Here’s what happened:  While I have never supported Sarah Palin, publicly or privately, I have long thought that too many of the attacks on her were mean, vicious and irrational.  I thought they went way beyond anything she had ever done in the political arena to deserve them.  And I figured, this can’t simply because she’s a conservative.

So on Bill’s show, I said I thought liberals (I should have said “many liberals” or “elite liberals”) dislike her so much because she didn’t go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton and instead bounced around a bunch of schools before landing at the University of Idaho – a crime against humanity to many of those elites. Then I said I don’t think they’re too happy with her either because she had five kids … and gave them names like Trig and Track and Bristol, Willow and Piper.  Then, I uttered the words that touched off the accusations that I was a “nasty” human being.  I said I thought that because she made a choice … to knowingly and willingly have a baby with Down Syndrome … that some liberals detested her for that too.

To put my observations into some kind of context, let’s take a brief trip down Memory Lane to when Sarah Palin was put on the GOP ticket in the summer of 2008.

A female professor at the University of Chicago, a first-rate school, wrote on the Washington Post Web site that Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”  You see, to many supposedly open-minded liberals, a conservative woman isn’t a woman at all.  She’s just a conservative; just as a conservative black person isn’t really black to a lot of liberals — only conservative.

Another woman wrote this in Salon, the liberal online magazine, about Sarah Palin’s sudden prominence: “I feel as horrified as a ghetto Jew watching the rise of National Socialism.”  In other words, the rise of Sarah Palin is akin to the rise of Adolf Hitler.

And a college professor in Canada wrote on the CBC’s Web site that Palin “added nothing to the ticket that the Republicans didn’t already have sewn up – the white trash vote.”

This hatred amounts to what I called Palin Derangement Syndrome.  It’s just plain nuts!  And to think female liberals wrote these vicious things about Sarah Palin just because she’s a conservative is also nuts.  There are lots of conservative women out there who don’t come in for this kind of trashing.  So I figured it must be something else.

It must be, I figured, that they hate her because she’s not like so many liberal feminists.  She appears to be happily married, for example.  And she’s not neurotic – like so many of them are.  And yes, I think her decision to have so many kids (with those names) makes liberals (not all, of course, but many) think she’s hopelessly Middle American.

As for Palin’s decision not to abort her baby with Down Syndrome: Women and their husbands should do whatever they think is best in those circumstances.  I have no say in those matters and I would never try to influence someone’s decision in that area.  It’s simply, and obviously, none of my business.   But I am asking this:  Who is more likely to have the baby with Down Sydrome, a pro-choice woman or a pro-life woman?  A woman who isn’t religious or one who is?  A woman who believes a life – even a life of a fetus – is sacred, or one who doesn’t?  I know there are many who will disagree, but I think it’s a safe bet that the pro-life, religious woman who believes in the sanctity of life is more likely to go continue her pregnancy (even as many who fit that description will abort a fetus with Down Syndrome).

That’s all I was trying to say.  I never thought I was “politicizing” anyone’s children or anyone’s pain.  If I did that, my sincere apologies to one and all.  But I still believe many elite liberals hate Sarah Palin for a whole bunch of reasons that have little to do with how she would vote on this issue or that — or even, as they often claim, because they don’t think she’s that smart, There are lots of lbierals who aren’t “that smart” — and they don’t seem to trouble their fellow libs all that much.

It seems that lamestream journalists had a great deal of trouble uttering the word “terror” or “terrorist” or “Muslim” – even though the gunman is a Muslim terrorist.  You’d think that his many jihadist statements might have been a clue.  Or the fact he repeatedly wrote to an imam in Yemen who was recruiting for al-Qaeda.  But the clincher, you’d think, was when the gunman shouted the Islamic war cry, Allahu Akbar, “God is Great,” right before he opened fire.

Hey, but those are just facts and everyone knows that lots of reporters won’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.  And the good story they were putting out – without any evidence to back it up – was that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan probably was suffering from PTSD – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, even though he had never been in combat in his life.

One poll of network evening newscasts found that 85 percent of their stories (in a five day period after the shooting) did not mention the word “terror.”  And only 29 percent of the evening news reports mentioned that Maj. Hasan was a Muslim.

I think this allergic reaction to reality has something to do with the human tendency – in this particular case, the human liberal tendency – to try to shape facts to conform with one’s own idealistic views of the world.  In other words, liberal journalists didn’t want the gunman to be a Muslim terrorist so they didn’t portray him as a Muslim terrorist.  Pretty simple, huh?

But not all of the coverage and commentary, of course, was lame; some of it wasn’t that good.  Which brings us to the real reason for this column:  My top 5 examples of lamestream media gone off the rails.

5.  Time magazine cover:  Terrified … or Terrorist?

This raises another question:  ARE YOU KIDDING?

4,  Evan Thomas, editor at large of Newsweek:  “I cringe that he’s a Muslim. I mean, because it inflames all the fears. I think he’s probably just a nut case. But with that label attached to him, it will get the right wing going….”

So the real danger, in Evan Thomas’s little pretend world, are right-wingers – not Muslim terrorists?  And the shooter is “probably just a nut case”? What about that Allahu Akbar, God is Great thing, Evan?  You think that might make him more than “just a nut case”?

3.  Joe Klein, Time magazine:  “There are today several odious attempts by Jewish extremists … to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs….”

But, Joe, the massacre was perpetrated by Nidal Hasan as a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs!  Blaming the Jews, though, is a good one.  It always works.

2.  Bob Schieffer, CBS News:  “And you know, Islam doesn’t have a majority – or the Christian religion has its full … helping of nuts too.”

Call it the moral equivalency argument.  But let’s acknowledge that Bob makes a good point.  We should all look out for those crazy Christian suicide bombers who are in the news every other day for blowing something or other up and slaughtering as many innocents as they can.  Those Christian terrorists pose a real threat to the American people.

1. Chris “I feel a thrill running up my leg” Mathews of MSNBC:

Apparently he tried to contact al-Qaeda. … That’s not a crime to call al-Qaeda, is it?”

Maybe not, Chris, but you are.

That’s my list and I’m sticking to it.  I welcome any entries you might have.

There was plenty of evidence, early on, that Major Nidal Malik Hasan had – let’s be politically correct and say – religious issues.  Or let’s not and be more blunt:  He was an Islamic fanatic, a soldier with a record of expressing anti-American and pro-jihadist sentiments.

That the lamestream media chose to ignore this for as long as they could is no surprise.  They chose the “post-traumatic stress disorder” storyline instead.  It re-inforced their biases against the wars America was waging, and made them feel better about themselves.  Evan Thomas, the editor at large at Newsweek went on TV with another brilliant theory.  “I think he’s probably just a nut case,” Thomas said.  This is what passes for intelligent analysis in the lamestream media these days.  Imagine how many facts Evan Thomas had to ignore to come to that dopey conclusion.  But it wasn’t just liberals in the media who chose to look the other way.  Maj. Hasan’s superiors in the Army chose to ignore the obvious, too.  And so did the CIA.

Brian Ross, of ABC News, has reported that Hasan tried to contact people connected to the terrorist group al Qaeda.  And, according to Ross, U.S. intelligence officers were aware of that fact months ago, but “it’s not known whether the military was ever told by the CIA or others that one of its majors was making efforts to communicate with figures under electronic surveillance.”

If the CIA did not tell the Army, the heads should roll at Langley.  But in any case there was plenty the Army knew, with or without the CIA, and willfully dismissed. The Associated Press has reported that “Fellow students of Hasan in a military training course complained to the faculty about Hasan’s ‘anti-American propaganda,’ but said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal complaint.”

If someone in a position of authority had not been so politically correct, so downright cowardly, Maj. Hasan would have been drummed out of the military a long time ago.  Rest assured, he will be held accountable for his actions.  But the others should be held accountable, too.  The ones who were lacked the guts to speak up and do the right thing, for fear they might offend Muslims.

It’s no secret that political correctness is killing American journalism.  Apparently it also had a heavy hand in killing those Americans at Fort Hood.

“While the mainstream media is busy downplaying the shooter’s religion, just think if an O’Reilly or Goldberg book was found in his home or, God forbid, there was a talk station pre-set on his car radio or he once knew a guy who had a cousin who attended a tea party.  There would be endless, mindless speculation and convoluted banner headlines about [how] the evil right-wing is sowing hatred and inspiring death.”

He’s right, of course.  A lone gunman kills a late term abortion doctor in Kansas and if you watched liberal television or read liberal papers you’d think Bill O’Reilly pulled the trigger.  When Timothy McVeigh blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, liberals blamed conservative talking radio for fomenting an anti-government frenzy. Now we have another catastrophe, but this one is a tad inconvenient for liberals in the media.  It turns out the gunman was a Muslim.  Uh Oh!

This particular Muslim was a psychiatrist in the United States Army, whose name appears on comments posted on a  radical Muslim Web site waxing favorably about suicide bombings;  and who allegedly told a friend — as a retired army colonel told Fox News — that, “Muslims had a right to rise up and attack Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan.” So, what’s the storyline?  Muslim fundamentalism?  Try, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

You see the media don’t want to jump to any conclusions in this case, especially when they’re politically incorrect conclusions.  But they’d jump to conclusions, wouldn’t they, if a white guy with a crew cut and overalls from the rural south walked into a local NAACP office and shot up the place.  They’d conclude the guy was a racist.  And they’d almost certainly be right.  With the Fort Hood story there was sound reason to suspect the killer’s  religion  played a part in the massacre, and all we got was drivel about how stressed out soldiers are these days.

Never mind that Major Nidal Malik Hasan had never been deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan.   His stress, we are  asked to believe, came to him second-hand, from the soldiers he counseled when they got home.  As the headline in the New York Times put it:  “Told of War Horror, Gunman Feared Deployment.”

Newsweek was just as bad.  It began a piece about stress and the military with a question.  “What if Thursday’s atrocious slaughter at Fort Hood only signals the worst is yet to come?”  Why examine the Muslim angle when you can blame the carnage on a couple of wars the media never liked in the first place.

And then there’s the blog by Mimi Swartz, the executive editor of Texas Monthly, who seems to be blaming crummy  hotels and restaurants for the massacre.  “Killeen is a sea of chain hotels and chain restaurants,” she writes.  “The place reflects all too well the state of today’s military, which means the people you see on the streets, almost always dressed in fatigues, are young, poor, uneducated and, invariably, stressed to the max ….”

I guess if Killen had been located in lovely Vail, Colorado Hasan would never have done what he did.

But what about that pesky religious angle?  According to CNN, Major Hasan had shared some thoughts about being a Muslim in the army with a convenience store clerk he knew.  “But as a fellow Muslim and someone of faith, he had a problem with having, perhaps, the opportunity in the future to have to shoot or kill or injure or fight fellow Muslims,” the clerk told a reporter. “And that is something that was weighing heavily on him. “

So, if it turns out that the motive behind the massacre had more to do with Hasan’s religion than his stress, the media once again will look foolish – and worse, untrustworthy.  Political correctness is a virus running through our culture.  And it is killing American journalism.

This is how the argument usually goes:  Republicans have moved too far to the right.  They’ve alienated the center.  They’ve allowed Rush Limbaugh to hijack the party.  They’ll never win again unless the party becomes more moderate.  Republicans need to act more like Olympia Snowe and less like Sean Hannity.

The part that amuses me is that we’re supposed to believe that these Democrats who have never voted for a Republican in their entire lives – and who never will – somehow care enough that they’re giving the opposition a roadmap to victory.  Sure!

The part that troubles me is that there’s more than a little truth in what they say.

One faction on the Right – let’s call it the Limbaugh faction – wants ideological  purity in the party.  I get the impression that Rush would rather lose an election – and not just “an” election, but a whole bunch of elections — rather than say a good word about a moderate Republican, fearing by doing that he’d be betraying his  “conservative principles.”

The other faction – let’s call it the Gingrich faction — is more pragmatic.  Newt also wants conservatives to win.  But he understands how it works in the real world.  He doesn’t consider himself a sell-out because he can live with a moderate Republican who may be pro-choice on abortion.  He understands that if the moderate Republican loses, there’s a good chance a liberal Democrat will win.

Now, a new voice has weighed in on how Republicans ought to behave, the anchorwoman voice of  Katie Couric.  As a liberal Democrat – (I’m sure she would identify herself as a moderate; they all do) – she has advice for Republicans on how to win.  In her CBS News blog she wrote this:

As Politico reported, there’s growing concern among some GOP leaders that controversial commentators and far-right conservatives have hijacked the message.

People like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin appeal to the base – and you certainly need that base to win elections. But in an age when 42 percent of Americans call themselves Independents – you can’t win with just the base, either.

Minority Whip Eric Cantor is calling for more voices in the Republican Party. And Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty says the party needs to be all about addition right now – as the number of declared Republicans hits a 26 year low, according to a poll in the Washington Post.

Before the 2010 midterm elections roll around, Republicans need to get the focus back onto the Big Tent where all are welcome and off the sideshows that are popping up along the party’s fringe.”

Yes, I’m afraid  Katie is on to something.  But, frankly, I can do without the civics lesson, the part where she tells us that Republicans “need to get the focus back on the Big Tent where all are welcome.”

Does Katie Couric really believe that the other team, the Democrats, “welcome” those who oppose abortion?  Do they “welcome” Democrats who are against affirmative action?  Do they “welcome” small-government types who want lower taxes?  How about those who don’t believe global warming is the life-and-death crisis Al Gore says it is?  How “welcome” are they? Do they “welcome” those who tell liberals who are constantly yelling racism to either produce some real evidence or “shut the hell up”?  And what about those Democrats who think “torture” – a word I’m using merely as a matter of convenience – is a good thing if it saves innocent lives – how “welcome” are they” in the party?

So, Katie, please stop pretending you care about Republicans.  We know you don’t.  And while we’re at it, here’s a memo to all liberal Democrats worrying about the future of the Republican Party:  Find something else to fret about.  You still amuse us, but you’re also starting to annoy us.

The reason the joke works is that it has (more than) a ring of truth to it.  The media has been slobbering all over Mr. Obama ever since he said he wanted to be president.  So it came as a great big surprise the other day when the so-called mainstream media went to bat for the president’s least favorite news organization, the anti-Christ itself, FOX News, and in the process took a swipe at the president they love so much.

Here’s how the FOX Web site reported the story about Presidsent Obama’s “pay czar”:

“The Treasury Department on Thursday tried to make “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg available for interviews to every member of the network pool except Fox News. The pool is the five-network rotation that for decades has shared the costs and duties of daily coverage of the presidency and other Washington institutions

But the Washington bureau chiefs of the five TV networks consulted and decided that none of their reporters would interview Feinberg unless Fox News was included. The pool informed Treasury that Fox News, as a member of the network pool, could not be excluded from such interviews under the rules of the pool.”

For this, ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN (the other members of the pool along with FOX) have been hailed as defenders of a free press, courageous, and even “noble” by my FOX pal, Bill O’Reilly.  The conventional wisdom is that the so-called mainstream media had finally had enough, that they would no longer be consciencetious objectors in the White House’s War on FOX News, that now they were standing with FOX because if the Chicago Mafia in the White House could exclude FOX … they could exclude anybody.

To which I say:  Maybe.

The more I think about it, the more I believe the Chicago mob is looking more and more like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.  But not simply for overplaying their hand against FOX.  The mistake Emanuel, Axelrod and company made, I believe, was merely tactical.  They offered the “pay czar” interview to the pool – and the pool had no choice but to do what it did.   Members of the pool have to stick together.  Those are the rules.

But consider this:  What if the White House had offered up the “pay czar” to each of the networks individually – and not as members of the pool.  What if the Obama administration had asked NBC News if it wanted the inerview, then CBS, then ABC and CNN – seperately.  Do we really think any of them would have said, “Are you offering the interview to FOX?  If FOX is excluded, we won’t do the interview either.”  Two words on that:  NO WAY!

In other words, the MSM might not be as courageous and noble as they’re being made out to be.  And if the Chicago Mafia is so dopey as to try this stunt again – next time by avoiding the pool – we’ll know for sure if “mainstream” journalists finally turned a corner.  If they say, “If you exclude FOX we decline the interview” then I will happily give them three great big cheers.  But if they look the other way and  do the interview — and allow FOX to be boycotted, isolated and marginalized by the White House — then the accolades for the “mainstream media,” like notices about Mark Twain’s death, will turn out to be premature.

So far I give the MSM one cheer.  The jury is out on the other two.

On ABC’s “This Week,” White House senior advisor David Axelrod told George Stephanopoulos that FOX is “not really a news station” and that much of what they put on the air at FOX News is “not  really news.”  FOX News, he said, “respresents a point of view.”

Meanwhile, over at CNN, the president’s chief-of-staff, Rahm Emanuel, told John King  that Fox “is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective.”

“I suppose the way to look at it and the way … the president looks at it, we look at it is: It’s not a news organization so much as it has a perspective. And that’s a different take. And more importantly, is not have the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led in following Fox, as if what they’re trying to do is a legitimate news organization …”

And there it is – the White House strategy clearly articulated.  What the president and his team are trying to do by going to war with FOX is convince the so-called mainstream media to think long and hard before running a story that FOX ran with – or run the risk of being tarnished as a FOX lackey and not a real news organization either.

Remember that it was FOX – not the big, supposedly objective, unbiased “mainstream media” that ran with the Van Jones story.  It was FOX that kept the ACORN story alive. Both legitimate news stories.  And remember that it was only after FOX wouldn’t let go of those stories that Van Jones (who wanted an investigation to learn if President Bush was somehow behind the 9/11 attacks on the United States)  resigned in the middle of the night.  And only then did most of the so-called mainstream media discover that this was actually news.  The New York Times didn’t run a single word about Van Jones – until after he resigned.  And since most other news outfits take their cues from the Times, most of them didn’t go with the story either, until very late in the day.

And if FOX hadn’t run those videos showing ACORN employes in several cities giving advice to a  “pimp” and his “ho” on how to set up a brothel in this country featuring young (very young) girls from Central America … there’s a good chance that none of those so-called unbiased “mainstream” news operations would have run the videos or covered the story.

That’s why the White House has gone to war with FOX:  to discourage other news organizations, friendly news organizations that have been slobbering over the president since he started running, that they should not lower themselves and “legitimize” a story that pretty much only FOX cared about.

And, let’s be honest:  If the White House were really concerned about fair play, about calling out news operations with biased “perspecives,” Axelrod and Emmanuel would have said something about MSNBC.  That operation is one great big biased “perspective.” But they didn’t.  Why?  Because they have no problem with “perspective” as long as it’s their perspective that’s being peddled.

But I don’t believe that this is simply a strategy aimed at the media. This isn’t only about trying to convince ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and the print press to shy away from “FOX stories.” No, I think the strategy goes way beyond that.  This is, I believe, a long term game plan aimed at influencing not just their journalistic pals, but also the bigger American culture in general.

If the White House can get the word out that FOX is not legitimate, that FOX is a political outfit not a news organization, if they can repeat the mantra long enough, perhaps, over time, it just might become an idea that is widely and uncritically accepted – mainly by Americans who are not especially political, and more than likely don’t even watch FOX News.

Yes, there’s enough on FOX to detest if you’re in the White House.  One or two people on the network suffer from ODS – Obama Derangement Sydrome.  And I was a critic of those who didn’t simply cover the Tea Parties but were cheerleading them on.  But that’s not the entirety of FOX News.  Chris Wallace is a serious journalist.  So is Brit Hume and Brett Baier and many others.  The White House, it seems, paints with a broad brush in condemning the entire network.  And besides, it’s one thing for run-of-the-bill liberals, both in and out of the media, to portray FOX as nothing more than an arm of the Republican National Party, a phony news organization that should not be taken seriously. But there’s something unseemly when the President of the United States is leading the crusade.  Is this man so vain that he needs every news organization to slobber over him?

But beware:  Once an idea is implanted in the culture, once it is seen as “THE TRUTH,” it’s hard to un-do the damage.  In other words, the White House strategy just might work.

No, I didn’t actually get a phone call from Oslo making it official.  Not yet anyway.  But who needs a phone call.  I found out about my good fortune by turning on the television and learning that Barack Obama won this year’s Peace Prize.  So I’m figuring, if he can win it, so can I.

Look, President Obama hasn’t brought peace to the Middle East, has he?  Neither have I.  He hasn’t ended the war in Iraq.  Me neither.  Obama hasn’t brought the troops home from Afghanistan and turned that God-forsaken mess into a peace-loving paradise.  Guess who hasn’t done any of that either.  How about Darfur?  Obama and I are tied for doing nothing on that one, too.  Gitmo?  Neither of us have shut the place down.

The fact is Barack Obama has done absolutely nothing to bring peace to the world.   Or as they say in Norweigan:  “Absolutely.  Nothing.”  He got the award because five lefties on the Nobel selection committee got together and decided that they, just like America’s lame-stream media, have a slobbering love affair with the guy.  Or to put it a slightly different way:  Barack Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize because he’s not George W. Bush.

I’m guessing the clincher, if they even needed a clincher, was Rio.  Just a few days ago, the International Olympic Committee dissed President Obama by giving the 2016 Olympics to Rio instead of Chicago.  How mean was that?   Especially since the president flew all the way to Copenhagen on Air Force One to make the pitch in person for his adopted hometown.  The least they could do in nearby Oslo to make up for the slight was give the poor guy a Nobel Prize, right?

I’m going to keep this short because I have a very busy day today.  First, I have to tell all my friends and relatives that I’m about to win the Nobel Peace Prize.  Then I have to book a flight to Oslo and get a hotel room and rent a goofy-looking tuxedo so I look nice when I get the award.

When I was a little boy, my mother used to tell me that if I work hard I could be anything I want.  I guess Mom was wrong.  I always wanted to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner — and I didn’t have to work hard at all.   Thank you President Obama.

Would they sign a Free Him Now petition if the pervert wasn’t a liberal like Roman Polanski – but a conservative like Rush Limbaugh?

If a conservative Republican said we need a law to require all Americans to take personal responsibility and buy health insurance, would the Right be against it – or are conservatives only against mandatory insurance when liberals call for it?

Would conservatives have supported going to war in Iraq if a liberal Democrat like Barack Obama had gotten us into that war?

Would conservatives support years and years of national building in Iraq?

Why are many liberals against sending more troops to Afghanistan when for years they said Afghanistan was the “good war”?

Were liberals being deceitful when they said Afghanistan was the necessary war, the war that required all our military attention?  Were they merely using Afghanistan as an excuse to get us out of Iraq?

Would liberals have said the Van Jones story was no big deal if a conservative had put a right-wing radical in his administration?

How would conservatives on radio and TV – who said virtually nothing negative about the people who disrupted town hall meetings —  feel if liberals disrupted town hall meetings during a Republican presidency?

What would conservatives say if a liberal talk show host tried to portray demonstrators at a left-wing anti-war rally as a “cross section of America” – just as commentators on the Right portrayed “Tea Party” demonstrators as a “cross section of America?

Liberals are rightly enraged when conservatives compare President Obama to Hitler.  They worry about incivility in America.  Were they outraged when liberals compared President Bush to Hitler?   Did they think that was uncivil?  Then why didn’t they say so?

Just wondering.

I bring this up because the “public editor” of the Times, a fellow by the name of Clark Hoyt, has written that while the Acorn story was big news on FOX and on conservative Websites, the editors at the Times were operating on snooze control and got around to covering it late. Very late.  No, he didn’t say it quite that way, but I’m pretty sure that’s what he meant.

“It was an intriguing story,” Hoyt wrote, “employees of a controversial outfit, long criticized by Republicans as corrupt, appearing to engage in outrageous, if not illegal, behavior. An Acorn worker in Baltimore was shown telling the ‘prostitute’ that she could describe herself to tax authorities as an ‘independent artist’ and claim 15-year-old prostitutes

“But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still. Its slow reflexes — closely following its slow response to a controversy that forced the resignation of Van Jones, a White House adviser — suggested that it has trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs. Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire. But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.”

The Times looking “clueless” or worse “partisan”?  What’s next:  the “public editor” informing us the sun rises in the east?

But here’s the good news:  Despite what you or anyone else may think, there is no liberal bias at the New York Times.  How do I know this?  The New York Times told me.  First, the “public editor” quotes Jill Abramson, the paper’s managing editor for news, saying the problem at the Times is not liberal bias.  Abramson admits the paper was “slow off the mark” but said it was because of “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio” – not bias.

And she’s not alone.  Hoyt also interviewed Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism.  According to Hoyt, Rosenstiel “has studied journalists for years, and though they are more liberal than the general population, he believes they are motivated by the desire to get good stories, not to help one particular side.”

Well, I guess that settles it.  No liberal bias in the “MSM,” despite what you crazy right-wing paranoids think.  Except for one little thing:  there is a liberal bias at the Times and at other big so-called mainstream news organizations.  And even though there’s no vast-left wing conspiracy to slant the news, no grand liberal conspiracies, there is another problem:  groupthink.

Newsrooms are filled with liberal journalists.  Conservatives in big news organizations are in the minority – and a small minority at that.  So many liberals, so many like-minded people—no matter how fair they think they are – are going to produce a biased product.  It’s as simple as that.  And for anyone who doesn’t buy the logic, consider this:  What if the New York Times (or any other news organization) was loaded with conservative journalists?  What if they dominated the newsroom?  What if they thought their conservative values were superior to liberal values?  What if almost all of them always vote for the conservative Republican candidate running for president?  What if they socialize with like-minded conservatives and rarely come into contact with liberals?  Does anyone think the news wouldn’t be slanted to the Right?  Of course it would.  That’s how it works in the real world when the deck is stacked.

The reason news executives finally brought women and minority journalists into the newsroom was the realization that news reported and edited almost exclusively by white males would be slanted no matter how unbiased the journalists thought they were.  White males, no matter how educated they were, simply could not understand certain issues the way others could.  So executives instituted affirmative action programs to create a more diverse newsroom.  But what we have now in our newsrooms, after years of this devotion to diversity, are white liberals and black liberals, male liberals and female liberals, gay liberals and straight liberals, Latino liberals and Asian liberals and on and on.

Skin deep diversity simply is not enough.  We need intellectual diversity in the newsroom.  We need diversity of opinion.  And I’m afraid the only way to get it is with more affirmative action — affirmative action for the smallest minority in the newsroom:  conservative journalists.

By the way, I would tell those conservatives to keep their opinions to themselves.  And I’d tell liberals the same thing.  It isn’t your opinion that is needed, I would say, it’s your  perspective.  Without it, bias will continue to pollute journalism.  And the powers that be will continue to deny its existence and not care how silly they look as they do it.

So is there hope for the Times and the other so-called mainstream news organizations?  I report.  You decide.

First he mentioned the now well-known Jimmy Carter quotation, about how “an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.”

That, Mr. Blow said, “was an overstatement of the role of race.”

Then he quoted Michael Steele, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee who said that, “President Carter is flat-out wrong. This isn’t about race. It is about policy.”

That, the op-ed columnist concluded, “was an underrepresentation of the role of race.”

Then on to his main point: “But that’s where we are with race in this country: exaggerations and blanket denials. Race has become a vicious game of bludgeons and crutches, where acerbic accusers run roughshod over earnest egalitarians and political gain is sought even at the expense of enlightenment.”

Are there racists in this country?  Of course.  Some white, and even though you’re not supposed to say it in polite company, some black.  In a country of more than 300 million people this should surprise no one.  But there was one section of the column that focused my attention.  It was a reference to a 2003 study by Rice University researchers that was used by Charles Blow to try to figure out what role, if any, racism plays in the current opposition of President Obama.

“One of the greatest challenges facing black leaders is aversive racism,” the researchers concluded, “a subtle but insidious form of prejudice that emerges when people can justify their negative feelings toward blacks based on factors other than race.”

Then this from Blow:  “Sound familiar?”

Well, yes, I guess it does.  And it also sounds troubling.

It sounds like the Rice researchers (and Charles M. Blow, the op-ed columnist from the New York Times) are saying that people who claim to be against President Obama’s healthcare plan because it costs too much, may, deep down, be against the plan because the president who wants it passed is  black.

And if you’re one of those critics who says President Obama’s plans to fight “global warming” will amount to a big tax on all Americans, you may be sincere, but you may be a bigot – a subtle one, but a bigot nonetheless.

What I find troubling about this kind of thinking is the implication that while critics may think they’re simply against the president’s policies, it’s probably more sinister than that.  Sure, the researchers seem to be saying, you’re not automatically in the KKK because you think the president’s stimulus bill was nothing more than a goody bag for liberal Democrats, but there’s a good chance a part of you opposes the plan not just on policy grounds, no matter what you say or believe – but on racial grounds.

So let’s turn a few tables.  Does this mean that folks who said they didn’t think Clarence Thomas was a good pick for the U.S. Supreme Court on policy grounds –that he was too conservative, that he might vote to overturn Roe v. Wade – also had “a subtle but insidious form of prejudice” lurking in their liberal hearts? Were they “justifying their negative feelings toward blacks based on factors other than race”?

Did Condi Rice’s critics dislike her because she was too right-wing in her politics or was it because she’s a black woman?  And how about those liberals, black and white, who think black conservative men like Michael Steele are sell-outs (and worse!) – are they subtle racists, too?  Or are only white conservatives guilty of this “aversive” racism?

Well, I guess we know the answer to that one.  So if liberals don’t think they’re guilty of racism, subtle or otherwise, if they see their opposition to conservatives like Thomas, Rice, Steele and others as principled and based soley on policy … then why should they assume that bigotry resides in the conservative soul, just because conservatives oppose the president’s liberal policies?

That, unfortunately, is an easy one:  Because, they would say, liberals are not bigots and conservatives are.  When you understand that, you understand all you need to know about how sanctimonious (and delusional) the Left can be – especially when it comes to the murky waters of race in America.

Well, looks like I didn’t get it quite right.  It seems that the real victims here are those misunderstood ACORN folks – yes the same ones who were giving the make-believe pimp and hooker advice on how to get around trivial, unimportant, technical stuff – like the law.

You see, the ACORN people are poor.  And not too smart.  And black.  And therefore corruption comes easily to them.

Fortunately, I didn’t say that.  A liberal who works at National Public Radio did.  His name is Frank James, and here’s what he wrote on the NPR blog “the two-way.”

“It’s … important to keep in mind that ACORN’s workers are coming from the same low-income neighborhoods the organization serves, with all that entails — poor schools, high crime and the sorts of social problems that have been documented for decades.

“So the flaws conservatives are pointing out about ACORN are not so much problems associated with that organization per se but more about the problems of being poor and minority in urban America.”

To which James Taranto replies in his Wall Street Journal online column:  “It’s hard to see how James’s casual assumption that corruption is the predictable result of ‘being poor and minority’ is anything other than invidious bigotry.”

Ah, but that assumes liberals can be bigots.  And we all know that’s not true.  Only conservatives are bigots. Just ask the next liberal you run into.

Main-stream (mayn-streem)

Main or current thought or behavior:  the ideas, actions, and values that are most widely accepted by a group or society, e.g. in politics, fashion or music

-0-

Since there is very little mainstream about the so-called mainstream media, it’s time for all of us to stop using such a misleading term – and come up with something new.

Is the New York Times or NBC News really mainstream when they ignore the Van Jones story?

Isn’t there something wrong when Glenn Beck, who doesn’t even pretend to be a journalist, scoops the “mainstream media” on all sorts of stories – from Van Jones to Acorn, to name just two recent examples?

The fact is there are lots of stories that Americans care deeply about that simply hold no interest for so-called mainstream journalists.   I get the impression that if FOX News decides to run with a story that may, for example, reflect badly on President Obama or one that puts a spotlight on some liberal judge who let’s child molesters off with (barely) a slap on the wrist, the mainstream media won’t go near it.  That may be regrettable, but I fear it’s true.

So, here’s where all of you come in.  What term should we come up with to replace “mainstream media”?

I await your brilliant suggestions.  Keep ‘em short.

The central character in this latest Times brouhaha (without the haha) is a radical leftist by the name of Van Jones.  Jones was President Obama’s “green jobs czar” until he resigned in the middle of the night, just after midnight on Saturday.  If you only got your news from the Times, you’d have every right to ask: Who’s Van Jones – and why did he resign?

Well, he’s the presidential adviser who (before he became a czar) said Republicans were assholes.  But that, as things turned out, was a 1 one on the political Richter Scale.  Then there were the comments about how white polluters and environmentalists are steering poison into black communities.  Another ripple.  And his public support for Mumia Abu-Jamal,who is on death row for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer.  More ripples.  But what caused a major quake was the revelation that Jones signed a petition a few years ago that called for an investigation to determine if the attacks on 9/11 were an inside job.  Specifically, the “9/11 Truthers,” as they’ve been called, want to know if George W. Bush and the neo-cons in his administration willfully allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen so they could use the deaths of more than three thousand of their fellow Americans as a pretext to go to war.

Anyone who truly believes this, is not only suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome but is also a full-fledged psycho.   It really is that simple.

But the fact that an adviser to the president signed such a screwball petition drew only yawns from the so-called mainstream media.  Not surprisingly, Fox ran with the story, and so did talk radio – after the Gateway Pundit blog broke the news last Thursday. And when the story got traction in the conservative media, Van Jones morphed from loudmouth radical to cowering weasel and said the petition didn’t reflect his views, then or now.  Really?  Then why did he sign the damn thing?

The fact is until he resigned the New York Times ran exactly zero words about the controversy.  Zero!  But this didn’t stop the Times from reporting the following in its Sunday (Sept. 6) paper:

“In a victory for Republicans and the Obama administration’s conservative critics, Van Jones resigned as the White House’s environmental jobs ‘czar’ on Saturday.

Controversy over Mr. Jones’s past comments and affiliations has slowly escalated over several weeks, erupting on Friday with calls for his resignation.”

As Clay Waters of the Media Research Center elegantly put it:  “An ‘escalation’ utterly ignored by the Times and almost all the mainstream media.”

Before he quit, NBC Nightly News didn’t cover the “escalating controversy” and neither did ABC World News Tonight.  On Friday night, the CBS Evening News had a story about the Jones controversy and on Saturday morning the Washington Post ran a piece on page 3.  And that pretty much was it as far as the MSM was concerned.

Now, let’s go back a month.

When the so-called “Birthers” – a fringe group of right-wingers (many of whom have criticized me for calling them that) were screaming about how Barack Obama was not born in the United States and therefore was not our legitimate president, the New York Times was outraged and demanded that prominent Republicans denounce these screwballs.  But the Times never called on Democrats, prominent or otherwise, to denounce Van Jones. The “Birthers” are bad.  The “9/11 Truthers” are worse.

News editors have always argued that news judgment is subjective – and that they alone have to make decisions on what gets into the paper and what doesn’t.  Okay.  So what should we make of their news judgment in the matter of Van Jones?

Well, one possibility is that the editors at the New York Times just didn’t think the story was all that important – nothing more than “a phony story whipped up by crazy, vicious right-wingers,” as a friend of mine who no longer can stand to read the Times put it, “and they weren’t going to fall for it.”  Maybe the editors got together and said something like, “What’s the big deal about an adviser to the President of the Untied States signing a petition that questions whether George W. Bush was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks?”  If that’s what happened, then every hard news editor at the Times should resign and go into a line of work where journalistic skills are not required.

But then there’s always that other possibility:  that they were covering for a president they’ve been rooting for since the day he announced his candidacy, a president they tried to turn into a Messiah, a president who is simply too historically important to fail.

I don’t know which it is.  And just between us:  I don’t really care!  What’s important is that an important adviser to the President of the United States had to resign even though the New York Times (and much of the MSM that takes its cues from the Times) tried to keep the mess off our radar screen.  Arrogant journalists probably figured, News is what WE say News is.  That may have been true once, but not anymore.

So let’s just call this latest round of bias and hypocrisy, one more self-inflicted mainstream media wound – one of many that sooner or later will finish them off.  And that’s the “inside job” they should really be worrying about.

******

In August 2004, when the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were taking aim at John Kerry and causing a lot of damage, a prominent journalist told a national magazine that, “In the end, what difference does it make what one candidate or the other did or didn’t do during the Vietnam War?  In some ways, that war is as distant as the Napoleonic campaigns.”

That article came out in the August 30, 2004 edition of Broadcasting & Cable magazine.  But what the prominent journalist did not bother revealing was that at the very time he was saying John Kerry’s Vietnam record was irrelevant, he himself was working on a story that would air on a major national television news program,  just days later … about – take a deep breath! – George W. Bush and what he did or didn’t do during the Vietnam War!

Now take a guess who that prominent journalist was.

Times up.

If you said Dan Rather, give yourself a gold star.

The story, which aired on the weekday edition of 60 Minutes on September 8, 2004, has come to be known as “Rathergate” — a name it got, as just about everybody knows, because the documents Rather used to back up his story (about George Bush joining the Air National Guard to avoid serving in Vietnam) could not be verified as real … and may in fact be downright forgeries.

So how was it that when John Kerry was taking fire from critics, Dan Rather thought Vietnam was ancient history – but just eight days later, the same Dan Rather was putting George W. Bush in the crosshairs on national television and all of a sudden Vietnam was as relevant as could be?

Could it be that Dan Rather was taking sides, that he was recklessly using his substantial power to further a liberal Democrat’s cause at the expense of a conservative Republican?

Naah!

Just ask Dan Rather, who, whenever he’s been questioned over the years about liberal bias, has always given the same answer:  “I’m in favor of a strong defense, tight money, and clean water.  I don’t know what that makes me.  But whatever that makes me, that’s what I am.”

With all due respect, what that makes you, Dan, is disingenuous at best and delusional at worst.

For whatever reason, this story never gained traction, though, I readily admit, I find it fascinating.  There is something way beyond creepy about Dan Rather (or anyone else, for that matter) telling a national magazine that Vietnam was not relevant to the presidential campaign while he was putting the final touches on a story about Vietnam and the presidential campaign.

What in the world could Rather have been thinking?  Didn’t he worry about how it would look when his 60 Minutes Wednesday piece came out?  But, as with so many things, Dan apparently wasn’t concerned – and now, he tells us he’s not concerned about his legacy either.

In an August 16, 2009 article about his lawsuit against CBS, the Los Angeles Times reported that “Rather said he doesn’t fret about his legacy.  ‘My record is my record,’ he said, ticking off the tent-pole events of the last half-century that he has covered: the assassination of President Kennedy, Watergate, the Gulf War, the Iraq war, Tiananmen Square, the Sept. 11 attacks.

“But will this particular story forever overshadow all of that? The usually loquacious newsman leaned back in his chair, silent for a moment.

‘I have no idea,’ he said quietly. ‘Ever is a long time.’”

The main point of contention centers on something I never said.  I have been taken to task for hauling out tired old news in the guise of a brand new “Exclusive.”  This, my friends, simply is not true.

First, a little background:

In September 2004, the weekday edition of 60 Minutes ran a story by Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes about how a young George W. Bush went into the Texas Air National Guard in order to avoid service in Vietnam.  The story aired just 55 days before a very tight presidential election — and depended on documents that have since been discredited.

The only point I was making (in my column and on The Factor) was this:  Mapes was told before her story went on the air that Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam and left it out of the story.  I made it perfectly clear that this information was in the CBS report on the “Rathergate” fiasco and that it had been available to the public for more than four years.  I never suggested I had new information – only that this fact never gained traction and wasn’t even known by people who worked with Mapes on the story, let alone the public at large.

I made the point that this “lost” fact undermined the Rather/Mapes story.  After all, if Mapes was told Bush volunteered to go to Vietnam and intentionally kept that from her viewers, it rendered the 60 Minutes story suspect – and it put Mapes’ motives into question.

Permit me a brief media culpa:  I should have mentioned that Accuracy in Media was one of the very few organizations to report this fact early on.  I merely said that “a few websites” had noted the finding.  My apologies to AIM.

Now, one other point:  The New York Observer has published a column by Felix Gillette that says none other than Mary Mapes herself had revealed information that George Bush volunteered to fly combat missions in Vietnam – in her 2005 book, Truth and Honor. The clear implication is my “exclusive” (again, I never claimed to be breaking news, exclusive or otherwise) was a joke!

Here’s how Mr. Gillette put it:  “Last night on the O’Reilly Factor on Fox News, Bernard Goldberg told  anchor Bill O’Reilly that he had uncovered an exclusive scoop ‘about a lost crucial fact in the so-called ‘Rathergate’ scandal.’”

Sorry.  I never said anything about “an exclusive scoop.”  Not a word!

Then he said that by writing about the “Bush volunteered” angle in her book, Mapes had already shared the information with … Mr. Gillette’s words … “the entire English-reading world.”

Well, technically, I guess, that could be true.  But let’s be kind and simply say that outside of Mapes’ family and friends, just about nobody read the book.

Gillette tells us that in Truth and Honor Mapes writes about an interview she did with Maurice Udell, Bush’s flight trainer in the late 1960s.  This is the exchange between Mapes and Udell (starting with Mapes’ question) that Gillette quotes from the book:

“Had Bush joined the Guard to avoid Vietnam? ‘That’s bullshit, that he avoided the war,’ Udell told me in 1999. ‘They try to put George down…He performed very well. I’m not saying that because he’s running.’

“Udell told me that Bush had wanted to go to Vietnam.”

Felix Gillette shares this with his readers to make only one point:  that Mapes broke the news – not me.  Never mind, as I say, that I never claimed I broke news, that I was only sharing a fact I had not known about, a fact that practically nobody knew about.

But here’s the interesting part, Gillette apparently doesn’t  wonder why Mary Mapes waited until her book came out (a full year and two months after the CBS broadcast) to reveal what she should have revealed in the 60 Minutes Wednesday piece.

Since she says in her book that she spoke to a source who told her that “Bush wanted to go to Vietnam” and that he didn’t join the Air National Guard to avoid  service in Vietnam, why didn’t she reveal that in her CBS story?

Wouldn’t a curious journalist wonder why Mapes kept that from her viewers and saved the information for her book, which came out long after she got fired and the careers of her colleagues, including Dan Rather, had been ruined, thanks to her.

Instead, all we get are snarky comments from Gillette about an “exclusive” I never claimed was an exclusive, about how “excited” I was to break news, which I never claimed I was breaking.

For those who think I’m naive, let me be clear once again (as I was in my original piece):  I am more than willing to entertain the possibility that Bush volunteered knowing he didn’t have enough flight hours and therefore wouldn’t actually have to go.  But if Mapes believed that she had an obligation to report that some say he volunteered … and if there was a credible source that says it was all a sham … fine … report that, too.  But Mapes did neither.

My next column – “Rathergate” Part 2 – will also contain information that has been available for years.  But I’ll bet it will be news to almost all of you.  I’ll even bet it will be news to Felix Gillette.

That was then.  Now Dan Rather is suing the network that employed him for 44 years, asking for $70 million dollars in damages.  Technically, the lawsuit is about a dry legal issue — breach of contract.  But it is also about something much more personal to Rather:  his legacy.  It is a lawsuit, fundamentally, about saving Dan Rather’s reputation.

That reputation took a turn for the worse back in 2004.  As has been widely reported, just 55 days before a very close presidential election, Dan Rather and his producer Mary Mapes put a story on the weekday edition of 60 Minutes that brought on the media equivalent of World War III.  There were accusations that Rather, Mapes, and maybe the entire CBS News Division had set out to deliberately destroy George W. Bush and get John Kerry elected President of the United States – a charge everyone at CBS vehemently denies.

The story was about how the young George Bush got preferential treatment during the Vietnam War; how he wangled his way into the Texas Air National Guard back in the 1960s to avoid service in Vietnam;  and how he was able to do it because his father was a big-shot, a United States Congressman from Houston. The story portrayed the Bush as a slacker. Others have said it portrayed him as a “cowardly draft dodger.”

And to bolster their story, Rather and Mapes got their hands on “never-before-seen” documents (as Rather put it in his story) that supposedly backed up their months (and in Mapes’ case, years) of reporting.  But in no time flat the documents came under attack, mainly by conservatives on the web who examined the typeface of the memos and concluded they were fakes.

CBS News management aggressively defended the story in general and the documents in particular – until they didn’t. After about two weeks, CBS threw in the towel and said it could no longer stand by the story.  Rather, who had been vigorously defending his story, reluctantly went on the air and admitted the documents could not be authenticated.  Later he would say he was forced to do it.

In the aftermath of the fiasco, CBS established an outside panel to look into the matter.  In January of 2005 the panel issued a report which concluded the news division failed to establish that the documents were legitimate and not bogus. Mapes was fired.  A vice president and two producers were forced to resign.  And Dan Rather was a dead man walking.

He had already lost his job as anchorman of the evening news but was allowed to stay on the weekday edition of 60 Minutes, which his story had sent on a glide path to oblivion.  And when that show died an inglorious death Rather went over to the Sunday edition of 60 Minutes. But that wouldn’t last long, either.  When his contract ran out CBS yanked him off the show, but made him an offer he decided to refuse:  Rather would get an office and an assistant and he could report stories for any CBS News broadcast that called on him – if any CBS News broadcast ever chose to call on him.  CBS offered Rather $250,000 a year, according to my sources, who say he wanted a million.  When he didn’t get it, he quit.  According to Rather, he was pushed out the door by the head of CBS, Leslie Moonves.

In 2007, Rather filed his $70 million lawsuit against his old company saying he wasn’t allowed to defend his story because the top management of CBS’ parent company, Viacom, wanted to appease the Bush Administration and protect its business interests.

Until now, the controversy over the Rather/Mapes story has centered almost entirely on one issue:  the legitimacy of the documents – a very important issue, indeed.  But it turns out that there was another very important issue, one that goes to the very heart of what the story was about – and one that has gone virtually unnoticed.   This is it:  Mary Mapes knew before she put the story on the air that George W. Bush, the alleged slacker, had in fact volunteered to go to Vietnam.

Who says?  The outside panel CBS brought into to get to the bottom of the so-called “Rathergate” mess says. I recently re-examined the panel’s report after a source, Deep Throat style, told me to “Go to page 130.”  When I did, here’s the startling piece of information I found:

Mapes had information prior to the airing of the September 8 [2004] Segment that President Bush, while in the TexANG [Texas Air National Guard] did volunteer for service in Vietnam but was turned down in favor of more experienced pilots.  For example, a flight instructor who served in the TexANG with Lieutenant Bush advised Mapes in 1999 that Lieutenant Bush “did want to go to Vietnam but others went first.”  Similarly, several others advised Mapes in 1999, and again in 2004 before September 8, that Lieutenant Bush had volunteered to go to Vietnam but did not have enough flight hours to qualify.

This information, despite the fact that it has been available since the CBS report came out four years ago, has remained a secret to almost everybody both in and out of the media — one lonely fact in a 234- page report loaded with thousands of facts, and overshadowed by the controversy surrounding the documents.

I made an online check and discovered that while a few websites noted the CBS finding, the story got no ink (that I could find) on the news pages of any big mainstream paper.  I did manage to find two opinion pieces about the CBS mess – one in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the other in the Miami Herald — that briefly, and only in passing, mentioned the “Bush volunteered” angle. But that was it!  A check of network newscasts turned up nothing. And when I questioned two journalists with intimate knowledge of the story, both said Mapes never shared her information with them.

For the record:  George W. Bush has always maintained that he joined the National Guard not to avoid service in Vietnam but because he wanted to be a fighter pilot. He has openly acknowledged that he did not want to be drafted and serve in the infantry, and says he signed up for the Guard knowing full well he would have to spend almost two years in flight training and another four years in part-time service.

It is also true, however, that in his 1968 application to join the Texas Air National Guard Bush was asked if he wanted to go overseas and he checked the box that said “do not volunteer.”  But as the Washington Post reported on July 28, 1999:  “Bush said in an interview that he did not recall checking the box. Two weeks later, his office provided a statement from a former, state-level Air Guard personnel officer, asserting that since Bush ‘was applying for a specific position with the 147th Fighter Group, it would have been inappropriate for him to have volunteered for an overseas assignment and he probably was so advised by the military personnel clerk assisting him in completing the form.’”  He later told the Post:  “Had my unit been called up, I’d have gone . . . to Vietnam.  I was prepared to go.”

However the complexities and seeming contradictions are interpreted, if Bush at any point had volunteered to fly combat missions in Vietnam – as the CBS investigation unequivocally states — how then could he have been a slacker?  The clear answer is that he could not – unless, of course, he volunteered to go to Vietnam knowing full well he wouldn’t be taken.  But if that was the case Mapes would have had an obligation to report both that he volunteered and then produce a credible witness to say it was a sham.  She did neither.

Mapes, a well-known liberal at CBS News, has always contended that she had no agenda, that she was not out to get President Bush.  But if she knew that George Bush had volunteered for service in Vietnam – as the CBS outside panel clearly concludes — she obviously had an obligation to share that with her viewers.

Now the question is, did she share what she knew with her correspondent, Dan Rather.  Or to put it another way:  What did Rather know — and when did he know it?  The answers may come out at trial, if his case against CBS goes that far.  At the moment, neither side appears anxious to settle.

Hewitt called me one day after my book Arrogance came out (in 2003) and to put it mildly he was furious.  I had written about how the 60 Minutes curmudgeon Andy Rooney had gone on the Larry King Show and dropped a bombshell.  Rooney said that Dan Rather “is transparently liberal.  Now he may not like to hear me say that, I always agree with him, too.  But I think he should be more careful.”

Then I wrote, “Had I heard right?  Did Andy Rooney … just go where no newsman had gone before?  Did he really say that Dan Rather was ‘transparently liberal?’”  And I concluded with this: “Andy Rooney had just acknowledged that conservatives had been right all these years, after all.”

But as anyone who’s over the age of three can attest, telling the truth can get you in a lot of trouble — so Andy felt the need to become a weasel and slink away from his courageous statement.  And that’s where Don Hewitt comes in.  The phone conversation I had with him took place many years ago and since I wasn’t taking notes, I’ll re-create it as best I can.

“On page 24 of your book,” he said, you wrote the following…”  Then he read a paragraph from my book that quoted a newspaper column Rooney had written a full year before Arrogance came out.  This is the paragraph in which Rooney backs away from his observation about liberal bias:  “As a guest on the Larry King show a few weeks ago, I said some things, in answer to his questions, that I would have been better off lying about or avoiding.  It was not that the people who objected to what I said necessarily thought I was wrong.  They thought I shouldn’t have said it.  In my own defense, I told a boss of mine that I thought if all the truth were known by everyone it would be a better world.  He scoffed.  I think ‘scoff’ is what he did.  I know he rejected the idea.”

The next sentence in the book summed up Andy’s cowardly retraction following the conversation he had with his boss.  “Let’s see if I understood this, I wrote.  “Andy Rooney thinks that when it comes to liberal bias in the news, dishonesty is the best policy?”

Hewitt was ballistic.  I could feel the smoke coming out of his ears. “I never told Rooney to lie,” he spit out.  There was more than a hint in that conversation that I had slandered his good name.

“I didn’t say you told Andy Rooney to lie, Don.  It was your guy, Andy Rooney, who wrote the newspaper column – not me!  It was your guy who wrote “a boss of mine” “rejected the idea” of telling the truth.”

I no longer worked at CBS News and I wasn’t about to take this guff from anyone over there, not even Don Hewitt.

I told Don that I wrote –in the very next paragraph — that Rooney’s “boss” in question was either Don Hewitt or Andrew Heyward, then the president of CBS News.

“But it wasn’t me,” Hewitt shouted, and you had no business saying it was.”

“But Don,” a page later I reveal to the reader that the villain wasn’t you – it was Heyward [the president of CBS News] who told Rooney that telling the truth wasn’t always a good idea, not even for a newsman.”

I am convinced that Don hadn’t read that part.  He got to page 24, read the section that infuriated him and stopped reading.  He went on and on about how he had been thinking about doing a 60 Minutes piece about me and my book and liberal bias in the news, but now he’d never have me on his show.  As I recall, we exchanged F-Bombs and hung up.

I tell you this story not to belittle Don Hewitt.  Despite the temper and ego, he was a rare visionary.  He not only created the best news magazine program on television but he made sure the program  never stooped to the tawdry, tabloid ways of other magazine shows like Dateline on NBC and 48 Hours which had become a “murder mystery” show on his own CBS.  No, I tell the story because Don is a perfect example of how hyper-sensitive so many journalists can be – a very odd trait for people in the business of looking down everybody else’s throat.

I later wrote Don a note reminding him that he puts people in the crosshairs every week on his show.  He’s the one who perfected the technique of having the camera go in tight on some poor bastard so you can see the sweat dripping off his face as Mike Wallace grills him.  Now, I wrote a few harmless words about Don and he was sputtering like a loon at me.  He called me after he got my note, didn’t back down an inch, but this time we said our good byes in a more pleasant way.

But the fact is that nothing I said on the phone or in my note would appease Don.  Absolutely nothing!  That I didn’t write so much as a word that was untrue, meant nothing.  That it was Andy Rooney – not me — who hinted it was Hewitt who encouraged him to lie about liberal bias, meant nothing.  That I was the one who cleared Don’s good name, meant nothing either. All that mattered to Don – was Don.

I haven’t thought about that crazy phone conversation in many years.  But it came back to me when the sad news of Don’s death became known.  And I started thinking that as screwy as that chat was, it tells us something important about journalists and journalism.  It tells us that Don’s old friend and colleague Ed Murrow got it right many years ago when he is alleged to have said, “Journalists don’t have thin skins, they have no skins.”

RIP, Don.

He barely got “hello” out before he said, “It’s interesting, isn’t it, that fewer than a million people voted for Nancy Pelosi?”  The actual number, it turns out was far, far fewer than a million people.  She got 194,098 votes in 2008 when she was re-elected to the U.S. House from her district in San Francisco.

“Interesting?  I guess.  What’s your point, Ed?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “it’s interesting that in a great big country like ours fewer than a million people – [194,098] – can be responsible for screwing up so many things in so short a time.”

Ed’s a reasonable guy and so he reasonably figured that thanks to President Obama, Nancy Pelosi is just about the most powerful person in America.  After all, the president let her and her most liberal pals in the House write up the gazillion dollar pork-laden stimulus package – instead of writing it up in the White House.  He let Pelosi and the same gang of lefties write up the bill that will overhaul the nation’s healthcare system at a cost of roughly a bazillion dollars – instead of writing it up in the White House.  Ed figures it should take a lot more people than the relative few left fielders who elected Nancy Pelosi to send us all to the poor house.

“Well, Ed,” I said, “they don’t call San Francisco Halloween-by-the-Sea for nothing.  But you do make a good point”

“Thanks,” he replied, sounding dejected. Then just before hanging up, he added one more thing.  “And remember, she’s the president if anything ever happens to the president and Crazy Joe.”  A sobering thought if ever there was one.

But what my good friend Ed fails to appreciate is that San Francisco, where they routinely pass resolutions on wars and other weighty international matters, is the only city in America with both a foreign policy and Rice-a-Roni.

I bring this up because after she gets done screwing up America’s domestic policies, Speaker Pelosi probably will move on to screwing up our foreign policy.  That’s the bad news. The good news is that even she can’t screw up Rice-a-Roni.

So much for that liberal Democratic mantra repeated often during the Bush years about how dissent is the highest form of patriotism.  Suddenly dissent is racism and terrorism. Besides, it’s just not good strategy to malign the protesters. The polls are showing that more Americans side with them than disagree with them. And don’t forget, more than a few of the protestors are Democrats themselves.  They’ll remember what they were called and how they were portrayed next time they go to the polls. You know what they say about payback being a you-know-what.

And then there’s the matter of rank hypocrisy.  These same lefties who are in a tizzy over old people who carry canes and wear Depends getting rowdy at town hall meetings, have encouraged their own crazies to do the exact same thing. Can you say ActUp … Code Pink  …ANSWER … and ACORN? These are organizations whose members think they have a constitutional right to shout down conservative speakers — or throw pies in their face.

But liberals don’t have a monopoly on hypocrisy.  Conservatives, especially the ones with great big megaphones who talk to millions on radio and cable TV, are downright gleeful at what they’re watching at the town hall meetings. Suddenly, rude, dopey protesters who shout down speakers they don’t like are national heroes.

Why?  Well, conservatives legitimately say “the other side started it” referring to all the times liberals disrupted meetings and walked away with a slap on the wrist, if that.  But there’s another reason.  The sad truth is that more than a few conservatives in the chattering class suffer from Obama Derangement Syndrome.  So anyone who yells and screams and drowns out Obamacare supporters at the town halls are simply doing the “right thing,” fighting the “good fight.”

I am one of those conservatives who for years have railed against liberals on college campuses who shout down speakers they don’t like. I thought the left-wingers at Columbia who disrupted a speech by the leader of the anti-illegal immigration Minutemen should have been thrown out of school.  Students who don’t like Ann Coulter simply shout her down — or throw pies at her.  The problem with those kind of liberals is that they have forgotten how to be liberal.  Conservatives have decried the mob mentality of these leftists.  We’re the ones who have called them Brown Shirts – and for good reason.

So tell me:  What are the conservatives on talk radio and cable television going to say the next time those liberals shout down a conservative speaker?  What will they say when liberal activists disrupt congressional hearings – as Code Pink has done – because they don’t like what they’re hearing?  How will they answer when asked about their double standard and their hypocrisy?  Responding with, “Yeah, but they’re OUR hooligans” just won’t cut it.

This we can be sure of:  Liberal activists, on and off campus, will be back to their old tricks soon enough.  They will shout down speakers and disrupt meetings – and they won’t even notice their own intolerance.  But be assured of this, too:  It’s going to be awfully difficult for conservatives to say the hooligans are out of line and not look like two-faced hypocrites  - not after they applaud the protesters on their team who do the exact same thing.

“If there’s been a more clinically insane political phenomenon in my lifetime than the ‘birthers,’ I’ve missed it.”

This raises a question:  Really?

Perhaps Mr. Robinson has “Newsheimer’s” and has already forgotten about that other clinically insane political phenomenon, the one about how President Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks on America.

A few years ago, when insanity was in the air, I spoke to one lunatic face to face – a medical doctor no less – who not only believed that the federal government under President Bush put explosives in the World Trade Center Towers to blow them up, but was also convinced – ready for this? — that no plane ever hit the Pentagon.  It was all made up, he told me.

“Let me guess,” I said to this moron, “Bush was behind it all.”

“Oh, no,” he said, “Bush was only the puppet.”

“Acting at whose behest,” I continued, hoping the doctor’s head would explode before he could provide more proof that he was an idiot. “The people who wanted to get us into war for oil and money,” he sputtered.  Never mind that there were a lot easier ways to get us into war than to blow up two towering buildings and part of the Pentagon.  But of course, to understand this, one would have to have a functioning mind, which as you can see, the doctor did not have.

This was Bush Derangement Syndrome in full bloom.  The doctor hated W with an unhealthy passion.  And that hatred made him truly believe – with every fiber in his body and every cell in what passed for his brain – that the neo-cons killed their own countrymen just so they could take us to war in order to fatten their bank accounts.

I bring this up not to encourage a contest over which of these two crazy ideas is crazier, the Obama thing or the Bush thing.  I bring it up because there currently is an effort afoot by the Left to conflate nut-jobs on the fringe right with regular conservatives and regular Republicans.  The longer the silly controversy stays alive, the better the chance, they figure, that moderates and independents will start to think that any politician with an “R” after his name is a maniac.

Here’s how Eugene Robinson stokes that fire:  “There are probably people out there who think the world is flat, and they’re not worth writing about,” he says. “The ‘birthers’ wouldn’t be either unless you believe a poll released last week by Research 2000 revealing that an astounding 28% of Republicans actually think that Obama was not born in the United States and an additional 30% are ‘not sure.’ GOP officials need to order more tinfoil.”

Oh yeah, the poll was commissioned by that model of trustworthiness, The Daily Kos, which makes everything in it suspect.  But  even if the real number is half what is reported, it is indeed troubling.

But when left-wing professors at major American Universities banded together to proclaim that 9/11 was “an inside job” did liberals like Eugene Robinson portray these paranoids as representative of the Democratic Party?  No!

And make no mistake, it wasn’t just a few nutty professors who believed W was behind the 9/11 terrorism.  Robinson is making a point when he tells us that 28 percent of Republicans actually think Obama was born outside the U.S. — a point that it’s not only the fringe that’s crazy.  Okay.  Then what should we make of this statistic:  Back during the “W was behind 9/11″ days, a poll by Scripps Howard/Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspected that federal officials helped in the 9/11 terrorist attacks — or took no action to stop them …  so President Bush could take the country to war.

Wow!  “More than a third” is more than “28 percent,” right?   Who does Eugene Robinson think these conspiratorial nuts are?  Conservative Republicans?

No, Mr. Robinson, they’re mostly (if not entirely) Bush-hating, left-wing Democrats like that crazy doctor I had the unfortunate experience of talking to.  Gee, I don’t remember Robinson – or any other liberal media bigwig — ever writing that the Democratic Party “needs to order more tinfoil.”

I hope this nutty “birther” movement burns itself out on its own stupidity –and the sooner the better.  The longer it’s out there the worse it is for ordinary Republicans who will be tarred with the nut-job brush.  Be assured that elements of the mainstream media will see to that.

I disappeared for a few days (it may have been longer, after all these years I’m not sure) to make a few bucks working for a real newspaper that paid real money.  When I nonchalantly strolled back into the school newspaper office after who knows how long, Mrs. Oshman, the paper’s faculty advisor, read me the riot act.  She was furious.  How in the world, she demanded to know, could I disappear when we had a paper to put out?

Instead of just taking it and saying, “Sorry, it won’t happen again,” I lashed out at her with the same fury she had just aimed at me.  “I was working to make some money,” I told her, “because if I need a shirt, I need money.”

In retrospect, it’s as clear as can be:  She was right and I was wrong.  But that’s not how I saw it at the time.  To Mrs. Oshman, this was about my absence from the school newspaper.  To me, it was about something else entirely.

Back then, I couldn’t spell “introspective” and had as much interest in examining my inner self as your typical dummy in high school.  But looking back, I’m pretty sure I know what my outburst was about.  My family and I had just moved from a tenement in the Bronx to a house in the suburbs in New Jersey.  I had never lived in a house before.  We had a lawn and a big pine tree.  Technically, we had only moved maybe 15 miles, but it felt like we were in a different galaxy.  And now I was going to a new, clean high school instead of the gang-infested dump I would have attended in the Bronx had we stayed.

Mrs. Oshman didn’t understand me – or my kind, at some deep level I must have figured.  She didn’t know people like me, kids who grew up in lower middle class rough neighborhoods. I needed a few bucks so I skipped out on my responsibility as an editor.  If she didn’t like it, that was her problem.

Except it wasn’t.  She had every right to question my dedication to the school paper.  She had no way of knowing that when I moved from the Bronx I brought a lot of baggage with me.  How could she know?  I didn’t know!   So we wound up being players in the same scene, hearing different things and speaking different languages.

Fade to black and come up in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the house of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.

By know we all know the story:  Gates had just come home from China, he couldn’t get into his house, so he tried jimmying the door. A neighbor thought he was a burglar and called the police.  A Sgt. James Crowley showed up.  Crowley, who is white, asked Gates, who is black, for identification.  Gates bristled.  The way he saw it he was being hassled simply because of the color of his skin. When Crowley asked him to step outside, Gates reportedly said (though he denies it), “Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside.” Asked by the police officer to calm down, he wouldn’t.  The situation got out of hand, and Gates, the internationally respected scholar, wound up in handcuffs, arrested for disorderly conduct (a charge that was later dropped).

Forgive the grand comparison, but this was Mrs Oshman and me all over again, this time writ large.  By all accounts, Sgt. Crowley (Mrs. Oshman) is a good cop who was just doing his job.  Gates (me) was the one who got unruly.  That will happen when you’re carrying a lot of baggage.  You see things that aren’t really there.

The idea that a white cop would confuse him with a burglar, in his own house no less  - just because he’s black – was too much for Gates, even though there’s no evidence Crowley jumped to that conclusion. I’m betting that Professor Gates wasn’t simply responding to the white cop standing in front of him.  He was responding, I think, to every white cop – no, make that every white person — who had ever hassled a black man in the entire history of the United States of America.

A few days later, Gates was quoted as saying, “I don’t stereotype.  I never saw him as the head of the Ku Klux Klan.”  Could be, but I’m not so sure. White people don’t have a monopoly on stereotyping.  But since we don’t know for sure, let’s at least agree on this much:  Henry Louis Gates Jr. is not a burglar just because he’s black.  But Sgt. James Crowley is not Bull Conner just because he’s white.  And race is the wound that continues to fester.

Theodore White wrote The Making of the President: 1960, a book which fascinated all political junkees as it recounted the ways and methods of the Kennedy triumph.  He followed that volume with successor books each four years.  The premise of each book was that by following what was happening in the two campaigns, he could fully cover all that was taking place in the election.  Newsweek Magazine seeks to perpetuate his methodology in its quadrennial summaries of the election campaigns published shortly after election day.

But such summaries miss the essential point: The reality of modern campaigns cannot be covered by discussing what the candidates, managers, and staff are doing.  It can only be fully understood by covering what the media is doing during the campaigns.  That is why Bernie Goldberg’s book A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media, despite its long title, is so important to read.  It is not a supply side treatment of the campaign – focusing on what the candidates were putting out to the public.  Rather, it is a demand side treatment, covering what the public was absorbing through the media.

In 2004, the media did a bad job of covering the campaign impartially.  But by 2008, it had abandoned that goal.  By 2008, we had become a British system with some media dedicated to the Republicans and others to the Democrats.  Each newspaper and television station and radio program had a partisan affiliation.  There were no longer any neutrals.  MSNBC courted the liberal vote as surely as Fox News did the conservatives.  Media that pretended to play it down the middle were shown up for what they were: closet fans of one side or the other  (usually of the left) who disguise themselves as impartial.

What Goldberg does, which needed doing, is not to focus on the message sent by each campaign but on that which was received by the voters via the prism of the media.  More and more we are going to have to get used to this filtration and, like Russians during the cold war, we will have to get used to reading between the lines of Pravda to get the truth.  (Oddly, “Pravda” means truth in Russian.  Credits to George Orwell).

In all things, consumers want what they want.  People don’t read Sports Illustrated hoping for the occasional coverage of golf or tennis or hockey.  The read magazines devoted to each particular sport to get exactly what the want.  So it is in politics.  We have become segmented by our inputs, each of us seeking out elaboration and ratification of what we already think.

It is to the commercial disadvantage of the “mainstream” media that they compete for half the vote.  It is the fiscal edge of FoxNews and talk radio that they share the other half.

Bernie Goldberg puts to rest any notion that there is anything impartial that is sent out over the air.  In doing so, he disabuses us of the idea that there is a Santa Claus or a tooth fairy or an Easter bunny.  He ends our innocence.  Better sooner than later.

Here was a woman who turned on herself, who renounced her own views, not once but over and over again.  When asked by Republicans what she meant by this controversial statement or that, we got fog.  What about that “wise Latina” comment?  Sorry, if you misunderstood what I meant, Senator.  Once she claimed she had used the wrong words to say what she had intended.  Thanks.  But what we saw for the most part was a woman prepared to abandon her most fundamental beliefs – only until the final vote on her confirmation is in, it’s safe to assume — to insure what was a sure thing in any case:  that she would become the next Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

If you know the outcome in advance, if you know you’re going to get the job, why not have the guts to stick by your own words, your own beliefs?  What harm could it do?

But this is how the game is played and only a political naïf would be surprised by the show Judge Sotomayor and her Democratic friends in the Senate put on last week.  Some said the hearings were dull.  I found them depressing.

Sonia Sotomayor was part of a three-judge panel that dismissed, virtually without comment, the case of the New Haven firefighters who claimed they were victims of racial discrimination.  New Haven officials refused to give them the promotions they had earned, the firefighters said, simply because they were white (one was Hispanic).  The city had another story; it said it feared lawsuits since no blacks did well enough to get promotions.  The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the firefighters indeed were victims of discrimination, based on the color of their skin — but only by the narrowest possible margin.  The vote was 5 to 4.

The closeness of the vote is depressing enough.  Four liberal justices were willing to tolerate racial discrimination because of some imagined fear that the city would have to fight costly lawsuits. Would liberals see it the same way if the victims of discrimination had been black firefighters?

Then we got the Senate hearings and had to endure more of the same shameless acceptance of racial discrimination.  Every liberal senator on the Judiciary Committee was more than willing to accept Judge Sotomayor’s decision against the firefighters.  Tolerance of such obvious racial discrimination was a small price, they figured, to make sure a liberal judge like Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed (even though the nomination was never in doubt).

But the price for putting up with discrimination is never a small one.  Sometimes it can cost you your soul.  Remember, liberals were the courageous ones who back in the day led the fight against racial discrimination.  Now, liberals are the ones who are not only willing to tolerate discrimination, but actually support it, to champion it, so long as it is done in the name of diversity and so long as the victims are white males, even blue-collar white males like the New Haven firefighters.

This is why so many of us who started out as liberals have moved on.  We have evolved.  Liberals, on the other hand, have forgotten how to be liberal.  They talk about empathy but have none for those firefighters, simply because of the color of their skin.

Who could have imagined back in the 60s when the fight for civil rights was in full bloom that someday it would come to this:  liberals defending discrimination based on race?

Not me.

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Forty-four percent of those voting said Palin would make a run for the White House next time around, in 2012.  Thirty-Seven percent said she’d run in 2016 or 2020.  Just 19 percent said she would never run for office again.

Our other two questions involved affirmative action.  Here was the first of the two:

“The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case involving the white New Haven firefighters has raised questions about affirmative action. Is affirmative action — when it is based on race, ethnicity and gender — a good thing for this country?

More than nine out of ten of our voters – 93 percent — said “NO,” affirmative action is not a good thing for America.  Only seven percent said it was a good thing.

The final question asked if you would favor affirmative action programs if they were not based on race, ethnicity or gender, but on a person’s economic standing.

Most of you said “NO” to this question, too.  Seventy-five percent of our voters said they would oppose affirmative action even if its goal was to give more opportunities to less economically advantaged Americans – without regard to race, ethnicity or gender; only 25 percent said they would favor such a plan.

As always, we thank all of you who voted.

But “polarizing” seems to be a word that has fallen out of favor these days — with journalists and other Democrats and liberals. Sort of like “global cooling,” which you may recall used to be quite popular with liberals in and out of the media – until it wasn’t.

Now we have a new Gallup poll (released July 12) and it makes you wonder why “polarizing” has lost so much of its cache.  The poll shows that Democrats give Barack Obama an astonishing 90 percent approval rating.  Ninety percent!  Youc can’t get much higher than that. Republicans aren’t quite so infatuated.  Only 23 percent of them support the president. Twenty-three percent!  You can’t get much lower than that. So, let’s do the math:  90 minus 23 equals a Grand Canyon size chasm of 67 points.

And it’s worse now than it was just a few months ago.

Back in April, President Obama had the support of 88 percent of Democrats and only 27 percent of Republicans – a huge gap for sure, but one of “only” 61 points.  Writing at the time in the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove, the “architect” of Bush’s two presidential victories, said that, “This gap is 10 points higher than that of George W. Bush’s at this point in his presidency.”  Rove also said that no US president in the past 40 years has done more to polarize America so much, so quickly, as President Obama.

To which Joe Klein, one of Time magazine’s many liberal commentators, responded with a blog headlined, “World’s Stupidest Argument.”

“Bush flunkies trying to argue that Obama is more polarizing than Bush was,” said Klein. “Given the fact that Obama had to take dramatic action, at home and abroad, to start lifting the country from the mess Bush made almost everywhere–and also begin to turn the country away from the myopia and greed of the Reagan era–it’s amazing that he hasn’t raised more dust or teabags. … In the long run, it’s a safe historical bet that Bush will prove more polarizing than Obama because he was such an abject failure in the job.”

I’m glad to see that Joe Klein has a crystal ball and can tell us how history will judge President Obama.  I don’t. So let’s stick with today.  And today, Barack Obama is as polarizing as a politician can get.

The past is prologue, as the old saying goes.  So take a look at what I wrote in A Slobbering Love Affair about how the mainstream media covered the Obama campaign for the White House.  When you understand how liberal journalists think – how they made the leap from old media bias to new media activism — everything you’re witnessing now will make sense.

So it’s no great surprise that Republicans like what they see in a poll that just came out about Ohio voters and their feelings regarding President Obama.

The poll, conducted by Quinnipiac University (released July 7) shows that President Obama has only a 49 to 44 percent approval rating in Ohio, numbers that Quinnipiac calls “lackluster.”  The good news for Republicans is that this is the president’s lowest approval rating in any statewide or national poll by Quinnipiac since his inauguration.  As recently as a May 6 poll by the Quinnipiac, Obama’s numbers were much stronger — 62 favorable to 31 unfavorable.

The polls also finds that, “By a small 48 – 46 percent margin, voters disapprove of the way Obama is handling the economy…. This is down from a 57 – 36 percent approval May 6.”

A word of caution to my Republican friends:  Yes, Ohio just may be the most important swing state in the nation, but don’t pop the corks on those champagne bottles yet.  In poll after poll, even as voter support for his policies fade, President Obama’s popularity remains high.  A recent Gallup poll found that 67 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the president – even though only 45 percent approve of his spending policies.

The conventional wisdom tells us that if the economy doesn’t get better soon, President Obama will own that great big problem, and before long his personal popularity will slide, just as support for his policies are already heading south.

I’m not so sure.

Let’s take a brief trip down Memory Lane.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term in 1940 even though the national unemployment rate during his first two terms never dipped below 10 percent – and for 21 straight months, never dipped below 20 percent!

How can any president be re-elected with those crummy numbers, let alone re-elected to a third term, something that had never happened before in our nation?  There are two answers:  Roosevelt had a Republican predecessor, Herbert Hoover, to blame for the dismal economy, and FDR was Magic.  People liked him.  They trusted him.  They believed he was one of them, that he understood their problems.

Fast forward to today.  Barack Obama also has a Republican predecessor to blame for the dismal economy.  And Obama, I believe, is also Magic.  You can bet that the president will never stop blaming George W. Bush for the terrible economy, and I think he’ll convince a majority of Americans he’s right, that it’s all W’s fault.  Remember, most Americans like Barack Obama.  They trust him.  They believe he’s one of them and that he understands their problems.

So the questions, as the unemployment rate creeps up to around 10 percent and federal spending heads into outer space, are these:  What happens if the economy doesn’t get better?  What if we remain in the doldrums for months and months and months? What happens if out-of-word Americans can’t find jobs? Do the American people finally turn on Obama and give him a pink slip in 2012?   No one knows for sure, of course.  So an honest answer is … maybe.  But I don’t think so.  Magic goes a long way in politics and in life.