks), the National Enquirer has been trickling out the goods they collected on John Edwards having an affair and possibly a love child with campaign aide Rielle Hunter, staking out Edwards in a California hotel -- and how he hid in the bathroom to avoid them.
There's a quick campaign ad on the two parties in a nutshell. Republican George Bush took on Osama bin Laden and took out Saddam Hussein. Democrat John Edwards hides in a bathroom from the tabloids.
Throughout this time, the very same media that almost immediately spread unproven trash on John McCain's alleged "romantic" relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman because the source was the allegedly professional New York Times now remained as quiet as a cabin full of Carthusian monks. Only when everyone was familiar with the story thanks to the New Media and Edwards was forced to confess did the networks break their obedient silence.
Anyone watching the TV stories found a tone of sadness, of the outraged disappointment of Edwards supporters like campaign manager David Bonior. That's acceptable. But the story came almost entirely from within the Edwards bubble. You couldn't find in these stories any time for Republicans, and it was rare to find anyone asking not about Edwards, but about the Democrats in general. How would this taint them?
When the question emerged briefly on television, it had a perish-the-thought tone to it. On "Sunday Today," two days after the Edwards confession, NBC anchor Lester Holt asked the apparently unthinkable: "Is Obama touched or tainted by this in any stretch of the imagination?" NBC political analyst Chuck Todd was fervent in his reply: "I don't think he is at all, Lester. You know, if anything, sure, that they lose a good surrogate. This was a guy who was very good on the stump."
Holt worried that the Republicans might stoop so low as to speak of Edwards: "Is there any stomach for John McCain perhaps using, taking some political advantage of this, or will he simply leave this alone as a third rail?" (Translation: We would like to make this an untouchable third rail.) Todd was emphatic once again: " Not at all. They're probably going to leave this alone. John McCain had to deal with a story that their campaign was very upset about, that The New York Times did. They're not going to touch this. You know, stuff like this usually ends up getting swept under the rug pretty quickly."
>> Continued -- Page 1 2
| 
