Obama Racism/Muslim/Unpatriotic/Scary Black Dude Watch Part Forty-Goddamn-Six

Digby:

I must admit that even with my dark and unrelenting cynicism toward the media that I'm a little bit shocked to see op-ed pieces appear in quick succession in two of the nation's most prestigious newspapers calling Barack Obama a "Muslim Apostate." They don't make the assertion that Obama is a Muslim, which he certainly isn't, only that Osama bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists consider him one since his father was "born a Muslim." This apparently means that bin Laden will be able to rally the Muslim world against America because Obama has abandoned the true faith.

I'm sure I don't need to explain how silly this is. The last I heard bin Laden wasn't exactly enamored of any of us Murkins, so I find it hard to believe that this news will make him even more hostile than he already is. It's absurd on its face. So why are the Christian Science Monitor and the NY Times printing similar op-eds on the topic? I don't know.

Well, I've got two ideas. The first one is pretty boring: Because that's what they've got handy with which to smear him. As we all know, it is the job of the MSM to smear all Democratic candidates with one hand while fluffing Republican candidates with the other, and, if we know anything else about the MSM, it's that they're lazy and stupid; it's thusly supercool for them that the whole "Muslim Apostate" meme dovetails nicely with preexisting anti-Democrat memes about Dems being not sufficiently Christian/religious, not sufficiently patriotic, and not sufficiently tough on brown-skinned threats to white American children.

The second idea has to do with the Sexism Watch, the MSM's sudden interest in discussing after-the-fact what role sexism played in what they've now deemed Clinton's total annihilation, and that little tidbit of truth John Judis dropped in our laps yesterday: Seeking to restore balance after their promulgation of sexism against Clinton, and (ref. aforementioned laziness and stupidity) recognizing their patent inability to maturely and intelligently address sexism head-on, they're just going to try to prove they weren't unfair to Clinton by being equally shitty toward Obama.

It's the Two Wrongs Make a Right Principle, and the MSM lives by it. I could see it coming a mile away—which is why I have said about half a dozen times now when comparing coverage of Obama and Clinton that I didn't want the media to start being unfair to Obama, but start being fair to Clinton. But it just doesn't work that way.

Cable news, for example, doesn't address complaints about giving too much time to religious extremists by chucking Bill Donohue and Pat Robertson et. al., but by inviting Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, too. Irrespective of your opinion of Dawkins and Harris, that's not an effective solution to the complaint that religious moderates who are political secularists are not represented on cable news. But that's the sort of typical "solution" we can expect from the MSM. Their notion of "balance" almost always involves making everything worse.

If the bar's crooked, they lower one side, not raise the other.

So what that means, basically, is that we're going to have a lot of work to do. And this series is about to get longer.

But you already knew that.

(H/T to Shaker JMonkey, by email.)

[Obama Racism/Muslim/Unpatriotic/Scary Black Dude Watch: Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen, Twenty, Twenty-One, Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three, Twenty-Four, Twenty-Five, Twenty-Six, Twenty-Seven, Twenty-Eight, Twenty-Nine, Thirty, Thirty-One, Thirty-Two, Thirty-Three, Thirty-Four, Thirty-Five, Thirty-Six, Thirty-Seven, Thirty-Eight, Thirty-Nine, Forty, Forty-One, Forty-Two, Forty-Three, Forty-Four, Forty-Five.]