Pop quiz: Who said, “The Middle East is an issue that has obviously plagued the region for centuries”? No, it wasn’t Ross Perot, and it wasn’t Donald Trump. It was Barack Obama, the same man the White House press corps hailed as the smartest man to ever sit in the Oval Office.
The political bias of the establishment media has never been more outrageous than what we see in the press’s double standard for covering President Donald Trump. For contrasts that will make your head spin and your heart ache, compare Trump’s treatment to the press’s idolatrous treatment of President Obama.
The media’s fan-club attitude toward Obama was unprecedented in the modern era. Not even handsome Jack Kennedy or war hero Eisenhower got the kids-glove treatment that Obama got. Obama’s frequent goofy statements and embarrassing gaffes were either overlooked entirely or treated as amusing sidebars.
Will any historian ever catalog Obama’s frequent misstatements of elementary facts? How many do you remember? Here are few of the gems liberal historians will overlook:
- Obama claimed the Americans liberated Auschwitz and Treblinka. No, they did not.
- He said the world came together to save Berlin during the airlift. No, they didn’t; it was mostly an American and British effort, with Mexico, Italy and Egypt conspicuously absent.
- He claimed that as a result of the Selma march, he was born. Not true. Obama was born four years before the Selma march.
Such historical ignorance and efforts at personal myth-making were routine for Obama —- and never challenged by the working press.
Obama’s hilarious mispronunciations and stupid asides were a regular feature of his speeches and interviews, at home and abroad. And yet, they did not tarnish his reputation in the White House press corps as a great intellectual and “perhaps the smartest man to ever sit in the Oval office.” Oh, really?
- “When I meet with world leaders, what’s striking — whether it’s in Europe or here in Asia…” – Obama referring to Hawaii as Asia.
- “We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad.” – No, it was a TRANScontinental railalroad, and it did not (and still does not) connect us to South America.
- “One such translator was an American of Haitian descent, representative of the extraordinary work that our men and women in uniform do all around the world — Navy Corpsman Christian Brossard.” –Obama mispronounced “corpsman” as “corpse-man.”
- “What I was suggesting — you’re absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith…” – Obama mistakenly says “Muslim faith” instead of “Christian faith” during an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
- “Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee — which is my committee — a bill to call for divestment from Iran as way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.” – Obama was not a part of that committee.
- “On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes — and I see many of them in the audience here today — our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.” – Obama referring to fallen soldiers that are somehow miraculously in the crowd for his speech.
- “I’ve now been in 57 states — I think one left to go.” – Self explanatory.
- “The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person, who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know, you know, there’s a reaction that’s been bred in our experiences that don’t go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society.” Obama’s comments on his grandmother’s reaction to people of another race as “a typical white person.”
- “In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed.” – Obama talking about a Kansas tornado where 11 people died.
Now, compare the worshipful treatment of Obama to what Trump has experienced since winning the election on November 8. The establishment press won’t even accept the legitimacy of Trump’s election, much less the strong points of his policy initiatives. They won’t let go of the popular vote versus the Electoral College. That is not ignorance of Civics 101; it is part of a political strategy to demonize and delegitimize the entire Trump program.
The media has openly joined the campaign by the Democratic Party and the “Social Justice” left to deny that President Trump has any policy mandates whatsoever. The narrative is this: since his presidency is illegitimate to begin with, it is okay to use violence to obstruct him at every point.
Trump is justified and very smart to communicate with the American people directly and not expect the media to convey his messages fairly. Too many of them have become angry partisans in the left’s demonization strategy, and they need to be short-circuited.
Conservatives and constitutionalists have seen media bias for half a century, and America has survived it. Yet, never has that bias and that vituperation been so uniform and vicious as what we see waged against President Trump. When it is coordinated with the near-uniform cultural bias in the entertainment and educational institutions, a triad of treachery emerges to challenge the very foundations of civic order.