William McGurn has been variously employed as a writer for the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch and George W. Bush, entitling him to the soft bigotry of low expectations. In today’s WSJ, he manages to clear the bar:
By choosing Fort Bragg for her first official trip outside the capital last Thursday, Michelle Obama signaled that she will use her position as First Lady to promote one of America’s most deserving causes: our military families. Plainly the families loved it. Just look at the smiles on those children as she read them “The Cat in the Hat.”So it was just a little disconcerting the next morning to hear the First Lady explain how she came to this issue during last year’s campaign. “I think I was like most Americans,” she told ABC News. “Pretty oblivious to the life of military families. Sort of taking it for granted.”
Perhaps Mrs. Obama did take these families for granted. Surely, however, it’s extraordinary to suggest that “most Americans” did the same.
The game here is to whelp a meme that attacks the enemy’s strong point, as the McCain campaign did when it tried to turn candidate Obama’s crowd appeal into a thing odious to all Americans: celebrity.
Look at McGurn’s last paragraph above to see how the trick is done. Mrs. Obama had said that she was “oblivious to the life of military families.” And that most Americans were too.
This is true beyond argument. William McGurn is also oblivious to that life, and so am I. Perhaps less oblivious than McGurn, since I once comprised half of a military family. But that was long ago, and now I, too, am oblivious. So are Rupert Murdoch and George W. Bush and most of the members of the latter’s administration and for that matter most of America. Nixon had that very outcome foremost in his mind when he ended the draft in 1973.
Now look at what McGurn has done with Mrs. Obama’s unexceptionable words. The First Lady is no longer taking the “life of military families” for granted; all of a sudden she is taking the families themselves for granted.
“It,” as you and I and McGurn know perfectly well, is a singular pronoun referring back in this case to “life.” Big difference, but McGurn knows his readers won’t notice. So he segues into the “extraordinary” news that Michelle Antoinette has the colossal nerve to think that real Americans are as ungrateful for the sacrifices of America’s military families as she is herself — her with her fancy Chicago designer dresses and her big arms and her disgusting “popularity.”
It will be interesting to see if this swill makes it into the media mainstream. Don’t be surprised if it does. Remember how a draft-dodging dry drunk turned Kerry from a war hero into a cowardly malingerer with insufficiently large pieces of shrapnel in his body?
And remember back in 2000 how the same smear machine used the same truth-twisting methods as McGurn’s to turn a future Nobelist into a pathetic pathological liar? If your memory is hazy, take a look at this careful dissection of Washington’s media manipulation by Robert Parry.
These sleazy techniques worked to get George W. Bush into the White House and they are already being used to drive Barack Obama out of it.
Anybody waiting for anything like honesty and integrity out of these slimy bastards has a long wait ahead (eternity). Makes the biggest argument I know for mandatory sterilization.
Posted by: knowdoubt on March 21, 2009 7:29 AM
Notice he did not mention ANY Rethugs that visited with the families of the military. The military only appeared as back drops to their agenda speeches. No families ever.
Posted by: regulararmyfool on March 21, 2009 3:38 PMTo be fair to W, a thing which does not come easily to me, he visited quite often with wounded Iraq vets. I don't recall any pictures, though. Maybe it was like Dover Air Force Base, photographers banned. But don't I remember seeing a picture of him with a legless vet once? Can anybody help me out on this? Anybody with still-functioning synapses?
Posted by: Jerry Doolittle on March 21, 2009 3:58 PM