Say Anything Blog

Carl Cannon is also saying that Joe Biden simply wasn’t held to the same standard as Sarah was.  As if that’s a surprise.  When has there not been a double standard for Republicans and Demcorats.  It is just more pronounced with Palin.

In the 2008 election, we took sides, straight and simple, particularly with regard to the vice presidential race. I don’t know that we played a decisive role in that campaign, and I’m not saying the better side lost. What I am saying is that we simply didn’t hold Joe Biden to the same standard as Sarah Palin, and for me, the real loser in this sordid tale is my chosen profession.

Here’s a run-down of what Cannon is talking about when he says that Biden didn’t get the same scrutiny Palin did:

Sen. Biden, however, was in a place by himself when it came to bogus claims, absurd contentions, and flights of rhetorical fancy. He threw out several assertions that were so preposterous that – had Palin made them – they would have prompted immediate calls for McCain to dump her from the ticket.

The good senator from Delaware warmed up slowly, erroneously claiming that McCain voted with Obama on a budget resolution, and asserting wrongly that Obama wanted to return to the Reagan-era marginal income tax rates. He also embarked on an appallingly wrongheaded monologue about the constitutional history of the vice presidency. But when the talk turned to national security, presumably Biden’s purported area of expertise, he went completely off the grid.

• “John McCain voted against a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty that every Republican has supported,” Biden stated. (Actually, in a 1999 vote in Congress, McCain sided with 50 other Republicans to kill the treaty. Only four joined the Democrats.)

• “Pakistan already has deployed nuclear weapons,” Biden said. “Pakistan’s weapons can already hit Israel and the Mediterranean.” (Pakistan has no known intercontinental missiles. The range of its weapons is thought to be 1,000 miles – halfway to Israel.)

• “When we kicked—along with France—we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t…Hezbollah will control it.’” Biden recalled. “Now what’s happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel.” (Except that the U.S. never kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon or anywhere else. They’ve been entrenched in Lebanon since 1982. Actually, Hezbollah, insofar as it was responsible for the 1983 suicide bombing at the Marine barracks that killed 241 U.S. servicemen, kicked America out of Lebanon, not the other way around.)

• “The president…insisted on elections on the West Bank, when I said, and others said, and Barack Obama said, ‘Big mistake. Hamas will win. You’ll legitimize them.’ What happened? Hamas won,” Biden said. (Only the last two words of Biden’s strange soliloquy are true. The rest are false. For one thing, Fatah controls the West Bank. Biden was thinking of Gaza. Secondly, neither Biden nor Obama predicted the 2006 victory for Hamas in Gaza’s legislative elections. Third, McCain and Obama – but not Biden—signed a letter urging the president to pressure Palestinians to require that candidates adhere to democratic principles before being allowed to run for office. Fourth, Biden served as an election observer and later wrote an article expressing high praise for Bush’s actions. To sum up: One factual error and three fibs in only 31 words. Pretty impressive, in its way.)

• “With Afghanistan, facts matter…we spend more money in three weeks on combat in Iraq than we spend on the entirety of the last seven years that we have been in Afghanistan. Let me say that again…” (He did say it again, but that didn’t make it true. It’s wildly and weirdly off the mark. Yes, facts matter. The facts here were that at the time Biden was speaking, the U.S. had spent $172 billion in Afghanistan. The Iraq War consumes between $7 billion and $8 billion every three weeks. Biden’s math was off by 2,000 percent.)

• “Can I clarify this? This is simply not true about Barack Obama. He did not say (he’d) sit down with Ahmadinejad.” (He most certainly did. And among those who criticized him at the time for it was Joe Biden, who told Byron York of National Review that the idea of a president meeting with the likes of the Iranian president or Hugo Chavez was “naVve.”)

Those were alarming mistakes.

I’ll say.

Mr. Cannon also says that overt sexism from male political reporters and commentators wasn’t refuted by their female counterparts because Sarah Palin didn’t fill the mold as to what they think a national female political candidate should be.  Which is apparently something like Hillary Clinton.

From the beginning, and for the ensuing 10 months, the coverage of this governor consisted of a steamy stew of cultural elitism and partisanship. The overt sexism of some male commentators wasn’t countered, as one might have expected, by their female counterparts. Women columnists turned on Sarah Palin rather quickly. A plain-speaking, moose-hunting, Bible-thumping, pro-life, self-described “hockey mom” with five children and movie star looks with only a passing interest in foreign policy—that wasn’t the woman journalism’s reigning feminists had envisioned for the glass ceiling-breaking role of First Female President (or Vice President). Hillary Rodham Clinton was more like what they had in mind – and Sarah, well, she was the un-Hillary.

Really, this is just another example of how our media, rather than simply reporting to us facts and figures, instead tries to shape the news to what they see as a consensus.  Or, at least, what the consensus us in their elite little work/social spheres.