Send in the Clowns! OOPS! I mean the Anchors from those so-called major News Networks!

No one can question the role of the MSM as fluffers for Obama any more.  Senator John McCain spent the last leg of the primary season tromping around the middle east with Senators Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman in tow.  I recall there was media present because Lieberman had to correct McCain several times about the difference between Al Quaeda and Shite insurgents supported by Iran.  However, I do not recall that the trailers included ALL THREE Anchors of each of the non cable networks. This is the same group that I used to rely on for truth about Vietnam, Nixon, and Watergate.  Wither art thou Walter Cronkite?

This is an even bigger shocker!   I heard this from Greta Van Susteren on FOX.  Oh, the SHAME!  I’m admitting to watching FOX now in public!  I first learned  that the three amigos will be trotting around the globe with the anointed one from Greta on Fox after I got home from teaching a freshman seminar on Monetary Policy. I did not read it first from my subscription to the NY Times.   I didn’t even hear it from my ol’ ninth ward slummin’, Vaughn’s visitin’, Ketel one drinkin’ friend Anderson Cooper or his producer Jamie!  I’m still trying to find my bearings right now because I can’t BELIEVE I heard this from GRETA (http://gretawire.foxnews.com/2008/07/17/oh-oh-how-does-the-media-yes-the-media-explain-this-one/)  before I heard it from Anderson Cooper or read it in the TIMES but I also have to say, I think the world is upside down at the moment. I think the gravitational pull of the earth has been disrupted somehow.

I’ll quote from the NY TImes out of habit and the fact I pay damn good money for my subscription.

Media Stars Will Accompany Obama Overseas

WASHINGTON — Senator John McCain’s trip to Iraq last March was a low-key affair: With a small retinue of reporters chasing him abroad, the NBC News anchor Brian Williams reported on Mr. McCain’s visit there from New York, including it in the “in other political news” portion of his newscast.

 

 

Ida Mae Astute/ABC

Anchors Charles Gibson of ABC, left, Katie Couric of CBS and Brian Williams of NBC. They are working out the details of on-site interviews with Senator Barack Obama when he goes overseas.

But when Senator Barack Obama heads for Iraq and other places overseas this summer, Mr. Williams is planning to catch up with him in person, as are the other two network evening news anchors, Charles Gibson of ABC and Katie Couric of CBS, who, like Mr. Williams, are far along in discussions to interview Mr. Obama on successive nights.

And while the anchors are jockeying for interviews with Mr. Obama at stops along his route, the regulars on the Obama campaign plane will have new seatmates: star political reporters from the major newspapers and magazines who are flocking to catch Mr. Obama’s first overseas trip since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee. A “Meet the Press” interview is also being planned.

The extraordinary coverage planned for Mr. Obama’s trip, though in part solicited by aides, reflects how the candidate remains an object of fascination in the news media, a built-in feature of being the first black presidential nominee for a major political party and a relative newcomer to the national stage.

But the coverage also feeds into concerns in Mr. McCain’s campaign, and among Republicans in general, that the news media are imbalanced in their coverage of the candidates, just as aides to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton felt during the primary season.

Well, we know it’s an oddity when  Obama takes a trip over seas to learn something,  let alone something remotely related to working.  We know that his senatorial duties overseeing the NATO commitment to Afghanistan have been scarce to nonexistent.   We know now that Obama missed many of the higher level meetings on Iraq and when he did attend 1 out of 3 meetings, he asked about something other than Afghanistan.  He never held a meeting for the sub-committee for which he holds the chairmanship.  While trying to back Obama up, Joe Biden actually lets slip  how badly Obama’s carried out any senatorial duties at all. But what do you expect from some one who has gotten more than full time pay for holding down part time jobs?  Did we mention these were part time jobs he can’t even show up for?

This from ABC’s Jack Trapper today.  ( source:  http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/)

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and his allies have been hitting Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, for not holding any hearings to examine the role of NATO in Afghanistan in his perch as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on European Affairs.

“He’s never had a hearing,” McCain said Tuesday, “so I am not surprised that all he has done is said, ‘Well, we need more troops.'”

In a letter to Obama earlier this week, McCain-backing Sen. Jim DeMint R- SC, wrote, “With oversight of NATO relations and its role in Afghanistan, I believe it is time for us to focus closely on these issues,” DeMint wrote, suggesting a meeting of the subcommittee upon Obama’s return from a much anticipated trip abroad.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden, D-Del., had previously told Meet the Press that “the reason Obama didn’t hold a hearing on NATO, I chair the committee. Every one of those committee hearings are held at full committee.”

But today Biden decided to take his defense of Obama one step further, writing to DeMint that there have been plenty of hearings on European Affairs, they’ve just been held at the “full committee level.”

“On the particular issue of NATO’s mission in Afghanistan,” Biden wrote, “We have held three Full Committee hearings in the last 22 months: one under Senator Lugar’s chairmanship (September 21, 2006: “From Coalition to ISAF Command in Afghanistan: The Purpose and Impact of the Transition”), and two undermine (March 8, 2007: “Afghanistan: Time for a New Strategy?” and January 21, 2008: “Afghanistan: A Plan to Turn the Tide?”).  At all three of these hearings, we were fortunate enough to have the expert testimony—in addition to other witnesses, both in and out of government— of former NATO commander and Supreme Allied Commander-Europe, Gen. James R. Jones (USMC, ret.).”

But Biden’s letter brought attention to the fact that Obama did not attend two of those three hearings — and for the third, on March 8, 2007, Obama only asked one question, one unrelated to Afghanistan.

So we have the least knowledgable person on earth about the status of Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan whose knowledge basically comes from what he reads from teleprompters leading three other folks with limited knowledge that basically comes from what they read from teleprompters on a tour of the world.  I now know completely where that old phrase ‘the blind leading the blind’ originates.

Come some one please wake me from this extremely bad dream.  Especially the one where I flip the channel to AC and watch him announce how Bill Clinton is fully behind the Obamanation from Illionois.  Hell must’ve frozen over.  I’m watching Fox and Bill Clinton is saying polite things on tv about Barack Obama and  oh, did I mention crude oil has gone below $130 a barrel?