Visually Impaired Sentry

     Don't get me wrong.  I do not expect anyone to read this and suddenly realize that all along they had been asleep at the switch.  It is not like that.  Instead, I think the folks who are responsible for exposing abject incompetence and total failure are intentionally looking the other way or, even worse, acting in league with those destroying that which so many thousands have died to protect. 
     The year was 1977 and I was getting ready to graduate from the University of Maryland's School of Journalism.  I was very proud of what I had done: earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Journalism.  For four years I had listened to professor after professor rail against abuse of our duty to report the news straight up if, in fact, it was a news story we were intending to write.  Only if the article were to be labeled opinion were we permitted to infuse our opinion on the subject of the article into the article. 
     Every source for the article had to be identified, and if an annonymous source were used, it had to be corroborated, and even then it could be used only if we could convince an editor that we had made a very good faith effort to convince the source it would be far better if he or she were named in the article.  The School of Journalism, as a whole, recognized that all of us were human and that, as such, we had opinions.  If we wanted to be news reporters, however, we had better bury that opinion so deep that no reader could guess what theat opinion was.
     Whatever happened to the profession of journalism in the years since 1977 is 100% beyond me.  I do know the result of these changes, though.  It is the almost complete abandonment of every ethical principle I was taught while a student.  These days, the news story that doesn't swim with far left opinion is that rare exception to the norm.  Every trick in the book is used to get the point across.  Often times, the "trick" is treating conservative and liberal differently.  Just because a liberal does something does not mean that he will be scrutinized in the same way that a conservative is scrutinized for doing the same thing.
     Take, for example, the Herman Cain story.  Cain is charged with what I suppose is womanizing.  In one case it is alleged that he put his hand under a woman's dress while in a cab on the way to his apartment.  Read that sentence and think about it for a moment.  Another charge surrounds the aftermath of a speech the Presidential Candidate gave in Cairo, Egypt.  During the speech a woman questioned Cain about one of his points.  Cain responded appropriately.  After the speech, Cain asked two other women if they would be kind enough to get the woman's name so he could ask her out to dinner.  According to the two women, they feared that he was up to no good and decided to accompany Cain and the woman who asked the question to the dinner engagement.  Cain is said to have been a gentleman during that dinner.  Again, I suggest you read about this second "charge" in its entirety. 
      Now, compare Herman Cain's alleged activity - which he has steadfastly denied - with the admitted or discovered activities of a Democrat who was the President at the time, and here, of course, I speak of William Jefferson Clinton. 
     Monica Lewinsky and Clinton conducted a tawdry affair in the Oval Office even while Clinton's wife, Hilary, was upstairs in the White House.  When it was first discovered, Clinton denied it.  In fact, he and his functionaries had geared up to fully trash Ms. Lewinsky, destroying her and her reputation at the same time, even to the point of telling the general public that she was a mentally unstable hero worshipper whose words were nothing but lies.  Unfortunately for Clinton, there was the matter of stained dress.  It sealed his fate and saved Lewinsky's reputation, or at least what was left of it.  We are told by many who were or are still close to Clinton that he has "issues" when it comes to women.  Those issues lead him to act heavy-handed on some occassions (Paula Jones, Cathleen Willy) and downright illegally in others (Juanita Broderick).  Those issues led his staff to appoint a small and close-lipped committee to handle "Bimbo Eruptions." There is no question that had any prior president been caught in the act in the same way Clinton was caught they would have resigned or been impeached.  But Clinton was so self-centered and brazen that he ignored calls for his resignation from such institutions as the Washington Post and stayed in office even while he was, in fact, impeached by the House of Representatives.  His response to the impeachment was to hold a rally on the White House lawn for legislators enmeshed in his defense.  These pro-Clinton legislators helped him survive the Senate trial and stay in office.
     Many of the same reporters and news organizations are now calling for Herman Cain to drop out of the Presidential Race.
How do they justify this in the wake of their diametrically opposed behavior in the Clinton affairs?  They don't.  And that is part of the point.  The press is so far in the left's pocket that they aren't even called upon to explain their behavior.  And so they don't.  They simply say that Cain should go.
     And that leads to the larger and much more ethically troubling point.  The Press has sat almost completely still during the first years of the Obama administration, even though these uears have seen the unquestioned worse presidential administration in the nation's history.  There has been abject failure on every front, highlighted by economic statistics that are so bad that they actually portend of the end of America's Economic and Political dominance on the international stage.  If his occurs, as it surely will if, God Forbid, obama were to be re-elected and continue with his suicidal policies, the press will have sat by and merely watched without doing a single thing to fulfill their duty as the fourth estate. 
     Point out to me one mainstream news source that has covered Obama the way the national media covered Eisenhour, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Sr., and even Clinton.  At least the press covered the Clinton debacle after trying, at first, to avoid it.  Michael Isiakopf, in his book on the subject, explains how the horrified editors of Newsweek - at that time still a somewhat respected purveyor of analytical news - actually refused to run his accounts of the Lewinsky affair until they were shamed into it by Matt Drudge's revelations on his web site.
     Now, at a time when a burgeoning alternative press has literally made fools of the editorial policies and practices of the mainstream press, the old guard seem unfazed as abuse after abuse of previously canonized press practices are revealed by sources such as Powerline, Drudge, and the two major demons of the mainstream, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh (it is a given that "talk radio" should have substituted for Rush Limbaugh, but Limbaugh was such a trendsetter that his role cannot be overemphasized, and those who followed him: Mark Levin, Shawn Hannity and Hugh Hewitt, although extremely influential and competent, pale in comparison to Limbaugh's reach, effect and profound influence.)
     If ever an objective history is written of these recent years, they will not be kind to the mainstream press.  Each and every outlet has been totally silent to the overall story of extreme incompetence, disasterous failure and complete abandonment of national values, national marks of achievement, national ethics and indeed, national norms.  Last night, while watching the Ravens' football game, a promo ran for the Sixty Minutes episode to show following the game.  The lead story on what used to be a real news show was an investigative piece on congressional conflicts of interest.  No matter what the story was about - and without watching I could predict with almost utter certainty that most or all of the congressman scrutinized would be Republican.  Am I correct?  The real story is how many pieces Sixty Minutes has done over the last three to four years on the utter disaster that is the obama administation.  Each and every area that a national administration influences - international affairs, domestic spending, domestic economies, crime rates and every other area - are areas of total failure by obama and his functionaries.  And not only are they failures, the policies of obama have guaranteed that these areas will be ones of total failure for years to come.  And there is ample evidence that obama intends this to be the case.  His use of so-called czars, which are nothing more than administrators assigned to positions of authority without any oversight by Congress.  How many investigative pieces on the obama administration have been undertaken by CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, National Public Television, CNN or the New York Times or Washington Post.  Maybe there has been one or two but I don't know of them.  But CBS was out there going after conflict of interest by the Congress, and slanting the story, I'm betting, against the loyal opposition.  Terrific.  Boreish, misleading and slanted, but terrific.