Thursday, January 31, 2008

New York Post Endorses Obama.

Rupert Murdoch's New York Post has endorsed Barack Obama after the New York Times recently endorsed Hillary Clinton. It's a strange notion for Murdoch to be endorsing any Democratic candidate and it's certainly - after The Sun's endorsement of Blair in the British campaign - something of a poisoned chalice.

And the paper has not stopped at simply endorsing Obama but, as expected, it has also done something of a hatchet job on the Clinton's.

His opponent, and her husband, stand for déjà vu all over again - a return to the opportunistic, scandal-scarred, morally muddled years of the almost infinitely self-indulgent Clinton co-presidency.

Does America really want to go through all that once again?

It will - if Senator Clinton becomes president.

That much has become painfully apparent.

Bill Clinton's thuggishly self-centered campaign antics conjure so many bad, sad memories that it's hard to know where to begin.

Suffice it to say that his Peck's-Bad-Boy smirk - the Clinton trademark - wore thin a very long time ago.

Far more to the point, Senator Clinton could have reined him in at any time. But she chose not to - which tells the nation all it needs to know about what a Clinton II presidency would be like.

I've already said what I think about some of the tactics that Bill employed in South Carolina, but it really is a bit much to have to listen to this sanctimonious bile from the New York Post.

The New York Post supported George Bush whose election campaign was far nastier than anything that Clinton has engaged in. McCain was constantly referred to by Bush's supporters as "the fag candidate" and did so, as columnist Frank Rich noted,“even as Bush subtly reinforced that message by indicating he wouldn’t hire openly gay people for his administration.”

Then, of course, there were the dreadful rumours circulated about McCain's daughter:
Bush supporters in South Carolina made race-baiting phone calls saying that McCain had a “black child.” The McCains’ daughter, Bridget, was adopted from Mother Teresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh. In August 2000, columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that the McCains “are still seething about Bush supporters in South Carolina spreading word of their dark-skinned adopted daughter.”
So it's one thing for the New York Post to endorse Obama, but it's quite another to cite Bill Clinton's campaign tactics as having anything to do with one's reasons for doing so.

The Post had no such qualms when supporting a candidate whose campaign tactics were of a much darker hue.

Click title for full article.

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