The media double-standard for Obama

Syndicated columnist Diana West wonders what the 2008 presidential race would look like if the corrupt liberal media wasn't openly rooting for Barack Obama's election and ignoring serious questions about Obama's character and his long-standing association with far left extremists.

From her latest column:

Imagine that McCain had spent the last 20 years in the pews of a white supremacist church that supported an apartheid-like separationism from black people, and also that, until a few months ago, McCain had proudly claimed the church’s white racist pastor as his "friend, mentor and pastor" — even taking the title of his best-selling 2006 memoir from one of this man’s sermons. Imagine further that, in the 1990s, McCain had directed foundation funding toward a white-separatist educational program supported by this same pastor.

Now imagine McCain — this same imaginary McCain whose polls indicate imminent victory — had only lately left this church, brushing off his relationship with the racist pastor by pleading ignorance of the man’s vile views.

All of these McCain hypotheticals, of course, are mirrored in Barack Obama realities related to his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah "G-- d--- America” Wright. The foundation funding I refer to, detailed in a recent scoop by Stanley Kurtz, is the $200,000 that Obama, as chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge foundation, approved for a local organization that promoted black separationism as taught by such Afrocentric theorists as Jacob Carruthers, who, Kurtz writes at National Review Online, sought to use “African-centered education to recreate a separatist universe within America, a kind of state-within-a-state."

Interesting, no? Worth a question or two into Obama's more or less political relationship with Wright, no? Or views on Afrocentrism, no? Or into his media-honed reputation as the candidate of post-racial integration, no?

Read the full column, "A double-standard for Barack Obama," in The Mercury.