It has already begun, spurred on by the faux outrage meter of the conservative punditocracy, the media is latching on to the Blagojevich scandal in an attempt undermine the coming Obama presidency. Patrick Fitzgerald made it clear that Obama has not been implicated in the ongoing investigation, and the Illinois Governor himself provided further proof on federal wiretaps, during a profanity laced tirade where he complained that Obama refused to play ball. This exculpatory evidence is being ignored by the MSM who is hell bent on embarrassing the President-Elect well before he takes his oath of office.
In the recent piece, Media pick up where they left off 8 years ago, Jamison Foster opined on the similarities between the Whitewater scandal and the current saga of Rod Blagojevich:
"To anyone who lived through the media feeding frenzy of the 1990s, during which the nation's leading news organizations spent the better part of a decade destroying their own credibility by relentlessly hyping a series of non-scandals, the past few days, in which the media have tried to shoehorn Barack Obama into the Rod Blagojevich scandal, have been sickeningly familiar"
He further notes that:
"An endless series of investigations, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, revealed, the Clintons broke no law and violated no ethics regulations in connection with Whitewater. They lost money on a failed land deal in which their business partner cheated them. That's all there was. Republicans Ken Starr, Robert Fiske, Robert Ray, Al D'Amato, and Jim Leach, among others, investigated the matter, and none of them found illegality. There was simply nothing there -- except year after year of obsessive, and often dishonest, media coverage, fueled by conservatives who would stop at nothing to destroy the president."
Similarly, it has been revealed that Barack Obama and his campaign did not engage in bartering for his vacated Senate seat, yet the media is at it again by furthering the specious argument that Obama has been tainted by the Blagojevich scandal. Huh? Spurious claims are being debated ad nauseum and presented as facts in an attempt to embarrass the President Elect. Jamison attributes this to the notion that like Arkansas, the state of Illinois is regarded as a bastion of corruption and:
"By portraying Arkansas as thoroughly, and uniquely, corrupt, the media (and Clinton's political opponents) tied him to a long line of misbehavior that had nothing to do with him -- and created the impression that Clinton must be corrupt merely for being from such an ethical cesspool"
As such, Jamison argues that Obama is being viewed through this prism with suspicion by the media and his conservative opponents. I beg to differ and it goes much deeper. Conservatives are well aware that their only hope to regain the presidency is to undermine and embarrass Obama. Whether its by questioning Obama’s legitimacy via his birth or drumming up faux scandals, the next four years will be inundated by incessant demands for investigations and responses to manufactured scandals that will be kept alive in the hopes of derailing our next president. We must not allow this to happen again, not this time.
The media capitulated on every scandal during the Bush presidency: From The Valerie Plame spygate, the US attorney firings, the mismanagement of the Iraqi war, the embezzlement of Iraqi reconstruction funds, to the partisan prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Seigleman, there was scant coverage and a seemingly perpetual deference to the Bush administration and its minions. Vague explanations and denials where taken at face value and never aggressively pursued by the so called left leaning media.
We are in the midst of an economic collapse, millions are out of work, homeowners are being foreclosed upon at an alarming rate and we are currently mired in two wars, and instead of reporting on the lack of oversight with the near trillion dollar TARP bailout fund (theCongressional Oversight Panelrecently released a report containing an initial set of questions that they intend to answer), the media is fixated on Obama’s contacts with the Illinois governor. Our nation simply cannot afford a president who is being distracted by political opponents whose sole purpose is to regain the power of the presidency by undermining him at every turn. The stakes are too high and all concerned citizens need unite to express outrage at the media and force them do their damn jobs.