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Conservative pundit and WLS-AM talker Tom Roeser is hoppin’ mad that NBC News anchor Brian Williams admitted the news media may be treating Sen. Barack Obama just as they’ve been treating Pres. George Bush for nearly 8 years now: with kid gloves.

This similarity isn’t a point Mr. Roeser chose to bring up — focusing instead on anchor Williams’ comment that, “it’s hard to stay objective covering Obama” — but time and again Americans have borne witness to a news media too enthralled, too smitten, and too in awe to really question President Bush. Admittedly, Mr. Roeser’s neglect may have something to do with the fact he’s a partisan conservative and may not want to see the light about how the Fourth Estate has admitted time and again to being mere stenographers for the White House. The instances of the Bush Administration getting a pass from the media, however, are numerous and cannot be denied — from a stenographic White House press corps and scripted “news conferences” to Katie Couric on location in Iraq regurgitating Pentagon spin and news anchor after news anchor admitting they were too timid in their role as the public’s eyes, ears and fact checkers.

Back to Mr. Roeser’s venting. Says he:

NBC’s Brian Williams, the TV anchor who began life as an intern in Jimmy Carter’s White House, confessed on MSNBC the other night that “it’s hard to stay objective covering Obama.” Oh now, is it? And what kind of ghastly admission is that? And why is that? What ideas have Obama offered that captivate the media? Is it his vacuous offering of “hope” which constitutes a Rorschach inkblot test where the psychologist shows you a blot and you fathom you can see any number of concepts in it? Bill Clinton for one finally got it right that this guy Obama has been getting away with murder in the white, guilt-ridden self-condemnatory, affluent, ill-educated media for years-witness the tender loving care the fast-fading “Sun-Times” is giving him with the hagiographer Jennifer Hunter, she who was known as the wife of the last publisher and the pouting, hands on hips racial cheer leader Mary Mitchell.

“Hard to stay objective” means one thing. The juveniles who cover politics now and who missed the civil rights era are longing to reproduce it by locking arms and singing “We Shall Overcome” by serenading a faint, very faint, copy of a nondescript male model-styled “Gentleman’s Quarterly” “black leader” to the White House to assuage their own “guilt” for not having been around when King, Jim Farmer, Hosea Willliams and others were in danger of losing their lives. Well the differences are clear to behold if the media and the star-struck Brian Williams would pay attention.

King’s theology was orthodox and rooted in Judeo-Christianity. Obama’s such as it is, is indebted to a materialistic anti-U.S. demagogue named Jeremiah Wright who explains that his church is “based upon the systemized liberation theology that started in 1969 with the publication of James Cone’s book, `Black Power and Black Theology.’” Obama is smart enough not to identify with the Jeremiah Wright view except to purloin Wright’s catchword “The Audacity of Hope”-whatever that means…something that Obama is unable to define and the white-led media is too vacuous to even ponder.

Yowza. Somebody sounds jealous. Couldn’t Mr. Roeser have just quoted news anchor Williams, said his myopic piece about media scrutiny of politicians, and left it at that?

Why such an acid-tongued ad hominem?

Not surprisingly, most of Mr. Roeser’s wild-eyed rant is easily debunked. I’ve already post many times on the Obama haters’ fetish for his Christian church (the latest are here and here in relation to Mr. Roeser’s fellow conservative partisan and Obama hater, Fran Eaton). The conservatives’ off-the-wall slams against this Christian congregation of 8000+ faithful apparently know no bounds and, for a group that claims the mantle of “values voters”, it’s really quite unbecoming and hypocritical to be so opposed to these Christians just because their practice of the faith is a wee bit different than, perhaps, Mr. Roeser’s or Ms. Eaton’s own flavor of Christianity. (Is Mr. Roeser Christian?)

PS: Dr. King believed in liberation and ending the long night of racism just as much as the folks at Trinity United Church of Christ… Perhaps Mr. Roeser missed that in his anger.

As for Mr. Roeser’s claims of Sen. Obama somehow being “vacuous” (and the Clintons’ claims of same, for that matter), the Obama campaign has answered them in advance with reams of white papers, policy statements and position documents. One just has to spend their energy doing an easy Google search instead of wasting it on hollow screeds.

Finally, here’s this weird conservative partisan rap of “white guilt” again, as if the anti-politically correct forces think “guilt” has something to do with Sen. Obama’s rise to prominence. In what Cracker Jack box did they find this balderdash?

I’ve already asked what the heck “white guilt” even is since it seems to be a growing conserv-o-partisan meme. Given that primaries are actually votes for preference (it’s not an either-or, so it’s a stretch to claim primary voters are voting “against” any one candidate), it’s clear that Iowa caucusgoers not only liked but believed in Sen. Obama’s positions and, yes, his statements to put him in pole position. It’s also clear that enough New Hampshire voters felt the same way and chose to place him in second (with 16,000 more votes than even the Republican “first place” finisher, John McCain).

Since Sen. Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire, does that mean she won because of “male guilt”? This thought, apparently, didn’t cross Mr. Roeser’s mind in his dissection of NH.

Mr. Roeser’s bitterness has led to ridiculousness… Or maybe he’s just green with envy that a Democratic prez candidate is getting the same kid glove treatment as Pres. Bush (which isn’t actually true overall, in light of the scrutiny given to Mr. Obama’s record — going back to kindergarten no less — and even the apparently lunar cycle repetition of the infopimped not-really-a-madrassa, not-actually-Muslim, and you-mean-it’s-a-normal-church? non-issue faux controversies, all of which has been debunked over and over).

Too bad.

Is demonstrated in a post that also exemplifies his aversion to editing.

An adversarial press vis-à-vis Republicans, forcing Giuliani’s third wife to admit she was herself married three times, something she admitted after interrogation last week. Only after steadily asking for as many biographical details as are available for other presidential candidates when reporters asked where Obama’s Kansas-born white mother was, we learned that she had died twelve years ago. Case closed. Some adulators implied her death was a private matter–nobody’s business; others defended the close-to-the-vest information policy, asserting, “we knew all the time she was dead.” The point was: Few knew or asked more than what the campaign office chose to release.

Let me offer a line from Obama’s DNC Convention speech:

They are both passed away now.

Only after asking for biographical details…

Uh huh.

Perhaps Tom should remember that at the same time they were discussing Mitt Romney’s great grandfather, the press also reported that Obama had a slave owning ancestor as well.

But more to the point, one cannot tell why the press should be concerned with the death of his mother.  A woman died of cancer.  That’s it.

We learned that while the senior Stanley Dunham is dead, his wife Madelyn is alive at 84 but that there is an embargo on her being interviewed. Although she was a bright and successful bank executive during Obama’s Punahou days, her receptivity is a closed book. We know that in the words of his half-sister “those were robust years full of energy and cacophony and she loved all of it.” Why is she kept away from the media? Well, we’re not privileged to know that-yet. Perhaps never. Is she incapacitated or unwilling to be interviewed? We don’t know that, either. Big media shush: It is not good form to ask.

You know some people get older and know they aren’t as sharp as they once were.  This might lead them to not drive anymore or say not comment in the press.  Sometimes the family has to take the keys away.  Perhaps given the repeated and egregious errors Roeser has made, it’s time for the family to take the keys to the blog and radio show away.

It’s all about being clubby with the gang.

Brad Cole, the mayor of Carbondale, struck a home run with me on my show last night. One of the classiest guys around, he refused to gut his old boss George Ryan…although it would be popular to do so. That kind of guy deserves to be reelected…