First, there turns out to be no standard of objectivity in contemporary journalism. Palin’s career as a city councilwoman, mayor, and governor of Alaska was never seen as comparable to, or — indeed, in terms of executive experience — more extensive than, Barack Obama’s own legislative background in Illinois and Washington. Somehow we forgot that a mother of five taking on the Alaskan oil industry and the entrenched male hierarchy was somewhat more challenging than Barack Obama navigating the sympathetic left-wing identity politics of Chicago.

– Victor Davis Hanson

The reason Bill Clinton is sulking in his tent is because he feels that Obama surrogates succeeded in painting him as a racist. Clinton has many sins, but from his student days to his post-presidency, his commitment and sincerity in advancing the cause of African Americans have been undeniable. If the man Toni Morrison called the first black president can be turned into a closet racist, then anyone can.

– Charles Krauthammer.

Twenty five years ago today Islamic extremists from the Iranian-funded, Lebanese-based, terrorist group social service group called Hezbollah murdered by truck bomb 241 American servicemen. Indeed, until September 11, 2001, Hezbollah was responsible for more American deaths than any other terrorist organization.

Pat Dollard remembers.

It is a rare cold day that I post something from Pat Buchanan, particularly due to his odd defense of Charles Lindburgh isolationists just prior to the Second World War, his seeming apologist attitudes towards Nazi Germany (albeit some taken out of context by his enemies), and his rhetoric — that would make your typical far Left conspiracy nut blush — accusing the U.S. of being beholden to Israel’s interests.

Having said that, I must agree with his question, “What if Saturday Night Live mocked Michelle Obama?”

The media cannot get enough of the “Saturday Night Live” impersonations of Palin as a bubblehead. News shows pick up the Tina Fey clips and run them and run them to the merriment of all.

Can one imagine “Saturday Night Live” doing weekly send-ups of Michelle Obama and her “I’ve never been proud” of my country, this “just downright mean” America, using a black comedienne to mimic and mock her voice and accent?

“Saturday Night Live” would be facing hate-crime charges.

How do we know? When the New Yorker ran a cartoon of Michelle in an Angela-Davis afro with an AK-47 slung over her shoulder, New Yorker editors had to go on national television to swear they were not mocking Michelle, but the conservatives who have so caricatured Michelle and the Messiah.

Is there a media double standard? You betcha.

Contrast these two stories:

SEATTLE, Washington (CNN) — Clifton Mitchell helped register nearly 2,000 voters for the community group ACORN. But not one of them actually existed.

ACORN is under federal investigation in at least 10 states.

Meanwhile,

[Mark Ambinder] Military ballots are being tossed in Fairfax Co, VA because of a “technicality.”

Now… were Barack Obama as popular amongst the military vote as John McCain is, do you think the Democrats and media cheerleaders would be crying bloody murder over those tossed ballots?

Here’s The National Post’s Lorne Gunter:

For nearly 30 years, Professor [John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville] Christy has been in charge of NASA’s eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily around the globe. In a paper co-written with Dr. [David Douglass of the University of Rochester] Douglass, he concludes that while manmade emissions may be having a slight impact, “variations in global temperatures since 1978 … cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide.”

Moreover, while the chart below was not produced by Douglass and Christy, it was produced using their data and it clearly shows that in the past four years — the period corresponding to reduced solar activity — all of the rise in global temperatures since 1979 has disappeared.

It may be that more global warming doubters are surfacing because there just isn’t any global warming.

At a John McCain rally in Virginia on Saturday, Tito Munoz had come to face the enemy: the news media, which had declared war on Joe Wurzelbacher.

“Why the hell are you going after Joe the Plumber?” Munoz yelled at a group of reporters, including my National Review colleague Byron York. “Joe the Plumber has an idea. He has a future. He wants to be something else. Why is that wrong? Everything is possible in America. I made it. Joe the Plumber could make it even better than me. … I was born in Colombia, but I was made in the U.S.A.”

… So we’ve listened to Joe Biden question the patriotism — and, at times, piety — of those who don’t share Obama’s economic vision. We’ve listened to Michelle Obama promise that her husband will make Americans “work” in his effort to fix our “broken souls.” We’ve heard the candidate himself say that we should agree to higher taxes in the name of “neighborliness,” and that he’d raise the capital gains tax — even if it demonstrably lowered revenues — “for the purposes of fairness.” His “tax cut” for 95 percent of Americans is in large part a middle-class dole. He will cut checks to millions who pay no income tax at all and call it a tax cut.

In short, Obama’s explanation to Joe the Plumber that we need to “spread the wealth around” is a sincere and significant expression of his worldview, with roots stretching back to his church and his days as a community organizer.

Millions of Americans don’t share this vision. They don’t see the economy as a pie, whereby your slice can only get bigger if someone else’s gets smaller. They don’t begrudge the wealthy their wealth; they only ask to be given the same opportunities. They look at countries such as France and, rather than envy its socialized medicine and short workweeks, they fear its joblessness and tax policies that punish entrepreneurialism. People like Tito Munoz look at America and see an open path to their own American dream.

It would be nice if the media at least tried to understand this point.

Instead, they attacked and belittled a citizen who asked a candidate a question. They think he’s stupid or a liar for not understanding that a promised check from a President Obama is more valuable than some pipe dream about future success.

It’s funny. When PBS’s Gwen Ifill had a straightforward conflict of interest — her forthcoming book hinges on an Obama presidency — that should have prevented her from moderating the VP debate, she and her fellow journalists tittered at the critics. All that matters, Ifill and company insisted, are the answers, not the questioner.

That’s apparently the standard for people like Gwen the Journalist. But if Joe the Plumber gets revealing but embarrassing answers out of the media’s preferred candidate, suddenly the questioner matters more than the answer. And he must be punished.

– Jonah Goldberg.

Reader Bruce sent me this great retort to a ridiculous chart in the New York Times supposedly proving that the stock market does better under Democrat presidencies than under those of Republicans. The simplicity is its stupidity, as it does not take into account which party controls Congress.

And since we’re on the topics of economics and taxation, here’s a few important notes regarding what an Obama presidency might do:

[Wall Street Journal] Jason Grumet is currently executive director of an outfit called the National Commission on Energy Policy and one of Mr. Obama’s key policy aides. In an interview last week with Bloomberg, Mr. Grumet said that come January the Environmental Protection Agency “would initiate those rulemakings” that classify carbon as a dangerous pollutant under current clean air laws. That move would impose new regulation and taxes across the entire economy, something that is usually the purview of Congress. Mr. Grumet warned that “in the absence of Congressional action” 18 months after Mr. Obama’s inauguration, the EPA would move ahead with its own unilateral carbon crackdown anyway.

[Rich Lowry] Where Obama’s 95 percent promise is fundamentally dishonest is in how it discounts the effect of his health-care plan. Obama would require businesses to cover their workers or pay a tax. If the tax is relatively low, employers will choose to dump their employees into Obama’s new public program, making a hash of his talking point that no one will lose his current coverage under the plan. If the tax is high, employers will provide coverage themselves, but will inevitably fund it by paying less in wages or hiring less. Obama is proposing a large new tax on employment.

McCain’s health plan, in contrast, would amount to a $1.3 trillion tax cut, according to the Tax Policy Center. McCain would tax employer-provided health benefits for the first time, but offset that with a $5,000 tax credit per couple for all health-insurance purchases. Independent analysts say the vast majority of taxpayers would be better off.

[Wall Street Journal] Taxes will rise substantially, the only question being how high. Mr. Obama would raise the top income, dividend and capital-gains rates for “the rich,” substantially increasing the cost of new investment in the U.S. More radically, he wants to lift or eliminate the cap on income subject to payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security. This would convert what was meant to be a pension insurance program into an overt income redistribution program. It would also impose a probably unrepealable increase in marginal tax rates, and a permanent shift upward in the federal tax share of GDP.

“It actually upsets me. I am a plumber, and just a plumber, and here Barack Obama or John McCain, I mean these guys are going to deal with some serious issues coming up shortly. The media’s worried about whether I paid my taxes, they’re worried about any number of silly things that have nothing to do with America. They really don’t. I asked a question. When you can’t ask a question to your leaders anymore, that gets scary. That bothers me.”

– Joe “the plumber” Wurzelbacher.

And here’s the response from John McCain:

You may have noticed– there was a lot of talk about Senator Obama’s tax increases and Joe the Plumber. Last weekend, Senator Obama showed up in Joe’s driveway to ask for his vote, and Joe asked Senator Obama a tough question. I’m glad he did; I think Senator Obama could use a few more tough questions.

The response from Senator Obama and his campaign yesterday was to attack Joe. People are digging through his personal life and he has TV crews camped out in front of his house. He didn’t ask for Senator Obama to come to his house. He wasn’t recruited or prompted by our campaign. He just asked a question. And Americans ought to be able to ask Senator Obama tough questions without being smeared and targeted with political attacks.

The question Joe asked about our economy is important, because Senator Obama’s plan would raise taxes on small businesses that employ 16 million Americans. Senator Obama’s plan will kill those jobs at just the time when we need to be creating more jobs. My plan will create jobs, and that’s what America needs.

Senator Obama says that he wanted to spread your wealth around. When politicians talk about taking your money and spreading it around, you’d better hold onto your wallet. Senator Obama claims that wants to give a tax break to the middle class, but not only did he vote for higher taxes on the middle class in the Senate, his plan gives away your tax dollars to those who don’t pay taxes.

That’s not a tax cut, that’s welfare. America didn’t become the greatest nation on earth by redistributing wealth; we became the greatest nation by creating new wealth.

Wow, if the media spent one 100th of the time covering Joe Biden as much as they have Joe the plumber maybe Obama’s inexperience (and Biden’s lack of judgment) would become the topic it deserves:

ABC News’ Matthew Jaffe Reports: Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., on Sunday guaranteed that if elected, Sen. Barack Obama., D-Ill., will be tested by an international crisis within his first six months in power and he will need supporters to stand by him as he makes tough, and possibly unpopular, decisions.

“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. “And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you – not financially to help him – we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”

Okay, let me see if I’ve got this straight: Obama is so inexperienced that all the worlds’ baddies know it, and they’ll “test” him in his first six months, but Obama won’t be able to just deal with it, he’ll “need help,” and he’ll make decisions that are so questionable that “it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”

Brilliant move, Biden. You just single-handedly made the argument better than anyone in the McCain camp has. Good job.

Add Biden’s gaffe to this comment (via Weekly Standard) from Obama’s military adviser, Maj. Gen. Scott Gration (Ret.), to the The New Yorker:

Gration was impatient with the idea that conflict is the natural state of the world, to be managed rather than resolved. “People are more alike than their cultures and religions,” he said. “When Obama talks about global citizens, it’s the same framework. You see, religion and culture – they’re the way people communicate their values. They want stability, order, education. This is just humanness. Then you add on your religion, your culture – that’s how you execute it.” His implication was that if we can get past the religious and cultural identities that serve as host organisms for conflict, and deal with people at the level of their humanity and their basic needs, then we can make real progress – especially if Obama personally holds an office that permits him to set the tone and lead the effort.

Good luck with that “Kumbayah” policy, says Weekly.