Brentwood outing

Just one of my favorite photos from past years:

Of Louis Farrakhan and John McCain

Media double standard? Inquiring minds want to know:

Barack Obama was questioned at Tuesday night’s debate by Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton about repudiating Louis Farrakhan’s endorsement — which Obama said was unsolicited — in the strongest terms possible. He was repeatedly badgered by Russert, and was forced to disown Farrakhan over and over again.

The very next day, John McCain appeared onstage in Texas with Pastor John Hagee, an influential activist in the Christian Zionist movement. Hagee’s comments about world affairs can make Farrakhan seem pedestrian at times: He eagerly awaits the Armageddon, considers the Catholic Church to be the Anti-Christ, and has said that Jews brought their own persecution upon themselves.

But when it came to McCain’s rather controversial backer, the press hardly batted an eye. Seems like a pretty clear double standard, right?

[...]

Very much like Farrakhan, Hagee has regularly made remarks about current events and other religions that many would find alarming. But unlike Farrakhan, he has never truly faced the scrutiny of the mainstream press, and major politicians like Joe Lieberman and John McCain have freely associated with him.

In 2006, Hagee laid out his views on eschatology in a book called Jerusalem Countdown, in which he claimed that sources had told him a year earlier about world events to come — and amazingly enough, all those predictions had come true over the past year. Next on the agenda, according to his March 2006 interview in Human Events: Israel would go to war with Iran before May 2006. And from there, Hagee eagerly anticipated an all-out world war against Iran and Russia, followed by the Second Coming.

[...]

So here’s the question: Will the same media outlets who have hammered Barack Obama about Louis Farrakhan’s uninvited endorsement now ask John McCain to denounce and reject the support of John Hagee, which was actually sought and publicly accepted?

We’ll see of the DC media and the Russerts of that town even dare to ask St. McCain if he’ll denounce the statements of his supporter, John Hagee. I’m not counting on it.

Our own response machine

This is encouraging:

[W]hen the right-wing smears against Barack Obama began to paint him as unpatriotic, The AP’s Nedra Pickler was happy to oblige by running an article whose third paragraph literally begins “conservative consultants say…” and goes on to quote disgraced right-wing smear merchant Roger Stone as an expert. [...] What the right-wing message machine and its enablers in the media didn’t count on this time was that now there’s a left-wing message machine.

Cue Jane Hamsher:

The AP probably doesn’t care a whole lot about what you think, but it does care what the papers who subscribe to their wire service think. So we’ve set up a page where you can plug in your zip code and automatically send an email to the papers in your area who syndicate the AP and let them know this is beneath what you expect their coverage to be — for this election cycle and beyond.

Especially if you live in some state that’s less likely to get a lot of attention like New York or California, please take time to send an email. We want to blanket the country as broadly as possible and let every paper know that this kind of journalism is unacceptable — and that you’re watching.

I’m just happy to see that, after years of complaining, progressives may be seeing the start of our own organized response machine to act as a counterweight to right-wing noise machine that has dominated our national discourse for years.