The "all-things-Obama" media love-fest continues: The Valerie Jarrett appointment

It's been exactly a week since Washington Post ombudsman, Deborah Howell wrote her piece admitting bias in the coverage of "all-things-Obama" during the campaign. This particular sentence elicited such a loud, "Ya think???" from me, I scared my damn self:

"But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago."

And wonder of wonders, here we are with the mainstream media engaging in gushing, leg-tingling ObamaLove yet again, still not scrutinizing the President-elect's recent appointee. Lord! It feels like the Bush Administration/Iraq war, parrot-the-company-line coverage all over again!

At least the conservative, Judicial Watch is paying attention. Oh I'm sure some esteemed journalists will characterize them as conservative wing nuts or something, but through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, they've got documents backing up what they say in their November 14, Obama Advisor Valerie Jarrett Linked to Real Estate Scandals! (She reminds of another Black woman I know who sold a great idea of "revitalization and restoration" of the Black community and then used the cash to unjustly enrich herself and her family for years. The city council finally paid her off to bow the hell out this year as I recall.)

Even Lynn Sweet (whose work I followed because it always had the "balance" clearly missing from the corporate shills of the large print, radio and television media organizations), seems to have soft-pedaled on Valerie Jarrett. Her November 15 piece, The Valerie Jarrett Story. Named senior Obama White House advisor, was certainly not the kind of truth-telling I'd come to know and love. I mean, if you're going to tell "The Valerie Jarrett Story," shouldn't it be the whole story? Judging from the comments section, I'm not alone in my disappointment.

Were it not for Ms. Sweet's prior reporting on the Chicago crew, The Boston Globe's investigative piece to which I linked in my last post and Ryan Lizza's well-written and informative, "Making It, How Chicago shaped Obama" in The New Yorker last July which was swallowed up in the smoke-screen of outrage at the satirical cover - subjective hype and sketchy, yet masterfully presented voting records would've been all I had to begin trying to objectively quiet that nagging feeling of being worked by the man who looked Black like me.

At this point, I don't expect much from most mainstream media outlets. They've got too much invested in holding up this new administration as the "Second Coming" rather than holding them accountable.

A tribute to new Senior White House Advisor, Valerie Jarrett and the President-elect...

Flineo's done it again!



And just to refresh your memory about the "ties that bind," I'm re-posting this link to The Boston Globe's excellent piece of investigative reporting, Grim proving ground for Obama's housing policy, published in June '08 about Grove Parc Plaza. And please, watch the video introduction as well. It seems knowing where all the bones are buried is another, great political "strategy."

Crowning Obama - America diminishes my history for "his story"

Tomorrow "history" will likely be made yet again this year. On the heels of having been the first African-American man ever selected nominee of one of the two major political parties in America, Sen. Barack Obama stands poised to be the first African-American President of the United States. And I, a Black American woman, will have had absolutely nothing to do with it. Given the shoulders upon which I stand, I’m fine with that.

Call it generational, call it voting against my interest, call it stupid – call it whatever you like, but I will be casting my vote for the candidate who has most spoken to the issues about which I care deeply. Will she win? Absolutely not. Does that matter to me? Not especially. I’m not, after all, trying to “gain the world.”

Now this is not a decision to which I’ve come in haste. Like many Black children of the Civil Rights era, I want to see a Black president in my lifetime. That being said however, the fact a candidate looks “Black Like Me” (props to John Howard Griffin) cannot be the sole reason I vote for him. As my grandmother used to say, “It’s not what you say, it’s what you do.” And as I watched the manipulative, albeit skillful machinations of the Obama campaign over this seemingly interminable campaign season, I took issue with plenty of what he did - beginning with his maneuvers in the state of Florida.

As a registered Florida Democrat with firsthand experience of the Republicans’ theft that gave us Bush 43 in 2000, I went to vote on January 29th not only to choose a presidential nominee, but to say YES - to Verifiable Paper Ballots. Closer to home, I needed to say No - to Amendment 1, a property tax reduction amendment geared toward the wealthier of us in exchange for cutting local services to the least of us, most notably our schools.

Sen. Obama's “Yes We Can” train hadn’t yet picked up much steam, particularly in the Black community - as evidenced by our very low voter turnout. But once it did, with the help of the dreaded and patently unfair caucuses, Black Floridians adopted a new line: “We didn’t go and vote because the DNC said it wouldn't count.” Excuse me? Shouldn’t voting on local issues, whose effects if passed, we would immediately feel in our everyday lives be at least as important as choosing a presidential nominee?

And who would a thunk it? Blacks, having been considered "three-fifths persons" constitutionally upon the birth of this nation and beyond, had their voices further devalued by an America-identified-Black, constitutional law professor! No sense of history repeating itself there.

In a response eerily akin to Stockholm Syndrome, many Blacks were just fine with that disenfranchisement. I’ve been told, on more than one occasion, “We have to get him in there first.” And then - what? He’ll respect you in the morning? Guess their Mamas never shared that old adage, "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free."

Blocking our 1.7 million votes because the majority weren't cast for him may have been a great political strategy in the eyes of those to whom strategy matters. But strategy doesn't matter to me –democracy does. And as I continued to watch while he played to the crowds on the dust-ups regarding flag pin/no flag pin, campaign financing/no campaign financing, Rev. Wright & Trinity/no Rev. Wright & Trinity, NAFTA/ no NAFTA, Hamas/no Hamas, no on FISA/yes on FISA, etc., etc., I was convinced he and his crew would just hold up their collective fingers, test which way the wind was blowing and proceed accordingly. Not exactly the strong, principled, Black man he’s been made out to be.

Somewhere deep inside though, I'd really held out hope the senator from Illinois might somehow be different from the politics as usual to which we’ve become accustomed. As he grudgingly spoke the dreaded "R" word in Philadelphia back in March, I was cautiously optimistic. But once that photo-op was over, the elephant was swiftly returned to the corner it has inhabited since the advances of the Civil Rights movement. I knew then, I could not support him.

Popular opinion insists Sen. Obama is the fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream. Now let’s see. Has he used his campaign to address poverty and those it affects most in this country? How about our prison industrial complex continuing to disproportion-ately swallow up Black and Latino boys at such an alarming rate? Did the disparity in sentencing, proven to be racially motivated by The Sentencing Project make it in? What about the lack of decent schools with qualified teachers in every class? Geoffrey "Whatever It Takes..." Canada as an advisor on education would have been a great move. Did I miss the part when he talked about the lack of affordable housing that breeds homelessness or worse? Well, I can see why he wouldn't have wanted to talk about that - Grove Parc and his community organizing might have really been under scrutiny. But okay, what about our broken judicial system meting out both the death penalty and life sentences to those of a decidedly darker hue, faster than The Innocence Project can blink? Dallas D.A. Craig Watkins, a young Black man with a true understanding of Dr. King's dream, could have helped him with that one. I guess America's only ready to elect a "Black" president if he doesn't talk about any issues important to Black people.

I don’t know the content of Sen. Obama’s character. If we're honest, few of us do. But I’m almost certain I felt those shoulders upon which I stand slump mightily and often during this long campaign season. As we all flock to the polls on Tuesday, to exchange our first viable chance at substantive change for an alleged “sui generis” candidate - will it be history or his story? Only time will tell.

Forget satirical cover, Lizza's column is what should concern residents of ObamaWorld

Main Entry: sat·ire

1 : a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
2 : trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly
I just want to sit that definition right up there as I write this, just to remind myself that -- I'm not losing my damn mind along with everybody else today!!

Here I was thinking, "Now you know they're wrong for that. They didn't have to slam the "bitters" or the Republicans that hard!"

In that quirky little way I have of looking at oh, I don't know - SATIRE, I saw them encapsulating all the things people seem to fear about the Obamas and skewering them as "issues" Americans maybe shouldn't be so worried about. You know, all those "issues" that keep popping up, forcing that instant and routine as of late, "chuck-you-under-that-big-ole bus" reaction. You remember those don't you?

I said to myself, "Self, now you know ObamaWorld is not going to find this funny - at all." They're going to see it as a full-scale attack!" I started ticking off in my head a list of the things I was sure would occur as a result of this cover:

1. A whole lot of angry, divisive comments from Obama supporters, threatening to cancel their subscriptions to The New Yorker, berating the magazine and the artist with so many, "How could you do such a things?"
2. A whole lot of schadenfreude, accompanied by anything from low snickers, to people rolling on the floor laughing, particularly from Democrats who don't support Obama and Republicans who, well, don't support Obama.
3. A decidedly indignant, "no-chuckle-here," official victim statement from Camp Obama (Jeez! didn't The New Yorker know that it's absolute sacrilege to think, say, write or draw anything other than that which has been rubber-stamped by Camp Obama?!)
4. A quick "It wasn't me" official statement from the McCain camp (though I'm sure they danced a little jig when they got their first glimpse of it!)
5. Pundits and surrogates on the left, pundits and surrogates on the right, all of them trying to convince us that their realities should be our own

I was right and then some. Commenters everywhere are a little bit warm today. This, from a HuffPo reactionary:

"It is not satire, satire takes the TRUTH and shows an extreme absurdity of that truth.You have taken a MISCONCEPTION and tried to show it as an absurd truth."

O-o-okay! I really do get the first part of this, the second part - not so much. The "truth" in the cover is the way a lot of people think about who the Obamas are. Those ARE their truths. The artist has no misconception about that. Thanks to the mainstream media, talk radio and the blogosphere, we've all been inundated with these um, - "issues." Would that one and all had been so rabid about say-y-y FISA? NAFTA? Iraq? Campaign financing? The death penalty? Abortion? Grove Parc Plaza? But I digress. Look, this is just my pea-brained opinion but, this cover is not about the Obamas!

And this from an L.A. Times commenter absolutely basking in his schadenfreude:

"Beyond funny. I laughed out loud. After Sen. Obama's spineless performance this week... this strikes me as quite mild. He should be on the cover as the coward he is. That vote this week took away any consideration many democrats had for him being a " man of his word ". He should be a wolf on the cover hiding under sheep's clothing would be a more accurate depiction of the Sen. who spins and spins and rarely keeps his word or votes with the integrity he so vigorously defends."

Another HuffPo knee-jerker shared this rant:

"As of today, we have cancelled our New Yorker subscription. Although we get the purported irony of your Obama cover, we find that it completely crosses the line into outrageous prejudice and bigotry weakly disguised as a spoof. It's offensive, but our decision to cancel after decades as New Yorker subscribers is because your cover wantonly and irresponsibly fuels a malevolent ignorance with imagery that can easily be taken out of your ironic context..."

Now to whose "malevolent ignorance" might she be referring? Oh-h-h, I get it. It's okay to insult and demean others just as long as you don't even give the appearance of either questioning or insulting Sen. Obama. Too bad his supporters never believed in such reciprocity.

Nico Pitney, over at The Huffington Post, shared this email exchange about the new cover he had with the artist, Barry Blitt. In his update, he provided these other covers by Blitt:


I guess these can be considered satire since they have nothing to do with how people feel about the Anointed One. Let's be clear. Of course, the cover can be interpreted more than one way. But doesn't that depend on the lens through which one views it? And I know Sen. Obama has a little issue with the 4th Amendment, but doesn't the 1st Amendment protect The New Yorker's right to publish the cover?
Now I can understand how his frenzied flock might see this as a potential threat to the Big Coronation.

No really! Think about it. If all you had was a selected nominee, with a tenuous resume and an egocentric, calculating agenda, accompanied by a penchant for shifting positons and people upon which his support was built, surrounded by power-hungry handlers who will say or do most anything to get what they believe to be their marionette into the Burning House, you might be a little frenzied too!

What I really found interesting and connective to the cover, in my little pea-brain, is the piece inside - "Making It, How Chicago shaped Obama" - by Ryan Lizza. Instead of worrying about the obvious absurdities portrayed on the cover, residents of ObamaWorld might just want to be a little more concerned about how Mr. Lizza’s factual account has ripped off that crazy “Change You Can Believe In” mask their guy’s been wearing for more than a year now, exposing the typical, inside-the-Beltway/Chicago-style politician that is the senator from Illinois.

In my “No permanent friends, no permanent enemies…” post back in April, I linked to Skeptical Brotha’s, "Barack's Betrayal" post which offers an excellent account of the ties that bind the Changeling to the Daley machine and the politics as usual against which he’s been so vehemently campaigning. It is a stinging indictment by a brother who pulled no punches and definitely worth a
read.

And you Obama supporters, calm the hell down please. His road to the Burning House has been so carefully and cunningly greased that I'm certain, nothing short of him getting up on TV and cussing everybody out will keep him from sliding right on in there - particularly since most of America seems asleep at the wheel. And again, there aren’t racists around every damn corner looking to cold-cock your guy. And if there are - you’ve been living with them all along with nary a peep of this righteous indignation.