The Media Research Center’s collective lingering case of Obama Derangement Syndrome has continued to linger throughout this year. Some recent examples:
- A May 11 post by Alex Christy complained; “For the third episode of Iconic America, PBS explored the history and meaning of the Gadsden Flag and during the portion covering the Tea Party protests during the Obama era, the assorted cast sought to reduce those protests to racists and other bigots. … These normal protestors of all races were lumped in with birthers who wanted to “send him back to Kenya” and conspiracy theorists who claimed Obama is a Muslim.” We don’t recall the MRC previously making a distinction between “normal” Obama-hating protesters and the “conspiracy theorists.”
- Christy groused in a May 15 post that “The cast of CBS Mornings oohed and aahed on Tuesday in a response to their interview of Barack Obama where the former president pushed Australian-style gun control and lamented that networks like CBS do not have the power they once did. Nate Burleson claimed the interview made him want to be a better journalist, Tony Dokoupil claimed Obama’s views on guns were “historically” correct and Obama donor and vacation pal Gayle King claimed Obama’s character, integrity, and intelligence are never to be questioned.
- A June 23 post by Christy whined about an interview Obama did with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, particularly that he “continued to ramble about the GOP and “the siloing of information” and how people who watch Fox News live in a different world than people who read the New York Times,” further grumbling that “Most of the interview was full of softballs.”
- Four days later, Christy whined that “racial provocateur Wesley Lowery” pointed out that racism in the U.S. didn’t stop because Obama was elected president and that there was a bit of a white backlash to it; he insisted that under Lowery’s thinking, “The country is thus in a no-win situation. Even if both parties elect black people, it doesn’t matter, because Lowery won’t allow himself to see people as anything other than racists.” Christy also claimed that “In reality, Lowery and his interviewers only showed that not everybody likes Barack Obama, high crime, or supports gender ideology.”
- A July 30 post by Clay Waters complained about another TV appearance by the “far-left race-baiting” Lowery “about his new book on how white Americans and the Republican Party became scared and possibly dangerous racists after Barack Obama’s election.? Waters made no attempt to disprove anything Lowery said.
An interview with the author of a 6-year-old biography of Obama, however, set off serious Obama derangement bells, and Tim Graham spent his Aug. 9 column defending the book and bashing Obama yet again:
The media deification of Barack Obama has really never ended. His election to the presidency in 2008 was treated as a milestone, like man landing on the moon. Allegedly objective journalists lined up in every studio and on every front page to do him homage.
It wasn’t journalism. It was more like idolatry. It was like Bryant Gumbel harshly replying in 1989 to new information about Rev. Martin Luther King’s adultery. He said “When the truth collides with a legend, print the legend.”
This line came to mind in reading a recent Tablet magazine interview with liberal historian David Garrow, a Martin Luther King specialist. Garrow’s massive 2017 tome on Obama – titled Rising Star – was blasted by New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani. She argued his epilogue was like a “Republican attack ad.” This is comical, since Garrow’s epilogue recounted quotes from, among others, liberals at the Times and The Washington Post.
[…] [David] Samuels suggests Garrow’s book was scorned because it highlighted “a remarkable lack of curiosity” about a man who was “treated less like a politician and more like the idol of an inter-elite cult.” It underlined that as Obama decided he wanted to be president one day, he realized having a white wife would be an obstacle.Obama’s memoir told a story about taking his composite girlfriend to a “very angry play” by a black playwright and she came out “talking about why black people were angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering – nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said.”
[…]This might seem like fragments of ancient history, but every negative fragment about Obama has the potential to upset the cemented mythology. The Obama of myth never compromises his ideals (or invents personal history) to get ahead. That’s why book critics accuse authors of writing “Republican attack ads” when they throw a negative shadow. “When the truth collides with a legend, print the legend.”
Actually, it is ancient history, given that Obama left office nearly seven years ago. Graham just looks like someone who’s unable to let go of a grudge. If there’s one bit of comfort to be taken from his screed, it’s that he didn’t go the salacious WorldNetDaily route and obsess over an alleged statement in a letter to an old girlfriend in which he alluded to gay sex. That was left to Ben Shapiro who made sure to know in a syndicated column published by the MRC on Aug. 11 that “Obama wrote letters to a girlfriend in which he “repeatedly fantasizes about making love to men.” He did serve up more grudgey Graham stuff, huffing that Obama’s “victory — that triumph — came at the expense of the American people, who were promised a racial conciliator and a man of honor by a media invested in that lie. When the truth materialized and our institutions continued to perpetuate the lie, our institutions collapsed. We live in the era of Barack Obama still.” somehow, that collapse is never the fault of right-wingers like Graham and Shapiro who hated Obama so intensely that they refused to cooperate with him in any way lest he be seen as a successful president.