Reverend Who?!

It is truly disheartening, albeit not at all surprising, that the corporate media continues to make a mountain out of Barack Obama’s former pastor, whose name I refuse to mention. I am a big fan of Bill Moyers and his Journal, which airs Fridays on PBS and thusly thought he did a fine job of giving a certain aforementioned Reverend a typically eloquent forum where he could finally clear the air and give his side of the story. Perhaps his Journal appearance went straight to his head; for there he was merely a few days later spouting off, only not so eloquently, on his own terms minus the calm and cool Bill Moyers to moderate and mediate.
Obama said what he had to say about the matter and that should be that, but upon leafing through The New York Times this morning – I saw not one, nor two, but THREE stories either about said Reverend or alluding to his impact on Obama’s campaign. I come to expect this, even of the Times, but repeatedly overhyping such non-policy related stories is unfortunate nonetheless as it necessarily detracts from considerably more substantive issues being addressed.
It is likewise demonstrative of how the same attention and over-magnification is not paid to individuals related to the other candidates that utter considerably more inflammatory and insensitive statements. I have written of John McCain and his ties to various bigoted Christian righties, along with the ‘gentleman’ who referred to Obama as the ‘Tiger Woods candidate’. But outside of Countdown I hear little to no mention of Hillary Clinton’s most recent endorsers respectively saying she makes the fictional Rocky Balboa look like a pansy and that (supposedly unlike other Democratic candidates) she possesses ‘testicular fortitude’.
For some reason, both McCain and Clinton are able to rather easily dismiss the misstatements of their supporters as ‘not their own’ – yet Obama gets repeatedly nailed. I am also reminded of when so much hay was made over Obama supposedly wanting to bomb Pakistan (just the regions were Al Qaeda is known to be hiding, actually), and G.I. Hillary talks about decimating Iran! He is much too savvy to publicly imply that this discrepancy is somehow race-related, but race certainly has something to do with it.
It is considerably easier for the media to report on something that is intriguing, which a majority of citizens are bound not to understand first hand, as a majority of Americans are not black. In the end, this nonsense truly does not have any bearing at all on what kind of President Mr. Obama would be; a really rather good one I believe.