For two decades, going back to the Willie Horton ads of 1988,
we've heard liberals accuse Republicans of race-baiting. Throughout this
campaign, there have been endless whispers, suggestions and outright
accusations that GOP could/would play the race card because Obama is
half-black. Now Barack Obama has found his bizarre version of Willie Horton,
and it's . Rush Limbaugh.
Obama sneakily tried to air a Spanish-language TV ad telling
Latinos that Limbaugh thinks all Mexicans are stupid, Mexican immigrants
should all shut up and go home, and that Limbaugh and John McCain are
identical twins on immigration.
None of it is true. Now when Obama talks about reaching across
the aisle and healing a divided Washington, we'll fall to the ground
laughing.
How far we've come since January, when moderate McCain won in
South Carolina, and the liberal media were declaring that this showed that
Limbaugh and his right-wing views were politically dead. Tom Brokaw huffily
declared on "Meet the Press" that McCain's win showed Americans had rejected
"dogma" and were a "nomadic herd" hungering only for "solutions," something
conservatives apparently can't offer.
What Obama was trying to do in this ad, obviously, was play to
racial fears. "They want us to forget the insults we've put up with, the
intolerance," the ad announcer proclaimed in Spanish as a picture of Rush
Limbaugh appeared onscreen with quotes of him allegedly saying, "Mexicans
are stupid and unqualified" and "Shut your mouth or get out." The announcer
added: "They made us feel marginalized in a country we love so much."
From there, the Democrats turned to tie this phony cartoon of
Limbaugh to McCain: "John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces.
One that says lies just to get our vote, and another, even worse, that
continues the failed policies of George Bush that put special interests
ahead of working families."
The script first broke into the national media on a Washington
Post blog called The Trail. It was first corrected on an ABC News blog by
political reporter Jake Tapper. The mangled "Mexicans are stupid" quote came
from 1993, during debate over the NAFTA trade agreement, when Rush suggested
that America shouldn't worry about losing low-skill jobs: "let the unskilled
jobs that take absolutely no knowledge whatsoever to do -- let stupid and
unskilled Mexicans do that work."
Tapper suggested the second quote was "totally unfair," since
Limbaugh was suggesting in one of his morning radio commentaries in 2006
that the "Limbaugh Laws" of immigration would include not letting immigrants
offer any criticism of the government of the president. "You're a foreigner,
shut your mouth, or get out." At the end, he craftily noted that this and
other laws are the immigration policy of Mexico.
But here's where it gets fascinating. The Washington Post
offered no "fact check" debunking Obama's lies about Limbaugh in the news
section of the paper. To her credit, liberal columnist Ruth Marcus slammed
it five days later, but the news section did not. ABC News somehow allowed
Tapper to blog everything that was wrong about the Obama ad, but never put
him on television explaining it. ABC skipped it. So did CBS. So did NBC.
It gets worse. A day after Tapper's online fact check,
"Nightline" host Terry Moran put together a real hatchet job on McCain,
accusing him of not only flip-flopping on the issues, but also flip-flopping
on campaign decency. "The old John McCain repeatedly promised voters a
different kind of campaign. Nobler, less nasty, better. ... That was then.
This is now."
Moran reported that McCain mocked Obama's vote in the Illinois
Senate to allow "age-appropriate" sex education for kindergarteners. McCain
was wrong to say in the ad that this vote was an "accomplishment," since the
bill never passed, even though Obama's vote for this crud places him against
most parents and solidly on the libertine left. And his subsequent statement
that he shouldn't be tagged for that bill because he only voted for it, but
didn't sponsor it, is far more disingenuous.
Moran highlighted how the site Factcheck.org declared the
McCain ad "simply false," but never noticed that the same Factcheck.org also
declared Obama's Limbaugh ad "doubly misleading."
Former Bush pollster Matthew Dowd completely sold out whatever
soul he still possessed by singing harmony to Moran's melody: "And I think
the Obama campaign wants to have this as a campaign in the clouds. I think
the McCain campaign wants to have a campaign that's in the mud."
So even as ABC's website reports that Obama is gravely
misleading Latinos about the alleged Mexican-hating Rush Limbaugh, El Gringo
Maximo, ABC is airing ridiculous claims from its own "experts" proclaiming
Obama wants to campaign "in the clouds." Which camp is abandoning fair-play
principles for political gain?