For months and months the John Edwards affair was relegated to beyond Siberia at the New York Times. (Siberia is defined for you hicks here.)

Only six days ago, a bunch of Times guys explained to ombudsman Clark Hoyt why this was not a story for the NYT:

“I’m not going to recycle a supermarket tabloid’s anonymously sourced story,” said Bill Keller, the executive editor.

Then yesterday, a bruising Edwards story turned up on page one of the New York Times:

Lawyers’ Ties Hint at Extent of Hiding Edwards’s Affair

The Edwardses’ old-fashioned attempt to cover up the “mistake” of the golden boy by paying off both the mother of the child (usually a “bad girl” from the wrong side of the tracks) and the hapless guy who “volunteers” to take the hit for the golden boy reminds me of a whole lot of bad movies from the 1960s, or of Peyton Place.

This non-performance of their duties is beyond pathetic from the entire MSM.

Kaus has more, as always. He’s got ‘tude, too.

Meanwhile, MSM reporters–having deemed it unnecessary to report on whether a leading, active Democratic pol, third-place presidential candidate and likely cabinet official cheated on his ill wife while making a big show of his loyalty and then lied about it to the public –have found an angle sufficiently tedious to be worth discussing with their readers: a possible campaign finance violation!

Fierce MSM competition to see who can sit on a story for longer:

Romenesko:

Reflections of a Newsosaur | Charlotte Observer | TV Barn

Alan Mutter says the mainstream media “look foolishly out of touch by continuing to remain silent about the allegation that John Edwards fathered the girl recently born to a former campaign aide.” || Aaron Barnhart: “The Enquirer, along with my employer, McClatchy, is actually working the story, while most of the MSM claims to be keeping its hands clean.”

Kaus is still hot on the trail, of course. Yesterday, he quoted Kinsley [e.a.]:

the MSM told a story about Edwards—they told it often and loud—it was probably one of the best-known and totally accepted stories of the 2008 campaign: John loyally standing by his loyal wife as she deals with cancer. If the story isn’t true, they should run a correction. My god, look at the things they run corrections over—the spelling of people’s names, and so on. Yet they’re leaving this huge story uncorrected, and leaving their readers misinformed.

Kinsley is shocked, shocked that his formerly respected and respectable colleagues who are running the MSM show don’t bother to correct the record (which they establish to begin with, using showbiz techniques)

There’s rather a more pointed critique from across the Pond:

Indeed.

If the MSM is hiding this obvious story, what else are they hiding?

Stuff that actually matters, that’s what!

And that is why it’s important for them to report the distasteful stuff, too—in order to win our trust that they will report, as the NY Times once prided itself on doing,

Without Fear or Favor

That ethos for journalists—to report the truth—was a long time coming. Now it’s a long time gone.

[updated to add missing text]

Mark Johnson, writing for the Charlotte Observer (distributed by McClatchy), not only puts the Edwards love child story on the MSM map, he also make clear the political stakes for Edwards[e.a.]:

With two weeks to go before their national convention, a number of Democrats are saying that Edwards needs to publicly address National Enquirer stories that have alleged he had an affair with a campaign worker and fathered her baby.

If Edwards fails to clear up the story in short order, he risks party officials deciding not to have him speak or, if they do, creating a distraction from a week focused on Barack Obama accepting the nomination.

“If there is not an explanation that’s satisfactory, acceptable and meets high moral standards, the answer is ‘no,’ he would not be a prime candidate to make a major address to the convention,” said Don Fowler, a former Democratic National Committee chair.

Oh no! You mean Edwards may fail the “high moral standards” test?!?

Despite the obvious concerns about the effect of this story on the Democratic Party and its candidate for president—who went after the Edwards endorsement vigorously, and won it—Johnson is spinning this as a problem for Edwards rather than as a problem for Obama.

Of course Clinton, had she won, would have been in the same boat. I don’t envy Obama right about now.

This is why I hate politicians—all of them. Even the rare ones who start out with ideals become corrupted by the process.

Edwards, however, is simply a dishonorable human being, a hypocrite and a liar.

In hindsight, Breck Girl seems like too kind a nickname.

The Edwards story takes another step up the ladder to the MSM from the undernews.

(via Kaus, your source for paranoia and for tabloid truth)

Faster Comics–Jay Leno Beats NBC News: Charlotte’s WCNC airs a hostile, smart, doomy segment on the “scandal brewing.” Pegged to Edwards “ducking reporters,” plus the suggestive birth certificate. … Leno, Conan jokes featured. Leno’s is even funny. … Resonant clip from campaign “webisode.” … Reporter Stuart Watson says Edwards is in danger of “disappearing from the national stage … unless he finds a way to squelch this story fast.” … Maybe he did: It would be paranoid to notice that the segment isn’t featured on the station’s Web site. … Update: Strangely, I am paranoid! Video is on main WCNC video playlist and on the “Investigators” page. … 12:18 P.M.

John McCain had the great good fortune to fall into the hands of a NYT worm. The worm got his: David Shipley managed to give more publicity to McCain’s op-ed by refusing to publish it than it ever would have gotten in the paper itself.

Here it is (via CNN):

Here is the op-ed piece written by Sen. John McCain that the New York Times declined to run. The piece was released to CNN by the McCain campaign:

In January 2007, when General David Petraeus took command in Iraq, he called the situation “hard” but not “hopeless.” Today, 18 months later, violence has fallen by up to 80% to the lowest levels in four years, and Sunni and Shiite terrorists are reeling from a string of defeats. The situation now is full of hope, but considerable hard work remains to consolidate our fragile gains.

Progress has been due primarily to an increase in the number of troops and a change in their strategy. I was an early advocate of the surge at a time when it had few supporters in Washington. Senator Barack Obama was an equally vocal opponent. “I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there,” he said on January 10, 2007. “In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”

Now Senator Obama has been forced to acknowledge that “our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence.” But he still denies that any political progress has resulted.

Perhaps he is unaware that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has recently certified that, as one news article put it, “Iraq has met all but three of 18 original benchmarks set by Congress last year to measure security, political and economic progress.” Even more heartening has been progress that’s not measured by the benchmarks. More than 90,000 Iraqis, many of them Sunnis who once fought against the government, have signed up as Sons of Iraq to fight against the terrorists. Nor do they measure Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s new-found willingness to crack down on Shiite extremists in Basra and Sadr City?actions that have done much to dispel suspicions of sectarianism.

The success of the surge has not changed Senator Obama’s determination to pull out all of our combat troops. All that has changed is his rationale. In a New York Times op-ed and a speech this week, he offered his “plan for Iraq” in advance of his first “fact finding” trip to that country in more than three years. It consisted of the same old proposal to pull all of our troops out within 16 months. In 2007 he wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost. If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance.

To make this point, he mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

Senator Obama is also misleading on the Iraqi military’s readiness. The Iraqi Army will be equipped and trained by the middle of next year, but this does not, as Senator Obama suggests, mean that they will then be ready to secure their country without a good deal of help. The Iraqi Air Force, for one, still lags behind, and no modern army can operate without air cover. The Iraqis are also still learning how to conduct planning, logistics, command and control, communications, and other complicated functions needed to support frontline troops.

No one favors a permanent U.S. presence, as Senator Obama charges. A partial withdrawal has already occurred with the departure of five “surge” brigades, and more withdrawals can take place as the security situation improves. As we draw down in Iraq, we can beef up our presence on other battlefields, such as Afghanistan, without fear of leaving a failed state behind. I have said that I expect to welcome home most of our troops from Iraq by the end of my first term in office, in 2013.

But I have also said that any draw-downs must be based on a realistic assessment of conditions on the ground, not on an artificial timetable crafted for domestic political reasons. This is the crux of my disagreement with Senator Obama.

Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his “plan for Iraq.” Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. During the course of eight visits to Iraq, I have heard many times from our troops what Major General Jeffrey Hammond, commander of coalition forces in Baghdad, recently said: that leaving based on a timetable would be “very dangerous.”

The danger is that extremists supported by Al Qaeda and Iran could stage a comeback, as they have in the past when we’ve had too few troops in Iraq. Senator Obama seems to have learned nothing from recent history. I find it ironic that he is emulating the worst mistake of the Bush administration by waving the “Mission Accomplished” banner prematurely.

I am also dismayed that he never talks about winning the war?only of ending it. But if we don’t win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president. Instead I will continue implementing a proven counterinsurgency strategy not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan with the goal of creating stable, secure, self-sustaining democratic allies.

There’s a new meme in town: namely, that things are improving in Iraq and in the GWOT.

WaPo:

While Washington’s attention has been fixed elsewhere, military analysts have watched with astonishment as the Iraqi government and army have gained control for the first time of the port city of Basra and the sprawling Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City, routing the Shiite militias that have ruled them for years and sending key militants scurrying to Iran. At the same time, Iraqi and U.S. forces have pushed forward with a long-promised offensive in Mosul, the last urban refuge of al-Qaeda. So many of its leaders have now been captured or killed that U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, renowned for his cautious assessments, said that the terrorists have “never been closer to defeat than they are now.”

Funny, but I just wrote about the fact that things seem to be looking up in Iraq! I guess others have noticed—but not the MSM, as Engram notes repeatedly in this post.

Of course Engram has been bird-dogging events in Iraq for a long time, creating graphs and explaining over and over in painstakingly that the reduction in casualties (both Iraqi and American) means that the tide is turning. Admirably and stubbornly, he has continued to make this unpopular case. How he ties it all together:

It seems that we may have already won this unwinnable war. In so doing, we have disconfirmed the world’s most dangerous theory. That theory, which was shared by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein alike, was that America’s powerful military was not a force to be feared because the will of the American public could be easily broken with just a bit of bloodshed. That was the lesson these tyrants learned from Vietnam, and the actions of Barack Obama and Harry Reid seemed to confirm that 9/11 did not change anything. The lesson I have learned is that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were, to my great surprise, mostly correct. As they thought, most Americans do not have the will to sustain a bloody fight. But I’ve also learned that if the president alone does show that resolve, then that’s all that matters. Now that al Qaeda in Iraq has been crushed, I suspect that they have learned this new lesson as well (well, bin Laden has).

As it turns out, it was al Qaeda, not America, that launched a misbegotten adventure in Iraq. Their great mistake in an otherwise brilliant plan was to think that even George Bush’s will could be broken once the will of the American people began to flag. It was a monumental error on their part. Now, they have lost in Iraq, and they destroyed their reputation throughout the Muslim world because of the strategy they used in their unsuccessful effort to evict American forces. That strategy was to slaughter other Muslims (Shiites) to break the will of the American people instead of directly taking on the U.S. military. It almost worked, but the gamble appears to have failed.

There’s more: because of Al Qaeda’s abhorrent massacres of Muslims, jihadism is losing favor among the world’s Muslims. Newsweek is the latest to report:

Important Muslim thinkers, including some on whom bin Laden depended for support, have rejected his vision of jihad. Once sympathetic publics in the Middle East and South Asia are growing disillusioned. As CIA Director Michael Hayden said last week, “Fundamentally, no one really liked Al Qaeda’s vision of the future.” At the same time, and potentially much more important over the long run, a new vision of Islam, neither bin Laden’s nor that of the traditionalists who preceded him, is taking shape. Momentum is building within the Muslim world to re-examine what had seemed immutable tenets of the faith, to challenge what had been taken as literal truths and to open wide the doors of interpretation (ijtihad) that some schools of Islam tried to close centuries ago.

As Peter Wehner notes, this jihadism-is-on-the-wane meme has been building recently:

CIA Director Michael Hayden gave a noteworthy interview to the Washington Post this week.

Less than a year after his agency warned of new threats from a resurgent al-Qaeda, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden now portrays the terrorist movement as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. In a strikingly upbeat assessment, the CIA chief cited major gains against al-Qaeda’s allies in the Middle East and an increasingly successful campaign to destabilize the group’s core leadership. …

…  Hayden’s assessment comes on the heels of important essays by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in The New Republic arguing that the tide within the Islamic world is turning strongly against al Qaeda and jihadism.

Wisely, Wehner cautions against excessive optimism [e.a.]:

Progress, like setbacks, can be reversed. Georgetown University terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman is surely right when he says “Al-Qaeda’s obituary has been written far too often in the past few years for anyone to declare victory. I agree that there has been progress. But we’re indisputably up against a very resilient and implacable enemy.” And Hayden’s right to warn us that progress in Iraq is being undermined by increasing interference by Iran, which he accused of supplying weapons, training, and financial assistance to anti-U.S. insurgents.

Indeed. This would be the “malign influence” that Iran casts over the entire region, according to Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony before Congress last week—a claim that was challenged by Sen Jim Webb, who apparently thinks we should go so easy on Iran that we should avoid using displeasing words like “malign. Petraeus disagreed [e.a.]:

WEBB: General Petraeus, there’s some language in response to questions that were submitted to you for the record that go to Iran that I would like to get some clarifcation or give you the opportunity to clarify. You use the word malign as an adjective, as someone who’s written nine books, I’m trying to struggle with how this fits in to what you’re saying here. You say ["]we will continue to expose you the extent of Iran’s malign activity in Iraq,” and then you say on the next page, “our efforts in regard to Iran must involve generating international cooperation and building consensus to counter malign Iranian influence,” and then you speak about its…”there are consequences for its illegitimate influence in the region.” Can you clarify for us…how are you using those words?
PETRAEUS: I can, Senator. What I’m talking about there I am characterizing that influence, it is malign and it is lethal and it is illegitimate. The arming, training, funding, and directing of militia extremists who have killed our soldiers…is very malign indeed it’s the same situation with what they’re doing…

But rather than get all caught up in Iran and other issues in the Middle East—Olmert’s extraordinary meltdown, anybody?—I’d like to reprint at length Peter Wehner’s conclusions about these extraordinary shifts in the geopolitics of the day, and the lesson we should all draw from them:

It’s worth recalling how widely the pendulum has swung in just the last two years. In 2005 and 2006, Iraq, it was said in many quarters, was lost; we either had to beat a hasty retreat or, as Joe Biden and Les Gelb counseled, we needed to separate Iraq into three largely autonomous regions (Shia, Sunni, and Kurd). For a time the Biden-Gelb plan was the “hot” one among commentators — the “third way” between leaving Iraq precipitously and foolishly attempting to repair a hopelessly broken and divided society. In fact, we are now seeing precisely the reconciliation and progress that many analysts believed was impossible to achieve.

It was also said by many analysts that as a result of the President’s misguided policies, al Qaeda was growing more popular, terrorist recruitment was up, al Qaeda had been handed great gifts by the Bush administration, and that America was less safe than prior to 9/11. The conventional wisdom was that the “Bush legacy” would be that al Qaeda was much stronger and America was much weaker than before the Iraq war.

Today the pendulum is swinging very much the other way. The reality is that things are much better now then they were at the mid-point of this decade. The cautionary tale in all this may be that we need to resist the temptation to take a snapshot in time and assuming that those things will stay as they are. Two years ago there were reasons for deep concern — but there were not reasons, it turns out, for despair or hopelessness. Events are fluid and can be shaped by human action and human will. While commentators were busy writing obituaries on Iraq, Bush, in the face of gale-force political winds, changed strategies –and Petraeus and company took on the hard task of redeeming Iraq.

Recent events are reminders, too, that equanimity and the capacity for some degree of detachment are important qualities to possess–qualities which are often lacking among those of us who inhabit the world of politics and government and comment on events on a daily or weekly basis.

Indeed.

But detachment and equanimity are, of course, the opposite of what sells on television—which is why cable “news” is 24/7 hysteria.

David Carr, writing in the New York Times, notes the dearth of media coverage of Iraq:

Even as we celebrate generations of American soldiers past, the women and men who are making that sacrifice today in Iraq and Afghanistan receive less attention every day. There’s plenty of blame to go around: battle fatigue at home, failing media resolve and a government intent on controlling information from the battlefield.

According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Coverage Index, coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has slipped to 3 percent of all American print and broadcast news as of last week, falling from 25 percent as recently as last September.

One “expert” offers the usual bland and unrevealing “explanations”:

“Ironically, the success of the surge and a reduction in violence has led to a reduction in coverage,” said Mark Jurkowitz of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. “There is evidence that people have made up their minds about this war, and other stories — like the economy and the election — have come along and sucked up all the oxygen.”

There is nothing ironic about the reduction in violence leading to a reduction in coverage. It is totally to be expected. The viewing audience, both for TV and for the movies, has proved to be allergic to the subject of Iraq, as Carr himself notes [e.a.]:

[W]hen Katie Couric, CBS’s embattled anchor, went to Iraq to report the story, she and her network were rewarded with their lowest ratings in over 20 years. Hollywood producers who had hoped there would be a public interest in cinematic perspectives on this war have been similarly punished.

Despite those callous Americans who are “punishing” well-intentioned media types who insist on bringing Iraq to their attention, some noble stalwarts continue to tell the story of Iraq [e.a.]:

Earlier this spring, Alissa J. Rubin of The New York Times wrote about flying in a C-130 in Iraq, accompanied by soldiers, including one in a coffin at the back of the plane.

“I wondered what exactly he had died for. And although I did not know him, I felt melancholy as we flew onward, accompanied now by ghosts and memories of loss,” she wrote.

I wonder if it has ever occurred to Carr that this kind of coverage—or, rather, the mind-set that frames this kind of Iraq coverage—is one of the reasons for the audience’s lack of interest in media coverage of Iraq. It’s poisonous, and worse than no coverage at all.

When a reporter writes that she wonders what exactly a just-dead soldier died for, that isn’t a display of compassion, as Carr suggests. Because while Ms. Rubin is scoring “compassion” points with her own cohort, she is pouring salt into the wound of that soldier’s grieving family.

But never mind. Chances are, his family won’t be reading the New York Times. Chances are, they’ll be at a commemoration like the one I attended today:

—in a district where the supposedly bitter folks cling to their guns and their religion, a district that voted for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama by about 75% to 25%—no one expressed the least doubt about what our war dead have died for, and continue to die for: their country, if it came down to that.

There were no movie cameras recording the event I attended in rural America. There were no luminaries, or representatives from the government. Soldiers, sailors, local guys from the VFW, a pastor, the high school marching band, and maybe 100 local residents gathered to remember their neighbors, and their neighbors’ kids.

It was very moving. I wish David Carr had been there. Perhaps he would have understood that Ms. Rubin’s kind of reporting is worse than no reporting at all.

When I posted about the massive rally for Obama in Oregon, I titled the post “rock star numbers.”

Well, whaddaya know? Obama got 75,000 people at his “rally” because the “rally” started life as a free concert [e.a.]:

Unmentioned in national reporting was the fact that Obama was preceded by a rare, 45-minute free concert by actual rock stars The Decemberists. The Portland-based band has drawn rave reviews from Rolling Stone magazine, which gave their 2005 album Picaresque four and a half stars (out of five), and another four and a half stars for 2007’s The Crane Wife.

How many of the people showed up to hear Obama, and how many to hear the band?

Good question! But it doesn’t matter, because the “optics,” as I referred to them, told the story. Or, rather, the pictures that were spread far and wide (including by yours truly) told exactly the Big Lie that Team Obama wanted to communicate—that there is a huge, unstoppable “movement” for the candidate.

Let’s examine that proposition. There are indeed a lot of people in America who are excited by Obama. Many millions have voted for him in the primaries, and he has sparked the excitement of the “creative community,” which has turned him into a pop culture phenom, which in turn has made him into a celebrity, with legions of fans—which is unusual, to say the least, for a political candidate..

Indeed, it’s been a long time since a politician excited the popular imagination to this extent. Obama brings a great deal of talent, intelligence, skill, and flexibility, and great craftiness, to the practice of politics. He is particularly effective at deflecting criticism. He does it by appealing to political correctness, public decorum, and popular prejudices. (When you are the model of personal dignity and decorum, and a very cool cat to boot, how could you go wrong by decrying “divisiveness,” “distractions,” “distortions,” “Bush’s war,” “Bush’s failed policies” “endless war,” “fear-mongering,” “the same old solutions,”?)

It’s all so effective that even I want to believe him. And that is precisely what makes me wary. Because I don’t join movements. I am naturally skeptical, and deeply suspicious of mass enthusiasms, particularly in politics. After all, if a movie star has a lot of unthinking fans, the worst that can happen is that the star gets too big for his/her britches and annoys the hell out of the rest of us due to overexposure. By contrast, if a political star has a lot of unthinking fans …

Not that Dreams from My Father is Mao’s Little Red Book. But no political star can possibly live up to the hopes that people place in him or her. There are no magic solutions to intractable, centuries-old problems. There are no easy answers. To exploit people’s hopes is, in my opinion, just as cynical as exploiting people’s fears.

Barack Obama is one of the most cynical politicians I’ve ever witnessed. He’s a snake oil peddler of the highest order—slicker even than Slick Willy.

Those influential people who are overexcited by him and should know better—the opinion leaders of the MSM—should, like me, take that as a signal to brake.

Instead, they’ve put the pedal to the metal, as Alessandra Stanley details in today’s New York Times.

Even her victory speech in Kentucky, shown live on cable news, was given perfunctory attention — a footnote to someone else’s page in history. When MSNBC called the Kentucky primary early in the evening, Tim Russert, host of “Meet the Press,” said her success with women and blue-collar voters “means Senator Obama has a lot of work to do” and sketched a rehabilitation plan. He did not mention Mrs. Clinton by name in that disquisition.

NBC simply erased Clinton from the picture, Ms. Stanley suggests. I would be full of admiration for Ms. Stanley’s courageous observation of a rival news organization if her own newspaper weren’t precisely guilty of the same thing.

Note that Clinton’s blowout of Obama in Kentucky isn’t even mentioned on the front page of the New York Times, or, for that matter, inside the news pages either. Indeed, as the headline writer says,

Clinton Fades Even in a Victory

Asserting their primacy, the media elite—from NBC to the New York Times—closes ranks and declares that it’s a victory only when they say it’s a victory. Obama is the clear winner.

Obama Declares Bid Is ‘Within Reach’

Perception is reality.

Will the American people buy this “truth”?

No.

Who’d have thought that, during our sixth year in and with more than 150,000 Americans in-country, Iraq would barely register as a blip in the public consciousness?

[A]nti-war activists are also trying to keep the war in the public eye. Last month, nine protesters gathered in front of the Regional Enterprise Tower, Downtown, where U.S. Sens. Arlen Specter and Bob Casey have offices.

“Please think about this. It’s important,” Lynne Flavin, 60, of Lawrenceville, told passersby. She held a blood red sign that said, “Support the Troops. End the War.”

Few people gave more than a glance.

Ralph Peters addresses the same issue in today’s New York Post, but from a different angle:

Do we still have troops in Iraq? Is there still a conflict over there?
If you rely on the so-called mainstream media, you may have difficulty answering those questions these days. As Iraqi and Coalition forces pile up one success after another, Iraq has magically vanished from the headlines.

Want a real “inconvenient truth?” Progress in Iraq is powerful and accelerating.

But that fact isn’t helpful to elite media commissars and cadres determined to decide the presidential race over our heads. How dare our troops win? Even worse, Iraqi troops are winning. Daily.

You won’t see that above the fold in The New York Times. And forget the Obama-intoxicated news networks - they’ve adopted his story line that the clock stopped back in 2003.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough says that “media people are living in fear“ of saying the “wrong” thing [e.a.]:

“There are all these minefields out there for Barack Obama that I think the press has been tiptoeing through,” Scarborough said. He continued, “If you attack Hillary Clinton, we have found, there are organizations out there that will bombard your sponsors, that will call the president of your network and will say, ‘Get that person off the air.’ Media people are living in fear.”

Scarborough challenged both fellow guest Farai Chideya (NPR) and members of the audience who disagreed with him, saying, “Everybody clapping in the audience obviously hasn’t worked at netowkrs during this campaign, where people take them in the back and say, ‘You’ve gotta be very careful now. If you attack Hillary Clinton too much we’re going to be called sexist. And if you attack Barack Obama too much, we’re going to be called racist.’”

I for one am delighted to hear that the architects, gatekeepers, and practitioners of the culture of political correctness tie themselves in knots as they scramble to avoid becoming its next victims. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch!