I was just reading The Washington Post’s response to the criticism of their Obama piece and it reminded me of another problem they have that is a part of the attack on reason. They often conflate completely different stories into one mass amalgam of confusion.
- In this case, they conflated conservative bloggers’ outrage toward the questioners at the CNN debate with bloggers’ outrage toward the Washington Post article about Obama. Not the same.
- When people started asking Hillary Clinton about releasing her First Lady records, the media also conflated this with John Edwards not releasing information about his request from UNC-Chapel Hill for sporting tickets before going to work at the poverty center there. Not the same!
- Lynn Sweet at the Sun-Times tried to conflate Clinton and Obama as being the same on ethics, when a clear analysis shows that Obama is far superior to Clinton on these issues.
- When Barack Obama said if he had actionable intelligence about Osama Bin Laden, he would act if Afghanistan did not, the media conflated this with Tom Tancredo’s remarks about wanting to go bomb Muslim holy sites. Not the same. Everybody thought Pakistanis were protesting Obama, not realizing because of the media coverage that it was actually Tancredo’s remarks that really set them off.
This is how we end up picking bad leaders–conflating all these politicians as being the same when they are not.
December 1, 2007 at 9:53 pm
It is clear that Obama purposefully wants to preserve ambiguity about his religious preferences. If he wanted to clearly indicate that he is a Christian, he would have adopted a *CHRISTIAN* name instead of the overtly *MUSLIM* “Barack Saddam”. There is a long biblically sanctioned tradition of heathens changing their names upon becoming followers of Christ (particularly if their original names are offensive), for example Simon->Peter, Saul->Paul. So there is a lot of legitimacy in questioning Obama’s religious proclivities.