The Inconvenient Obama and the Anatomy of a Gaffe

Last week, the media focused on a gaffe made by John McCain in which he couldn't say how many homes he owned.

The onslaught began immediately. First, spokesman Bill Burton emailed reporters to say that "this story about John McCain losing track of how many houses he owns is a telling moment that helps to explain why he still thinks 'the fundamentals of our economy are strong' and why he offers just more of the same economic policies that we've gotten from President Bush for the last eight years." Just, you know, FYI.

Next, veep hopeful Tim Kaine pounced, claiming on CNN that McCain "couldn't count high enough apparently to even know how many houses he owns." By 11:00 a.m., Team Obama had already cut and released an ad on national cable (above) "contrast[ing] Americans' struggle to pay their mortgages with McCain's optimistic talk on the economy and his personal wealth." "It's seven," says the announcer, answering Politico's question as an image of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. appears on screen. "Seven houses. And here's one house America can't afford to let John McCain move into."

Now, I thought this was a silly thing and of minor significance. The media disagreed and so far the polls have agreed with me. Still, this gaffe doesn't seem to go away. At the same time, of whether or not Barack Obama voted for a bill that was essentially infanticide came up again. At roughly the same time, an Italian journal reported that Barack Obama's half brother lives on a dollar a month..

His name is George Hussein Onyango Obama, and he is the 26-year-old half brother of Mr. Obama, the multimillionaire autobiographer who neglected to write that his paternal sibling lives on less than a dollar a month in the outer slums
of Nairobi, Kenya. They have met twice.

Unearthed by Italian Vanity Fair and virtually ignored by the American press, the inconvenient George Obama could emerge as a compelling character in the freshman senator's carefully edited road-to-the-White-House narrative - especially now that his campaign has unleashed a personal attack on Senator McCain...

Now, of these three, I think it is not a stretch to say that any objective observer would say that on of the last two stories was the bigger one. What does it say about Senator Obama, that he allows his half brother to live in abject poverty while he lives in a million dollar mansion. Doesn't that say a lot about his character? Yet, outside of his own hometown newspaper the Sun Times, you will see scant mention of this in the MSM in America.

If every there was a great example of media bias in the states, it is the media's selective choosing of which is the bigger gaffe, McCain's homes, Obama's brother, or Obama's infanticide vote. The fact is that the MSM has decided to choose the trivial and silly of the three stories and make that the gaffe to focus on. Of course, we all know that this happened only because that was the only one of the three that focused on the Republican.