The headline on the front page of most of America’s newspapers this week screamed the latest Republican “scandal”: $150,000 spent on Gov. Sarah Palin’s wardrobe!”
Get ready for a stream of complaints from Democrats who love engaging in the class warfare rhetoric for which they’re famous.
I can hear Barack Obama now: “Here I am fighting for lower and middle class Americans with my (phony) tax plan and the Republicans are off spending $150,000 on Sarah Palin’s wardrobe!”
Incidentally, I inserted the word “phony” in Sen. Obama’s hypothetical statement because very few people have seemed to notice that his claim to “cut the taxes of 95% of Americans” is a rope-a-dope fantasy if there ever was one.
If nearly 50% of Americans don’t pay any income tax at all, how is he going to “cut” THEIR taxes? That’s an easy one: he’ll have the government write them checks, called tax “credits”, which is another manifestation of his socialist “spread-the-wealth” agenda.
Anyhow, back to the wardrobe story.
If I were running the McCain/Palin campaign, I’m not entirely sure I’d authorize $150,000 for what’s been described as clothing, hairstyling, makeup and other “campaign accessories” for Gov. Palin and her family.
Then again, I cannot even begin to imagine what it costs to fly both candidates around the country on enormous, expensive jets surrounded by hefty (paid) staffs and U.S. Secret Service agents.
I gotta believe it ain’t cheap.
This makes me wonder about Sen. Obama’s trip to Hawaii this week to visit his ailing grandmother.
Obviously, there is nothing wrong with Obama taking time to be by the side of the woman who raised him.
But I wonder why there hasn’t been a single news media outlet that I’m aware of which has questioned the funding of a personal family matter?
If the media accusation is that the Republican Party shouldn’t be spending money on Gov. Palin’s wardrobe, why wouldn’t the same media question why the Democrat Party is spending what has to be hundreds of thousands of dollars in order for their candidate to deal with a private, personal family issue?
The answer is pretty simple. It’s so apparent that the mainstream media has gone beyond simple, subtle bias in favor of Obama and Democrats. They are actually advocating for Sen. Obama to win.
One can find examples of this advocacy every day now. This week, a number of headlines and TV news stories bellowed about the 8 or 9 or even 10 percentage point lead that Obama supposedly has.
Where was the story about the Associated Press/GfK poll which currently shows the two candidates in a dead heat?
Or the news that in the latest George Washington University Battleground Poll, Obama and McCain are essentially tied among likely voters?
In my local paper, that was all buried on page 13A.
I remember my parents teaching me that life isn’t fair. I’ve shared that bleak advice with my children, too. But the level of inequity displayed by reckless and childish “journalists” who are rooting for Obama over McCain is simply bizarre. They’ve dropped any pretense of responsible or fair reporting.
And not to be outdone, at least one Democrat U.S. Senator confirmed his party’s plans to try and shut down talk radio if his party wins on November 4th.
During a radio interview on KKOB Radio in New Mexico this week, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, the liberal Democrat U.S. Senator from that state, admitted on-air what many of us have known for awhile now: Democrats want to resurrect the “Fairness Doctrine”, an antiquated, rickety FCC regulation from 1949 that was abolished in 1987 following numerous unanimous Supreme Court rulings that it clearly shredded the First Amendment.
This speech-suppressing nightmare, as Bingaman knows, would destroy talk radio in America, pure and simple. Radio companies are never going to be forced to mandate 50% conservative views and 50% liberal views, if for no other reason that that means that a radio station would lose money 50% of the time. Like it or not, liberal radio hosts fail miserably in the spoken word format. The most prominent, well-organized effort to create a liberal talk radio network called “Air America” has bombed. They went bankrupt. Liberals keep trying to fund it and keep Air America afloat, but it’s flushing good money down the drain after bad.
And so how do Democrats silence all of us conservatives on the radio?
Legislate us into silence. Bring back this ridiculous FCC policy which would force radio companies to abandon a format that proves too costly and complicated to run.
As Sen. Bingaman was calmly explaining to the shocked radio host on KKOB why he wants the talk radio format destroyed, he said that the Fairness Doctrine has “served us well for many years.”
He knows full well that by the time Rush Limbaugh came along and saved AM radio and talk radio because hugely successful, the Fairness Doctrine was long gone.
Served us well? Nice try, Senator.
The fact is that Democrats cannot stand dissent. Despite having a news media in its hip pocket writing silly stories about Sarah Palin’s clothing budget, they can’t tolerate millions of Americans enjoying and participating in a thriving, successful medium like talk radio. They are threatened by us. And since they can’t beat us in the free market (hey Al Franken, how many of your paychecks bounced before you finally called it quits?), they’ll attempt to get the government to shut us down.
A friend of mine once told me, “Oh Mike, don’t worry about the Fairness Doctrine, the American people will never stand for such an outrageous attempt to destroy the Constitution. It’ll never happen.”
If the Democrats win on November 4th, the American people can complain all they want. Even with pitchforks and torches, bitter Democrats in Washington will prevail.
Powerful Democrats like John Kerry, Dick Durbin and Nancy Pelosi have already advocated for the return of the Fairness Doctrine.
They just haven’t been as blatant about it as the America-hating Sen. Jeff Bingaman from New Mexico.