Ed Kemmick
I hope the Billings Gazette is proud of itself.
It has been more than a week since it published an editorial bashing President Obama, and it remains the “most read” story on the Gazette’s website.
The editorial has also attracted hundreds of online comments, which rarely happens anymore. It even had the distinction of being “discussed” on a Fox News segment called “Outnumbered,” in which four sorority gals and a guy with a hairdo exulted over this supposedly stunning change of direction on the part of the state’s largest newspaper.
If I really believed that the newspaper had experienced a change of heart, it wouldn’t be so bad, but the Gazette endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012. This editorial seems to have been cooked up mostly in hopes of appeasing the unappeasable.
Just look, if you have the stomach for it, at the comments under the editorial online. They are the same spittle-flecked delusional ravings we’ve heard since Obama won his first Democratic primary in 2008.
These people don’t think Obama is merely incompetent. They think he is a communist whose mission in life is to destroy the United States. Or at least that’s what they profess to believe. Who really knows?
I’m having the same trouble with the Gazette editorial. It is both cynical and half-hearted, its aims unclear and its arguments weak. Is it merely a sop to the right wing, as I suggested above, to make up for all those editorials in favor of the nondiscrimination ordinance?
If so, it was a failure. The editorial didn’t even mention Benghazi or the IRS “scandal,” which, according to Fox News, are the two biggest stories since Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon. The true believers undoubtedly saw the editorial as too little too late, delivered in unconvincing language.
But what if the editorial was simply a ploy to reel in readers, to make waves, to get talked about, to make news for the newspaper? That seems more likely. It’s not quite yellow journalism, which involves sensationalizing the news, but the editorial did carry the odor of having been written to make a splash.
If so, congratulations: 250 comments and counting, still on top of the “most read” list nine days after it was written, and adoring coverage on the aforementioned Fox News segment. But like any cheap device to bring in readers for the short term, it ultimately does damage by making the paper seem less sincere, less serious, less a voice with a real conscience.
The editorial introduces its criticisms of Obama by saying, “Let’s recap some of the mistakes.” So, let’s recap some of the editorial’s flimsiest arguments.
It begins by saying Obama has “us,” meaning the editorial board apparently, “yearning for the good ol’ days when we were at least winning battles in Iraq.” That’s a pretty flip nod to a terrible tragedy, and all we read in the specific denunciation of Obama’s handling of Iraq is that it “seems uncertain.”
So, please tell us, Billings Gazette, in no uncertain terms, what Obama or anyone else could do to salvage that miserable situation.
We are also told that the Obama administration has failed to give consumers “new innovation to replace the power supply.” In a similar vein, Obama is damned for failing to come up with “medical innovations,” for failing to push for “new cures, science or solutions when it comes to medical problems.”
There you have it. Obama has not discovered a way to wean us off oil and coal and he has not found a cure for cancer. I guess he really does want to destroy America.
There are also perfunctory mentions of Bowe Bergdahl, the VA mess and Obamacare, but they, too, suffer from half-hearted phrasing. The condemnations are softened by reminders to readers that Obama’s instincts were right in the Bergdahl case, that Obama didn’t invent the VA and that Obamacare is still too new to be truly judged.
As a result, the editorial didn’t fool anyone. Supporters of Obama saw it as a cynical sop to the right and the right saw it as a lily-livered attempt by a member of the traitorous mainstream media to wash its hands of responsibility for the communist in chief.
Wait, the editorial did fool a few people, namely the dolts on that Fox News show, but they were fooled only in the sense that they will latch onto any shred of evidence that Obama is the Antichrist.
The editorial concludes by saying that none of the individual indictments against Obama were “definitive on their own, “ but “when taken in completely,” they demonstrated incompetence and failure.
I don’t know what that one odd phrase is supposed to mean, but I venture to say that no one reading the editorial was taken in completely.
