Dirge for the race card

A twitter friend of mine requested a rant about how the Mainstream Media utterly ignore absolutely anything that makes Obama look bad, and asked if I thought it was race related.

Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I almost break my neck because some idiot won’t let us use coal to power the damn lights…  But I suppose that’s a different issue.

To the best of my knowledge and memory, the feud between the liberal media and conservatives started getting cutthroat around the time of the fall of Dan Rather. He had been head anchorman of CBS for over 20 years at that point, and was generally respected throughout the journalistic community.

In essence Rather failed to vet documents that allegedly proved G.W. Bush failed to complete his term of service with the Air National Guard and ran it as straight news.  Ultimately he resigned, undoubtedly under duress.  For the first time, the internet had landed and gutted a VERY big, VERY liberal MSM fish for lying. The MSM would NEVER go unchallenged again.  This was the shot heard round the media, if you will.

Nothing about that really involved race.  It did however morph into a Left/MSM vs. Right/internet media war that continues to this day.  And the MSM is losing.

Before Obama came along, there were MANY black politicians using the race card to preempt anyone who wanted to say anything bad about a black legislator. Its use was Standard Operating Procedure for a long time. Any and all criticism was called racist in spite of any evidence to the contrary.

Obama did not invent that.  He learned it at the feet of the masters and unsurprisingly became one himself.

I believe that the majority of the MSM was delighted that Obama was black.  They thought it would give THEM the ability to use the race card by proxy. Obama himself would be absolutely untouchable.  When challenged the response would be the race card and that was supposed to preempt any and all disagreement. Nobody was supposed to be able to politically survive an accusation of racism regardless of the truth.

I don’t believe most MSM reporters ever thought race card could be worn out. But by the time they realized calling everybody racist was no longer working, they were too invested in Obama and had nowhere to go if they could get loose. They are stuck because too much evidence of bias and partisanship is now in the hands of right wing bloggers.  New Media knows exactly how to use it against the MSM and, frankly, is foaming at the mouth like rabid dogs.

So is their protection of Obama due to race?  Kind of.  They thought they had a great weapon in the first black president, a weapon the left simply could not use with a white president because they couldn’t call all opposition racist. They were correct about that actually – and it took quite some time for everyone to become indifferent to the constant accusations of racism. The race care did eventually wear out.