Bloodthirsty Liberal

What does executive privilege mean?

PS: Had an intelligent thirty-something ask me today what Fast and Furious is. This means that the media hasn’t reported on it at all.

- Aggie

I knew a kid in school who was nicknamed “Huh?” by a sarcastic and frustrated teacher after his unswerving response when called on in class. (It was especially rich when she called on him by nickname, and he answered in typical form.)

I wonder if when Michelle asks him to pass the—well I was going to say salt, but that would never happen—the organic tri-color peppercorn grinder, and prompts him with his first name, does Barack Obama reflexively answer “present”?

Would that he were:

Not so long ago much of the world griped about an America that was too assertive, a “hyperpower” that attempted to lead with too little deference to the desires of those attending the G-20 meeting today in Mexico. Well, congratulations. A world without U.S. leadership is arriving faster than even the French hoped. How do you like it?

• In Syria, a populist revolt against a dictator threatens to become a civil war as Russia and Iran back their client in Damascus and the West defaults to a useless United Nations. The conflict threatens to spill into neighboring countries.

• Iran continues its march toward a nuclear weapon despite more than three years of Western pleading and (until recently) weak sanctions. Israel may conclude it must strike Iran first to defend itself, despite the military risks, because it lacks confidence about America’s will to act. If Iran does succeed, a nuclear proliferation breakout throughout the Middle East is likely.

• Again President of Russia, Vladimir Putin snubbed President Obama’s invitation to the G-8 summit at Camp David and is complicating U.S. diplomacy at every turn. He is sending arms and antiaircraft missiles to Syria, blocking sanctions at the U.N. and reasserting Russian influence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Mr. Obama’s “reset” in relations has little to show for it.

• In Egypt, the military and Muslim Brotherhood vie for power after the Arab spring—with the U.S. largely a bystander. The democrats don’t trust an America that helped them too little in the Mubarak days, while the military doesn’t trust a U.S. Administration that abandoned Mubarak at the end. Egypt is increasingly unwilling to police its own border with Israel or the flow of arms into Gaza.

At this point, I recall the old joke attributed, I believe, to Shecky Greene. “Frank Sinatra, I love that man. He saved my life once with three words. Two goons were beating me up out back of The Sands, and Frank walked by. ‘That’s enough, fellas’ he said.”

But there’s plenty more. A president as self-absorbed as ours misses a lot of things outside the frame of a mirror.

Of course, there’s another way to look at it:

Peter Baker of the New York Times informs us in a “news analysis” that “for Barack Obama, a president who set out to restore good relations with the world in his first term, the world does not seem to be cooperating all that much with his bid to win a second.” Thanks a lot world, you ingrate!

…

“If anything, the dire headlines from around the world only reinforce an uncomfortable reality for this president and any of his successors: even the world’s last superpower has only so much control over events beyond its borders, and its own course can be dramatically affected in some cases. Whether from ripples of the European fiscal crisis or flare-ups of violence in Baghdad, it is easy to be whipsawed by events.”

Whipsawed by events! Indeed! When Bush was president, some useless columnist referred to a “world spinning out of control”, as if the White House was personally responsible for forest fires, earthquakes, dust storms, and excessive ear wax.

Now, “the world does not seem to be cooperating”. There’s many a day when I just want to flip a great American bird to the rest of the world, but I never expected to be joined by the news “analysts” at the New York Times.

Obama certainly believes that in the past America “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive”, “not pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors”, has “at times been disengaged, and at times we sought to dictate our terms”, that we “made decisions based on fear rather than foresight”, that we are “still working through some of our own darker periods in our history”, and most importantly, that “we can’t lose sight of our values and who we are. That’s why I closed Guantanamo.” (I [bleep] you not.)

So maybe this world in which American power and interests are absent is to his liking. If not to the New York Times’.

Well, what did you expect? Bill Ayers can’t be expected to get everything right!

1. Hussein Onyango, Barack’s grandfather, wasn’t really imprisoned and tortured by the British.

2. The father of his Indonesian stepfather, Soewarno Martodihardjo, wasn’t killed by Dutch soldiers in the fight for independence.

3. Regina, a friend at Occidental who Obama writes about as a symbol of the authentic African-American experience turns out to be based on Carolina Boss, who is white. Regina was the name of her Swiss grandmother.

4. Obama projected a racial incident onto his New York girlfriend that he later told Maraniss had happened in Chicago.

5. Obama wrote that he broke up with his New York girlfriend in part because she was white. But his next girlfriend, an anthropologist in Chicago, was also white.

6. Obama cuts out two white college roommates entirely.

7. Obama wrote about his high school friends as an alienated, ne’er-do-well “club of disaffection.” In fact, most members of the “Choom Gang” were “decent students and athletes” who went on to successful careers.

8. Obama’s mother left his father, not the other way around.

9. In his memoir, Obama mentions he missed out on playing time in high school basketball because he coach preferred players who “play like white boys do.” In fact, Obama had to work hard just to make the team, and race had nothing to do with it.

Other than that, the book was (mostly… occasionally… rarely) accurate.

This is rather disturbing. Sure, JFK didn’t write Profiles in Courage, either, but at least they were profiles in other people’s courage! And they were relatively fact-based. At some point, a “composite” history isn’t history at all, but fictional memoir.

Or worse, campaign propaganda.

How reliable was Dreams From My Father as a biography and historical narrative? Barack Obama’s most recent biographer David Maraniss has discovered that Obama’s memoir was less a reliable historical account — and more of a carefully crafted didactic narrative intended to score political points.

Is it impolite to point out that this basic reporting is four years late? John McCain was (falsely) alleged to have had an affair with a lobbyist, Sarah Palin practically had to endure a pelvic exam, and no one bothered to check that neither his grandfather nor step-grandfather were imprisoned, tortured or killed by any colonial power—as he declared in writing?

Elizabeth Warren is more genuine than he is, and Indian head nickels are more genuinely Indian than she is.

PS: Why does he treat white people so shabbily in his (fictional) memoir?

PPS: Via Moonbattery:

A reporter calls out a question to a president unaccustomed to being asked them, much less having to answer them.

And the lefter side of a leftist media wonders aloud if racism has reared its ugly head.

Not so much:

What follows is some historical perspective (“Why Do Grown Men And Women Shout At President Reagan?”) coming from (yes, really) Associated Press writer Christopher Connell in October 1987 which is more than necessary in the circumstances.

…

Comments on the underlined items:

Not only did they “do it for a living,” they did it almost constantly during Reagan’s eight years, almost regardless of the circumstances. It appeared to be a strategy designed to make the president appear aloof and stand-offish, when by 1987 (which is probably why Connell decided to cover it) it was clear that the press’s image had been severely tarnished by its years-long virtually non-stop childishness.

It got so bad that by Reagan’s second term, the press was almost routinely interrupting equivalent presidential functions like the one Robert Bork was involved in as described above.

I believe it’s fair to say that Obama and his apparatchiks have limited direct presidential access to Dear Leader far more than Reagan and his handlers ever did. Shoot, at one point (and I believe it’s still the case), Obama’s people were deciding ahead of time who in the press would get the privilege of asking him questions.

Now, all of a sudden, Neil Munro is a “heckler” getting a beat-down from the White House Correspondents Association amid speculation that The Daily Caller might “lose its access to the President and to the White House.” What a bunch of flaming, presidential boot-licking hypocrisy.

To be fair, Obama has handled his share of uncomfortable questions:

Mr. President, does the feather dusting of the presidential private parts tickle?

Well, it’s been about six weeks now since I stopped reporting on the economy and decided to join the ranks of the big guys. If Elizabeth Warren can be an Indian, why can’t I be an economist, or, as the song goes: I’m An Economist Too!

How am I doing?

Last week I predicted an adjustment on the weekly unemployment numbers of +6,000 based on a complicated mathematical model that I have created and patented. Aggie’s Complicated Mathematical Model™ The details are secret, but it is a mix of watching the “weather”, meaning the previous week’s and month’s adjustments, and predicting the trend. Those of you who have ever done skeet shooting know what I mean. Personally, I’ve never handled a gun, but it’s been explained to me.

More Americans sought unemployment aid last week, suggesting hiring remains sluggish.

The Labor Department said Thursday that weekly unemployment benefit applications rose 6,000 to a seasonally adjusted 386,000, an increase from an upwardly revised 380,000 the previous week.

The four-week average, a less volatile measure, rose for the third straight week to 382,000. That’s the highest in six weeks.

Weekly applications are a measure of the pace of layoffs. When they drop below 375,000, it typically suggests hiring is strong enough to reduce the unemployment rate.

OK, what happens next week? Anyone else wanna be an economist? I say that next week this week’s numbers go up to 391,000 (only up 5,000, because they need a breather), and the new, unadjusted number will be 395,000, only up 4,000 from the previous week’s adjusted numbers. The reports will therefore say that we are seeing the beginnings of a turnaround.

Oh, and I think that sometime soon Obama will make a panicked address to the nation laying out the case for more stimulus. Paul Krugman will write in the NY Times that the reason the recovery is stalling is because the stimulus wasn’t big enough in the first place and if we don’t act quickly, WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!
He will not mention that we’re all gonna die eventually anyway. But that is Nostradamus territory, and I’m an economist, not a seer.

- Aggie

As little as we can:

I found my DVD, called “Barack Obama’s Occidental College Days,” in the student bookstore, where shelves groaned under stacks of Obama merchandise—paperweights, caps, pennants, T-shirts, pencils, shot glasses—in which the “O” from Obama was graphically entwined with the “O” from Occidental. (You work with what you’ve got.) The film, with a cover showing a rare photo of Obama on campus, lasts no more than 15 minutes and seems padded even so. Our host is a large and enthusiastic man named Huell Howser. He sports a Hawaiian shirt and a crewcut. With an Oxy flack as guide and a cameraman in tow, he strides the sun-drenched campus and pauses here and there as if simply overwhelmed.

“This place is full of history,” he says.

“There’s a lot of history to be marked here,” the flack agrees.

On the steps of the school administration building they are almost struck dumb. Almost.

“On this spot,” our host says, Obama may have given his first political speech—a two-minute blast at the college for investing in South Africa’s apartheid regime. But we can’t be sure.

“There are no photographs,” says Howser, “but then there are very few photographs of Barack Obama at Occidental.”

“That’s right,” the flack says glumly.

This is true at Columbia, too. There is just enough evidence to prove he went there, but no more—beyond his own telling of it.

And he can tell quite the story:

Maraniss’s book is most interesting for the light it casts on Obama’s self-invention, which is of course the theme of Dreams from My Father: a sensitive and self-aware young man’s zig-zagging search for a personal identity in a world barely held together by fraying family ties, without a cultural inheritance, confused and tormented by the subject of race. Dreams is a cascade of epiphanies, touched off one by one in high school, at Oxy, in New York and Chicago, and, at book’s end, before his father’s grave in Africa. Years before Obama haters could inflate him into an America-destroying devil or Obama worshippers spied those rolling swells of greatness that have yet to surface, Barack Obama was carefully fashioning from his own life something grander than what was there. He was the first Obama fabulist.

Obama himself drops hints of this in Dreams. He writes in his introduction that the dialogue in the book is only an “approximation” of real conversations. Some of the characters, “for the sake of compression,” are “composites”; the names of others have been changed. All of this is offered to the reader as acceptable literary license, and it is, certainly by the standards of the early 1990s, back in the day when publishers flooded bookstores with memoirs of angst-ridden youth and there were still bookstores to flood. Yet the epiphany-per-page ratio in Obama’s memoir is very high. The book derives its power from the reader’s understanding that the events described were factual at least in the essentials. Maraniss demonstrates something else: The writer who would later use the power of his life story to become a plausible public man was making it up, to an alarming extent.

…

Racial resentment is the key to Ray. In Maraniss’s words, he’s “a symbol of young blackness, a mix of hot anger and cool detachment,” racially authentic in a way none of Obama’s other friends were. He provides a crucial example of the resentment that Obama is tempted by but at last outgrows.

But Ray wasn’t really there—didn’t exist, in fact. Ray is a “reinvention” of one of Obama’s friends, Maraniss tells us. His mother was half-black and half-American Indian; his father was … Japanese. His name was Keith Kakugawa, and he had no trouble dating white girls; his girlfriend at the time was the base admiral’s daughter. Maraniss discovered that Obama’s luck with girls, whatever their melanin count, was just as robust as Keith’s. With a Japanese name, Kakugawa would have trouble—more trouble than half-black Barry Obama—identifying himself as an African American and speaking as one. If Kakugawa was Ray, then the rants and the attitudes they represent are in this instance made up, and the story line of Dreams—the story of Obama’s life as we have learned it—loses an essential foil.

“Somewhere between pseudonymous and fictitious,” Maraniss writes, gently as always, “Ray was the first of several distorted or composite characters employed in Dreams for similar purposes.” But it’s the purposes themselves that are worrisome. Maraniss cuts Obama much more slack than he would, say, if he were an editor at the Washington Post magazine fact-checking a memoir he hoped to publish. He’s right to accept some invention from a memoirist who insists on telling his story through precise rendering of scenes and dialogue. But a memoir is just realist fiction unless the “composite” says and does things that were done and said by someone. In Dreams many of the crucial epiphanies, the moments that advance the narrator’s life and understanding to its closing semi-resolution, didn’t happen.

So Dreams From My Father, along with rest of the Obama narrative, is “fake but accurate”. There is a great deal more, including a fairly definitive put-down of Ed Klein’s salacious histoire d’Obama, The Amateur, that so many Americans seem unable put down.

As ever, my outrage is not with the fabulist trying to invent a compelling narrative out of marijuana smoke and slimming mirrors, but with the Fourth Estate, who serves society only through objective, even pitiless, reporting. Andrew Ferguson, the author of this essay, makes the astute point that no newspaper, least of all the WaPo, would run an account like this without querying and checking every fact and character. When they have—see Jayson Blair, Mike Barnicle, Patricia Smith, Stephen Glass, et al, even the Washington Post’s own Janet Cooke—they have come to regret the stain on their professional characters.

Unless they haven’t. The media don’t report stories so much as tell narratives. It was easy enough to see that Obama was a bright but underachieving figure until recruited to run for the US Senate—easy because Obama told us and acted so throughout his life, when merely being “present” was enough to advance.

But that was not the story they so dearly wished to tell. They wanted to report (and even burnish) the image of an almost Christ-like figure who arrived in the big city (Chicago instead of Jerusalem) from the provinces (Hawaii instead of Nazareth) to redeem a people stained by sin (racism instead of apple-picking). And nothing, certainly not the discoverable truth, was going to stop them.

What Rose and Brokaw were expressing above, just days before the already-decided election, is the vague unease of veteran newsmen at the unquestioning coronation of an emperor, when it was their job to pronounce him unclothed.

Either that or covering their a**es.

What is it I always say about the mainstream media?

Exactly one month ago, the Washington Post published a 5,400 word front page hit piece on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s high school years which included a now infamous hair-cutting incident.

On Sunday, the Post devoted 5,500 words, beginning on the front page of the sports section, to an excerpt of David Maraniss’s new book with the headline “President Obama’s Love for Basketball Can be Traced Back to His High School Team”.

Doesn’t matter what I say, as it wouldn’t be printable anyway.

It matters what they DON’T say:

Reporters have aggressively sought more information from Romney about his business record, but there is no sign that a single reporter has ever asked Obama about his role in Chicago’s housing disaster.

The closest Obama has ever come to admitting his role in the scandal came in a September 2007 speech to a Wall Street audience.

“Subprime lending started off as a good idea: helping Americans buy homes who couldn’t previously afford to,” he said.

But “as certain lenders and brokers began to see how much money could be made,” he said, “they began to lower their standards. … Most everyone knew that some of these deals were just too good to be true, but all that money flowing in made it tempting to look the other way and ignore the unscrupulous practice of some bad actors.”

Why is it a good idea to entice people to do something they can’t sustain? That sounds like a drug dealer (to employ a metaphor Obama will be familiar with) giving away free samples of crack in order to hook new addicts.

Also, it’s nice of Obama to admit that the subprime fiasco had several “bad actors”: not just the “predatory lenders”, but also the borrowers who knew better, and the Keanu Reeves of bad actors, government policy itself, which put the whole mess in motion.

This is a small excerpt from a much longer piece at the Daily Caller. I encourage you to read more. You won’t learn anything about Obama’s jump shot or crossover dribble, but his political maneuverings are explored in great detail.

By their guts and their tans shall ye know them:

American military authorities allowed a reporter and photographer into the prison to see everyday life for the detainees, who are said to include bomb-makers, terrorist masterminds and individuals responsible for the deaths of US and British troops.

It is the first time a British paper has been inside the current system of prison blocks at Guantánamo, a military base which became notorious in 2002 when pictures of inmates in orange jump suits, chained to hand trolleys, were broadcast around the world.

President Barack Obama had pledged to shut it, but that promise has been dropped, and facilities which now hold 169 inmates across a cluster of “camps” have largely remained out of the public eye.

…

The pictures of men shackled while sitting are certain to prove controversial but prison commanders say it is essential to stop inmates attacking guards and instructors.

This paper witnessed prisoners receiving computer lessons, mingling with each other and preparing meals. Guards say torture simply does not happen, although they refuse to discuss what happened in the past. They also refuse to discuss the camp’s future.

Guantánamo Bay had been scheduled for closure by Mr Obama when he became president. But that pledge has been dropped, although hundreds of prisoners have been returned to countries including Iraq and Afghanistan.

The US authorities say those who remain are terrorist bomb makers, planners of attacks on Western targets, and financiers of terrorist operations.

The US government justifies the camps at Guantánamo by defining the inmates as “unprivileged enemy belligerents”; their incarceration in wartime is not an act of punishment but a matter of “security and military necessity”, which Washington claims has long been recognised as legitimate in international law.

Naturally, I don’t know what goes on there, but this isn’t the first report to show jowly jihadists and rotund recidivists at Camp X-Ray. Hundreds have been repatriated (or “patriated” to any non-native countries that would have them), some of whom have gone straight back to terrorism, so these are the dregs of Al Qaedan humanity (if that’s not redundant).

What’s most striking to me is the absoluteness of Obama’s hollow words (you could hear the echo!) in resolving to close the place down. Thank goodness for our nation’s security he’s such an accomplished liar!

And the Left-wing outrage will begin in three… two… two… two…

Vice President Joe Biden’s cordial annual media picnic turned into an all-out war between the vice president and children of journalists in attendance.

The vice president distributed high-powered water guns to the children gathered at his official residence and identified notable journalists for them to pursue.

Among the targets were CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Politico’s Mike Allen.

Biden’s team of warrior children then turned their weapons on the Vice President himself. Before it was over, Biden was super-soaked and smiling.

Just for fun (I’m not really outraged), imagine how the press would have covered this story if Cheney were still VP. OMG, they have cut between these water-soaked tykes and blood-spattered soldiers in Afghanistan; they would have dissolved from the gap-toothed smiles and squeals of the rugrats to the pained grimaces and frozen rictuses of the wounded and dead GIs. Outraged liberals would have lined up around the block to denounce this trivialization of warfare.

Seriously: ask yourself when was the last time the evening news covered the arrival of the flag-draped coffins of the Afghan or Iraq war dead back on home soil? I would bet Sean Penn’s money it was early January 2009.

Wisconsin? Where’s that? Never heard of it.

I hope this lady is rested up. The line to get your face slapped (or your groin kicked) forms to the left.

“A woman who had been very angry that the mayor had conceded prior to the polls…all the votes being counted, rather, she was upset with the mayor…she came up and she slapped him and said, ‘How dare you concede, while there are people still trying to vote inside the Ziegler building.’”

“So the polls closed at 8, but there were still people inside the buildings who hadn’t had a chance to vote, so legally they could still vote. So by 8’o clock, it was still an hour and a half later and people are still trying to cast their ballots.”

“This woman is upset about that, and she slapped the mayor. He seemed very stunned by the fact that she had done that. Obviously, some of the passion and disappointment, tonight, coming out through that one woman’s hand and her temper.”

At least she had the ‘nads to admit she was upset. The liberal media folded up their teepees and stole away in the night like so many Massachusetts Democrat Senator nominees (and their great-great grandmothers and “paw-paws”.)

When asked why he was endorsing the ersatz Indian, Betty Buckskin, before the primary or even the nominating convention, given her forked-tonguedness, Governor Deval Patrick infamously replied, “We don’t care about that.”

I guess you could say he “deemed” it unimportant.

That’s how they roll, and that’s how the media roll with them:

Both the Obama administration and many traditional news outlets have blown off the claim in journalist Ed Klein’s book that Eric Whitaker, a close friend of President Obama’s, tried bribing the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to stay quiet during the 2008 election.

But it turns out that Klein’s book — “The Amateur” — actually isn’t the first recorded instance of Wright, Obama’s former inflammatory pastor, claiming someone tried to pay him off to stay quiet while Obama ran for president.

In David Remnick’s 2010 book, “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama,” the author quotes Wright saying he was offered cash to shut up by a friend concerned that his history of incendiary sermons could doom Obama’s hopes of winning the White House.

“One Obama supporter — a ‘close friend of Barack’s,’ Wright claimed—even offered to send Wright money if he would only be quiet,” Remnick wrote. “Wright refused. He was retired now and needed to earn a living and help support grandchildren in college.”

Remnick quoted Wright saying he wasn’t interested in the money being offered.

“Where’s the money going to come from?” he said. “I’m just going to be quiet until November the fifth? I’m not supposed to say a word? What do I tell these people who have invited me to preach? All of these dates between April and November? So, no, I didn’t cancel engagements, and I didn’t cancel what I was supposed to be doing.”

I’m a cynic, but that sounds more to me like Wright wanted to see the money first—not that he wasn’t interested. He had paid gigs lined up, and until Obama’s check cleared, he wasn’t going to cancel anything. A little cynical too, but who would know Obama better than his pastor of 20 years?

Anyhow, who’s going to dismiss Remnick? He’s editor of the thoroughly discredited New Yorker, which couldn’t be further up Obama’s backside if it were printed on Charmin. The story’s true, and everyone involved knows it.

In a recent interview with The Daily Caller, Klein said of the media: “I think it’s because they don’t want to embarrass the president. I think they’re protecting the president. I mean, I think it’s as simple as that.”

Of course it is. Jay Carney tells them to lie down, and they ask “How low?”

PS: I would complain about the lack of institutional memory among the media in failing to recall or even report an incendiary story like Remnick’s published only two years ago, but then probably nobody read it. They didn’t read Dreams From Bill Ayers Tape Recorder, why should they read another hack tome on another hack politician?

But has Remnick come forward to back Klein on the story, or at least accuse him of plagiarism? Or did he not read his lickspittle hagiography either? If he’s said nothing, he’s even more a coward than he is a craven liberal media dog.

Remember the outrage over allegations that George W. Bush was busted for coke?

Neither do I, but somebody does:

“Fortunate Son” attracted attention because it reported that Bush, then the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, had been arrested for possessing cocaine when he was 26 years old. Hatfield wrote that Bush’s father, the future President George H.W. Bush, used his influence to cover up the incident.

“George W. was arrested for possession of cocaine in 1972 but due to his father’s connections, the entire record was expunged by a state judge whom the elder Bush helped get elected,” Hatfield quoted a “confidential source” as saying.

George W. Bush denied the story, as did George H.W. Bush.

Still, even though nobody had ever heard of Hatfield, for some reporters the revelation seemed final proof of a rumor that media types had been kicking around — and sometimes publishing — since the beginning of Bush’s campaign. The New York Times, which had looked for evidence of cocaine before, looked again.

“Reporters for The New York Times, which received an advance copy of Mr. Hatfield’s book last week, spent several days looking for evidence that might corroborate his account,” wrote Times reporter Frank Bruni, now a liberal columnist for the paper, on October 22, 1999. “But they did not find any, and the newspaper did not publish anything about the claim.”

Lots of other news organizations did. When both Bushes denied the story, the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Post, Los Angeles Times, and many others reported Hatfield’s revelation.

The New York Times also found a way to pass on the accusation without passing on the accusation; the paper published several articles about the controversy over the book, even if it did not directly quote the book itself. Times readers certainly got the idea.

The party ended when the Dallas Morning News reported Hatfield was “a felon on parole, convicted in Dallas of hiring a hit man for a failed attempt to kill his employer with a car bomb in 1987.” The publisher of “Fortunate Son,” St. Martin’s Press, quickly withdrew the book.

But nobody could withdraw the story. For a while, the tale that Bush had been arrested for cocaine possession, even though it was told by an unknown author who was also a felon who apparently made the whole thing up — that tale was the talk of the 2000 presidential race. (Hatfield committed suicide in 2001.)

Thank goodness nobody writes books looking into the indiscretions of presidential candidates in their youth anymore—or if they do, the press ignores them. Otherwise, the public might know how much dope Obama smoked (by his own admission) and how much coke he snorted.

And a few other interesting things:

Klein’s book reports that in the spring of 2008, in the middle of the presidential campaign and in the heat of the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s incendiary sermons, a very close friend of Barack Obama’s offered Wright a payoff if Wright would remain silent until after the November election.

The source of the story is Jeremiah Wright himself. Wright told it, in his own words, in a nearly three-hour recorded interview with Klein. (The author gave the audio of the entire interview to me, as well as to other reporters who asked.)

Unlike the media storm over “Fortunate Son,” the Wright revelation has attracted very little comment in the press. The Associated Press and most of those outlets that talked about Bush and cocaine? They’ve had little or nothing to say about Jeremiah Wright and alleged payoffs.

The New York Times has published just one piece about Klein’s book, a scathing review that asserts that Klein — a former editor of the New York Times Magazine — is the real “amateur” in the story.

Obama either did or didn’t offer a bribe to Jeremiah Wright to shut the [bleep] up. But Wright says he did.

And the press aren’t going to touch the story? One of two possible participants in a bribe says it happened—a man of the cloth and the president’s spiritual advisor for twenty years—and the media is mute?

Neutered, more like, and self-inflicted.