Hunting Witches and Letting the Trolls Slide

Hunting the Witches and Letting the Trolls Slide.  The Boston Globe has published an article examining the high school career of Jeb Bush; the Washington Post has published an article examining the high school and college careers of Scott Walker.  Jeb Bush is not currently serving in any elected office; Scott Walker is currently the elected governor of Wisconsin.  Both men are considered viable candidates for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.  Both stories have been picked up by other publications throughout the nation, resulting in fairly wide dissemination of the content.  It is reasonable to expect that as the prospects of other prospective 2016 Republican presidential nominees improve, they too will be subjected to a decades-old airing of their “dirty high school laundry”.  And even though he not only graduated from a highly regarded liberal institution, and obtained an MBA from another highly-regarded liberal institution, the liberal media continues their snarky, condescending attitudes towards their favorite “rube”, George W. Bush.   Oh, if we could only examine the One’s life with the same scrutiny used on W, what mysteries would be revealed.

I suppose it is legitimate to place one’s high school antics under the magnifying glass; perhaps there is some mystical conclusion to be drawn from school days juvenile behavior or the foggy memories of fellow classmates.  After all, I am sure that we all found Mitt Romney’s hair cutting adventure to be very indicative of his future rebel rousing and delinquent actions (meh).  As George Orwell once penned, “Propaganda is as much a matter of what is left out, as of what is actually said”.   If the Globe and the Post want to lavish their limited resources (oh…the travails of the print media!) on the high school days of prominent Republicans, dumpster diving through the muddled memories of days gone past, they could at least make an effort to be fair and balanced (sorry FNC) about it.  Upon reading the articles, it is clear that much of the content is supposedly based on facts, but those observations are liberally laced with snarky comments intended to cast a certain “disquieting” light upon the matter and the individual.  As Orwell indicated, one has to be very aware of what is not said in order to divine the true picture.  Cherry-picking of content and exclusion of pertinent information is a much a lie as a printed untruth.

My point is this: Where are these high-minded, award-seeking, journalistic probing efforts relating to our president of six-plus years?  Are we left only with the acknowledged fictitious “Dreams of My Father” to fill in the blanks of Obama’s education?  For all his acclaimed genius, how can it be that there is not common knowledge about his monumental (MUST have been…right?) achievements during high school and college?  What were the nature of his grades; his admission records; his student activities?  Apparently, the liberal mainstream media (talking to you BG and WP) are content to let Obama fill in the blanks, or simply ignore the blanks, while allowing him to take extreme liberties with the facts and use “composite” characters to flesh out the stories.  

I have written before about how I feel history will indict our media for their failure to expose this president for the fraud and the charlatan that he is.  I thought that at some point in his second term, at least following the last mid-term elections of his tenure, they would begin to peel back his self-applied veneer and give us a glimpse of his true life experience.  Alas, I have been far too optimistic in my opinion of the press; they simply cannot shake off the hopey-changey fever.  Just as people in Pennsylvania cling to their guns and religion, the mainstream media clings to the “ideal” that is our first black president.  They continue to blatantly exercise a double-standard, oblivious to the fact that much of the public sees through it and has thus tuned them out.  They are like the pig farmer who goes straight from the hog house to the café; everyone smells it but him (no offence to pig farmers; a good one would make a better president).  They continue to shill for this little man in our White House, thus tying themselves to the stain that will perpetually attach to him and his minions.   It is a tragedy that they have chosen to forego their rightful place as the public watchdogs of our political process, but it will be so satisfying to see future years depict the forced consumption of their just desserts.