The Sensitive MSM

This piece from Jonathon Alter is so absurd I thought I was reading The Onion rather than News Week (though lately it's hard to tell the difference). Alter makes the thesis that McCain's smears are beyond the pale on Obama and that they have created a "smear gap". This is absurdly ironic given that not two days before this was published (though he certainly could have written it earlier) the Obama campaign made the suggestion that John McCain cheated at the Saddleback Forum. Alter alligns these so called beyond the pale smears into four categories

1) McCain made an ad that claimed that Barack Obama himself was responsible for high gas prices.



Now, there is frankly no defending this ad. It is absurd and stupid. A much better ad, similar to ones done later, would have shown how policies that Obama supports contribute to gas prices. That said, Obama has made similarly deceptive ads that claim that John McCain is on the pockets of big oil and that he wants to give them tax breaks while he increases taxes on the middle class. To claim that this McCain ad is beyond the pale and nothing that Obama has done is anything near it is stupid.

2)The Britney ad. Here Alter is perturbed that McCain claimed that Obama would raise taxes on electricity and that his tax plan would raise taxes on small businesses. Then, Alter uses Factcheck.org as his arbitor. Well factcheck or not, Obama has promised to raise the two highest tax brackets, the corporate tax rate, and the payroll tax. All of these would hit small businesses. To call these smears is nonsense. There is plenty of reason for John McCain to say that Barack Obama's tax plan is NOT small business friendly.

3)McCain casts aspersions on Obama's patriotism.

The fact is he hasn't. He came out against the North Carolina ad that attempted to link Obama, Reverend Wright, to several North Carolina pols. The fact is that folks like me think he should. Furthermore, it is a FACT that John McCain is significantly more patriotic, has sacrificed more, and has a much larger resume of patriotism than Barack Obama. To say that it is a smear to point out that John McCain is more patriotic than Barack Obama. McCain joined the Naval Academy at 18. He went to war. He spent nearly six years being tortured in a POW camp. Then, he spent the rest of his life as public servant. Barack Obama spent twenty years in the pews of an Anti American pastor and said nothing. There is no question which of the two is more patriotic. It is NOT smear to point that out.

What's really silly is not the so called smears that Alter points out, but that he simply ignores the smears from Obama onto McCain. For months Barack Obama attempted to claim, falsely, that John McCain wants to continue the Iraq War for 100 years. He has falsely attempted to paint George Bush's Iraq policy as the same as McCain's even though he knows full well that McCain opposed the first four years of that policy furiously. It was those first four years that were the abject failure. Obama knows full well that McCain was one of the only politicians to support the surge from the beginning. Even now, Barack Obama refuses to admit the surge worked.

Furthermore, Barack Obama knows full well that since the beginning John McCain opposed the massive increases in spending that were the biggest black eye on the Bush administration's economic policy. He opposed the Bush tax cuts when they were initially proposed, and he opposed them specifically because they weren't also combined with spending cuts. Yet, Barack Obama falsely paints John McCain's economic policies as the same as Bush's.

This article is frankly just plain silly. What is tragic is that Alter received a paycheck to write such trivial and amateurish analysis.