Less Whining, More Dirt!

Suddenly the air is filled with whining. The New York Times ombudsman whines that the New York Times wrongly set up John McCain as a man untrue to his wife (a charge that, to judge from her dour countenance at the press conference, may have been regarded as plausible by McCain's wife, Cindy). The Clinton campaign whines that the press is being partial to Obama. The New Republic takes 5,160 words on this theme from Sean Wilentz, who chews on the matter with such fury that one must surmise that the Clinton campaign had promised to make him Librarian of Congress, or some kindred dignity. Less whiningly, since it's winning, the Obama campaign spluttered about the Clinton campaign circulating a photo of him in a turban and what looks to me like a nurse's white uniform, though apparently it's Somali ceremonial rig.

And the Republicans? They don't whine. They scream. They scream so loudly the Times backs into its own story. They plant stories and the press tugs its forelock. Take the Associated Press. On February 24 the news agency runs a story by Nedra Pickler under the headline Conservatives Say Obama Lacks Patriotism. Pickler's fourth sentence cites, as her story's lead source, Roger Stone, chastely described as a "Republican consultant."

This is the same Roger Stone who appeared with Tucker Carlson on MSNBC a few days earlier to promote an anti-Clinton 527 group, Citizens United Not Timid, or CUNT. "The more people go to the site," Stone had smirked to The Weekly Standard in January, "the more people buy the T-shirts.... The more people wear the T-shirts, the more people are educated. Consequently, our mission has been achieved." Shouldn't Pickler have thought that Stone--maybe best remembered for his swinger ad with his wife, which lost him his job with the Dole campaign in 1996--was a mite too tacky as a lead source, to be dispensing objective political analysis?

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