Media Play Dumb To Smear McCain/Palin

MSNBC's Mark Murray and ABC News' Jake Tapper seem to have found a new way to help Barack Obama, playing dumb and purposefully misconstruing a McCain/Palin fundraising letter in order to claim the Republican ticket is being dishonest.

Murray writes:

This afternoon, the McCain campaign issued a Palin fundraising solicitation for the joint McCain-Palin-RNC fund. (After this week, McCain no longer can raise money after accepting $84.1 million in public funds, but the Republican National Committee and state parties can.)

"I cannot tell you how special last night was for me and how enthused I am to be John McCain's running mate," Palin said in the email solicitation, adding: "Unfortunately, as you've seen this week, the Obama/Biden Democrats have been vicious in their attacks directed toward me, my family and John McCain. The misinformation and flat-out lies must be corrected."

Unless we're mistaken, neither Obama nor Biden nor the campaign has attacked Palin's family.

Echoing Murray hours later with unerring precision, Tapper writes:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin sent out a fundraising solicitation today that charged that "the Obama/Biden Democrats have been vicious in their attacks directed toward me, my family and John McCain."

I asked spokespeople of the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee just which "Obama/Biden Democrats" they're referring to.

The response I got was that Obama spokesman Mark Bubriski erroneously attacked Palin as a supporter of Pat Buchanan.

That's it. That's the evidence.

An attack on Palin herself.

In other words, they can't name one person affiliated with the Obama-Biden campaign who attacked the Palin family.

So, the only "Obama/Biden Democrats" in existence are those staffers in the Obama campaign?

Sorry, all you folks with Obama '08 bumper stickers, Obama buttons, and Obama-Biden bumper stickers on your car, you aren't "Obama/Biden Democrats." Even though you've contributed money to the campaign, and think Obama is the best thing since sliced bread, and your proudly think of your self as an Obama Democrat, you aren't. Why? Because Jake Tapper and Mark Murray say so.

As I wrote to Tapper in his comments (and this being ABC News, we'll see how it stays up):

Please, Jake, you're better than this.

The actual candidates will of course take the high road, but it is rabid Obama/Biden supporters in the blogosphere and media--including your counterpart Brian Ross--that smear Palin and her family.

On the Blotter, Ross tried to portray a 1997 lawsuit filed against thrown out by a judge as a current scandal. The judge dismissed it for having no merit. But spin away, boys! It is what you do.

Gust this week Obama-supporting media have accused Obama of slashing funding for special needs programs when she actually raised them 175%, just as she was accused of slashing funding for pregnancy prevention programs when she raised those as well.

The Obama media lies about Sarah Palin, and then won't retract.

But are you referring to lies against her family only? How about the fevered insistence of left-wing "journalists" that Trig Palin was the son of his sister? How about media claims that Levi Johnston was being forced into a "shotgun marriage" with Bristol Palin, when they were already hoping to get married before they found out she was pregnant?

Americans have had a declining respect for the media at least since I was in j-school in the early 1990s. That decline is part of the reason I switched majors.

It looks like I made a smart choice.

John McCain and Sarah Palin have terrified the mainstream media/leftwing blogosphere, to the point they are now reduced to reporting direct lies.

CNNs Soledad O'Brien claimed that Palin, the mother of a Down's Syndrome child, cut funding for special needs programs 62-percent, a lie so blatant that even the openly pro-Obama partisans at the Daily Kos felt compelled to call them on it.

The Washington Post tried to claim that Governor Palin slashed funding for teen moms, when the very documents they show prove that she expanded funding by $3.9 million dollars.

At The Atlantic, the same out-of-control Obama partisan-who-will-not-be-named who demanded medical evidence to prove that Bristol Palin wasn't her brother's mother (even after she revealed her own concurrent pregnancy) doctored the headline of old news story to insinuate that while Sarah Palin was a mayor of town of thousands, that she was at fault for a rise in methamphetamine in an area the size of West Virginia.

Mainstream media journalists at the Associated Press lied and claimed Palin said the Iraq war was a mission from God. They lied. The truth of the matter is that only three suited fools from Chicago think they're on a mission from God, and Jake and Elwood aren't running.

The media—yes, those cheering fans spotted during Obama's acceptance speech—are more willing than ever to lie, cheat, and steal their way to an Obama advantage in this election.

It is pathetic. But it is what they have become.

Update: The comment cited above at ABC News? Deleted in less than a half-hour. Good thing there are such things as screen captures.

The last time this happened, Jake Tapper wrote to tell me he wasn't responsible for deleting comments and that he'd ask ABC News about it. Now he has another example to cite. He also just said via email that referring to him a s a member of the Obama-supporting media was "nonsense."