Who Vetted Obama?
AIM Column | By Cliff Kincaid | September 2, 2008
It also turns out that the DailyKos got the leak from the Obama campaign of the candidate’s alleged birth certificate…
The Washington Post
reported that John McCain’s vetting process for picking Governor Sarah Palin
included an FBI background check. Other reports dispute this. But when did the
FBI investigate Obama? Who vetted him?
We are living witnesses
to an incredible media double standard, whereby a Republican vice-presidential
candidate’s personal life is being torn apart, while the Democratic presidential
candidate continues to get a free ride. Obama has a 30-year history of associating
with unsavory characters, beginning with communist Frank Marshall Davis and
continuing with Jeremiah Wright and communist terrorists Bill Ayers and
Bernardine Dohrn, which should disqualify him from getting a security clearance
in the government that he wants to run.
But the media would
rather talk about Republicans and sex.
The leftist DailyKos
website started digging into Palin’s past and claimed that her fifth child
wasn’t really hers. The charge fell apart when pictures surfaced of the governor
pregnant with the child.
Nevertheless, the media,
which have been so quick to ignore questions about Obama’s background, joined
in the inquiry into Palin’s private family matters and forced the governor to
disclose that one of their daughters is pregnant out of wedlock. This is what
passes for investigative reporting these days.
A daughter’s pregnancy,
of course, has nothing to do with whether Palin is fit for the job of
vice-president or even president and is entitled to a security clearance. But one’s
associations with communists who hate the United States might emerge as a
cause for concern.
It is worth noting that
the DailyKos site is the same site that a liberal blogger named Lee Stranahan
says banned his comments about Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards
needing to answer reports that he had had an extramarital affair. Those
reports, which came from the “tabloid” National Enquirer and not from any
“respectable” major media outlet, turned out to be true.
It also turns out that
the DailyKos got the leak from the Obama campaign of the candidate’s alleged
birth certificate, an announcement intended to put to rest all of the questions
about whether Obama is a natural-born citizen and passes the basic
constitutional requirement to be president. Is the document real? I have not
seen any investigative reporters from the major media assigned to this story.
Instead, they’re sniffing around Palin’s family, which is something they had no
desire to do while John Edwards was cheating on his cancer-stricken wife.
In contrast to the Palin
story, which will probably continue for weeks, the Obama birth certificate
controversy has been left alone by the major media. They have simply assumed―because
they favor his candidacy―that Obama, with a history of being moved from country
to country under different names, is a legitimate U.S. citizen. A lawsuit has been
filed challenging Obama’s qualifications to be president and some bloggers say
the birth certificate is a fraud. But it’s not an issue for the major media.
They would rather examine photos of Bristol Palin’s tummy.
An FBI investigation of
Obama might get at the truth about the Democratic candidate. But an FBI
background check is something that the presidential nominee of the Democratic
Party has not been forced to undergo. How many people even know that?
But whether the FBI
investigated Palin is now becoming a controversy.
In contrast to the focus
on Palin and her family, the Post on August 24 ran a 10,000-word piece about
Barack Obama’s growing-up years in Hawaii
that completely ignored the role of his acknowledged mentor, communist Frank
Marshall Davis. There was not one word devoted to an identified communist, who
also stands accused of drug use, alcohol abuse, and child molesting, being in
intimate contact with the Democratic presidential nominee for about nine years
of his young life.
The author of that Post
story, David Maraniss, told us that he didn’t think Frank Marshall Davis was
worth even one mention in that 10,000-word story. He even said that Obama’s own
book was incorrect in ascribing a significant role to Davis in mentoring the candidate. As the
facts show, Davis
became Obama’s father-figure when his real father abandoned the family. The
mystery is why Obama only referred to Davis
as “Frank” in his book and concealed his true identity. But the Post doesn’t
want its readers to know anything about it. But we do have a right to know that
Bristol Palin is pregnant.
It will be coming out
that Obama’s mentor, Davis, was the subject of an FBI investigation for 19
years and that his FBI file is 600 pages long. Davis was included in the FBI’s “security
index,” meaning that he could be arrested and detained in the event of a
national security emergency. But the young person he sent off to college, who
would admittedly attend socialist conferences and pick Marxist professors as
his friends, doesn’t have to undergo an FBI background check and will run the
FBI should he become president.
In contrast to the
coverage of Palin, the major media have not highlighted that, for all of his
“experience” in foreign affairs, Senator Joseph Biden, the Democratic
vice-presidential candidate, is an exposed and admitted plagiarist. I have
watched countless hours of coverage of the campaign on the cable and broadcast
networks and haven’t seen one detailed story about Biden’s history of
plagiarism.
But can you imagine the
outcry if it came out that Palin, who graduated from college in journalism and
became a sportscaster, had been caught plagiarizing?
Meanwhile, the Obama
campaign is already claiming to have found a skeleton in Palin’s closet. An
Obama spokesman, Mark Bubriski, charged that Palin once supported Pat Buchanan
for president because she was spotted years ago wearing a Pat Buchanan button.
And since Buchanan has been charged by some with being a “Nazi sympathizer,”
that means that Palin is tainted and has to explain herself. Buchanan, a
commentator on MSNBC and columnist, has exposed this as nonsense. But he is not
the main target, of course. It is Palin and McCain. It is a campaign dirty
trick designed to smear the Republican ticket and hurt its chances with Jewish
voters.
Assuming that this is a
legitimate topic, when will Obama explain his association with a Moscow-line
Communist for nine years of his life? And his failure to come clean about that
relationship in his 1995 book, Dreams
From My Father? This seems to be more serious than wearing a button.
For the record, it is
reported that Palin actually supported Steve Forbes and wore the Buchanan
button as a courtesy to the candidate when he visited Alaska. In a related development, pro-Israel
bloggers claim to have seen photos and video of an Israeli flag on Palin’s left
lapel and an Israeli flag in her office. So it would appear that she is a
supporter of Israel,
the exact opposite of what the Obama campaign was trying to imply. Now that
this is out of the way, how will Obama explain Davis? Or will he ever be asked to?
For its part, the
Washington Post has assigned at least two reporters to dig up dirt on Palin.
One controversy is that Palin is under investigation for trying to fire a state
trooper who threatened members of her family. On two straight days, August 30
and 31, Post reporters James V. Grimaldi and Kimberly Kindy authored articles
about whether this trooper should have been fired or not, and what role Palin
played in the controversy.
Since trying to fire a
trooper who threatened your family doesn’t strike most people as improper or
illegal, the Post now seems to be taking a new direction. The Tuesday paper
carries a page one story about how, when Palin was mayor of a town in Alaska, she sought
federal grants.
Tomorrow it will be
something else.
McCain has a blogger, Michael Goldfarb, who is
supposed to be an attack dog when it comes to media misdeeds. He calls a report
by Elisabeth Bumiller of the Times “fiction” and offers her a link to the
McCain press line.
This is said to be tough
stuff from the McCain campaign. They obviously don’t understand what they’re up
against.
Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at
