'Lying liars' and politically correct truth

A few years ago, Al Franken wrote a little book called "Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them): A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right."

As the title makes clear, Franken was only interested in skewering Republicans in his book, which was not really "fair and balanced," but which was funny. Since Franken is now running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota, it is unlikely he will be available to do an equal opportunity book about the Democrats, or as he would put it "the left."

I've done a few columns in the past about members of the media, but not so much to call them liars as to demonstrate that their so-called objective news reports are often slathered with a dripping sloppy mess of preconceptions and smarmy snickering condescension. The issue isn't whether they lie or not; the issue is whether we should simply put a label on all cable news channels that reads "For Entertainment Purposes Only - Do Not Use as a Source of Information."

And the problem isn't just the liberal media outlets such as MSNBC, where famously you can watch Bush-hater Keith Olbermann interview people even further to the left of himself in order to get answers to such pressing questions as "Has the president just lost his mind?" ("Well, yes, Keith," says the boot-licking sycophantic guest, "but more importantly the nation has lost its collective mind for putting up with this president's endless supply of bull puckey.")

All right, maybe the problem is the liberal medial outlets such as MSNBC, but it is also conservative Fox News, where the parade of preening, prattling, fawning co-anchors is non-stop from morning till night, each one more self-important than the next. It's true that Fox has a wider variety of guests on the air than MSNBC, but it doesn't matter because ultimately all of the news and all of the discussion on these "news" networks is pre-digested pablum that is intended to prevent you from having an original thought.

All that matters is ratings, as Bill O'Reilly has observed. And ratings means that we get such Howard Beale-inspired claptrap as "body language" analysis of newsmakers and sweeps-week segments on "Spring Break Girls Gone Wild." And we also get endless recyclings of stories that probably never should have been "cycled" for national consumption in the first place. You know the ones - death in Aruba, missing in Spain, assassinated by car accident in a tunnel in Paris, dismembered in a neighborhood to be named later.

Meanwhile, the important business of government goes on. The deficit grows. The illegal population soars. The lies continue.

Ah yes, the lies. That's where we started this meditation, wasn't it? So let's look at the most famous lie of the last two weeks:

"Jesse Jackson won in South Carolina twice in '84 and '88, and he ran a good campaign. And Sen. Obama is running a good campaign."

But the curious thing about this lie is that it wasn't a lie at all - it was just (sorry about this, Al Gore) an inconvenient truth. It was so inconvenient, in fact, that the mainstream media tried to use it to turn Bill Clinton (the "first black president," remember?) into a racist for saying it.

Indeed, the national media spent several days glibly telling the public that the Clintons were playing the "race card" in order to scare white voters into being afraid of Hillary Clinton's major opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama, who is indeed black.

But what exactly was the race card? And who told the lie?

Turns out the race card was played by the black voters of South Carolina, 81 percent of whom voted for Obama compared to just 17 percent for Clinton. The only way that makes sense is if the black voters were voting for Obama largely on the basis of his skin color. After all, there is barely a smidgin of difference between Clinton, Obama and John Edwards on the issues.

And the white vote shows that very clearly: Clinton won 36 percent of the white vote and Obama won about 25 percent, with about 39 percent going to Edwards, who won the state in the 2004 primary.

If the black vote had been as color-blind as the white vote, the winner in South Carolina would probably have been Edwards again, but instead blacks voted overwhelmingly for Obama because they identified with him, not necessarily because they thought he would do the best job.

That's why Bill Clinton was entirely justified in comparing Obama's victory to Jackson's in 1984 and 1988. Both men's victories were based on winning huge support among blacks while losing among whites. Indeed, in 1988, Jackson only got 7 percent of the white vote, yet won the state. That doesn't mean Obama's victory can be dismissed, but it has to be put into context. There are very few states where Obama can count on similar sizable black voting majorities. He needs to win the white vote to gain the nomination. Saying so doesn't make you a racist. Bill Clinton is not a racist; he is a realist.

Unfortunately, the media chose to inject race into the campaign as an issue, using Bill Clinton's comment as the starting point for endless finger-pointing and falsehoods that wrongly implied to voters that Clinton had done something despicable, deceitful or underhanded. He just said what the politically correct media was largely afraid to say. (Credit here to political analyst Craig Crawford who had the temerity to stand up to Olbermann on MSNBC and insist that Clinton's comment was "race free.")

Let's face it. There are plenty of lies to go around in national politics, and "lying liars who tell them." Just consider the enormous, bald-faced lie that John McCain has been telling about Mitt Romney supporting a timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Romney never said that. But don't take my word for it; check it out for yourself.

That's something the national media doesn't expect you to do, and which the politicians count on you not to do. But if you expect to play an informed role in the next election, it is something you simply have to do.