The scrutiny of Bush and Palin speeches often led to hilarity among Jewish liberals, with talk about how “stupid” Bush or Palin are because they messed up a fact or answered a question in such a way that allowed cynics to charge that Bush or Palin was less than  scholarly in their understanding of an issue. In his State of the Union — typically, the always self-referential Obama used the word “I” 132 times in his State of Obama speech, according to one count, compare that to presidents past — Obama said something that would have seen Palin or Bush certified as “idiots” — not knowing the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Said Obama, “We find unity in our incredible diversity, drawing on the promise enshrined in our Constitution: the notion that we are all created equal…”

That we are all “created equal” is stated in the Declaration, not the Constitution.

My point isn’t to cheap-shot Obama. Rather to make the case that perfectly intelligent people slip up and deserve mercy, not churlishness and “gotcha” tabulators. Obama’s bitter supporters were, and still are, merciless to Republican slips. Everyone, Democrats and Republicans, and anyone in the public eye, is deserving of greater mercy, And yet it is interesting to note how media scrutiny of Palin’s verbal mistakes are put into the spotlight, while Obama’s mistakes are only glossed over.

One life-threatening mistake that was glossed over was the slow pace of American aid to Haiti, rivaling the slow pace of Bush’s disaster with Katrina. Except Bush was pilloried and Obama was not. Watch this CNN clip in which American rescue workers in Haiti fear for the lives of children because Obama’s assistance to Haiti was horribly bungled, especially compared to the Israelis. I thought Americans weren’t supposed to say we felt ashamed of being American in the Obama era. Guess not. And here’s ABC News, comparing Israel’s “legendary” response to the Americans. How was Obama’s response to Haiti any different than Bush’s was to Katrina? And yet the media made the response to Katrina Bush’s defining moment, while Obama is off the hook for his response.

I thought helping Haiti was the essence of Tikkun Olam, but the Tikkun Olam flacks are giving Obama a pass on this, proving once again that Tikkun Olam (holy words now contorted by leftist Jews), is all about being a Democratic hack, and nothing to do with being a Jew. Forced to choose between Tikkun Olam for Haiti or protecting Obama, the TO guys say Obama.

The blatant unfairness of how Obama is still coddled, compared to Palin and others, is one reason why Fox News, in a new poll, is shown to have the trust of 49 percent of the American people, while the left-tilting networks are left in the dust: CNN, 39 percent; NBC, 35 percent; CBS, 32 percent; ABC News, 31 percent.  (Fox was the only news station that had more people trusting it than distrusting it.)

As Bill O’Reilly of Fox pointed out, the people remember that it was Fox, not the networks, that “treated presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Obama, and John McCain pretty much the same,” while the rest of TV news was still adoring Obama, leading to Saturday Night Live skits on the media’s one-sided treatment of Obama. In contrat, “we scrutinized them all,” wrote O’Reilly in his syndicated column. “In fact, the McCain campaign kept the senator off my program, fearing tough questioning. But it was the scrutiny of Obama and the exposure of people like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright that brought Fox bitter criticism from the left. The folks saw that. They watched as [Fox] was bashed all over the place,” and Fox went on the Obama Nixon-like enemies list last year, along with the constant harping against conservative talk radio. “Today, many Americans have lost confidence in Obama, and they remember who was in the tank for him and who wasn’t.”

And I wonder if Jewish readers around the country will remember which Jewish journalists and Jewish newspapers were in the tank for Obama and who wasn’t, and if that won’t come back to haunt those Jewish papers that were rooting, not reporting.

As for the obsessive White House attacks on Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, the two of them now combine to reach more than 20 million listeners, while Air America, the liberal talk radio network — a network that was flip about the “rich Jews” in Riverdale, after the attempted bombing of two shuls there, and flip about terrorism in general, in keeping with the Obama move in 2008 to downplay the use of the phrase “war on terror” — announced this past week that they are going off the air entirely, so few were their listeners and advertisers. No news station has lower ratings than MSNBC, home of Keith Olbermann and his left-wing rants that last week earned him scathing, hilarious ridicule from Jon Stewart.

And if someone had yelled, rather than mouthed, “not true,” or “you lie,” regarding Obama’s deliberate falsifying the Supreme Court decision on corporate contributions, that yeller would have been rude but no more rude than Obama himself for dissing the Supreme Court as they sat right in front of him, unable to answer, while the Democrats jumped to their feet, clapping and cheering right behind the justices. What Obama did was one of the most inelegant moments in the history of the State of the Union. The ultimate joke was that it was Obama himself, in 2008, who became the first presidential candidate to ever not accept federal funding so he could accept unlimited contributions that he otherwise couldn’t, and foreign contributions, as well.

With more and more Democrat candidates beginning to see Obama as a detriment to their own future, there’s more and more talk about Hillary Clinton quitting the cabinet to run against Obama in 2012, the way Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy challenged Lyndon Johnson from within the party in 1968.

“We, the People,” are listening to radios and televisions, reading newspapers and blogs, and like Pirate Jenny, our Black Freighter is in the harbor, ready to reward the good and settle with the rest.

Tags: ABC News, Bill O'Reilly, CBS News, CNN, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Keith Olbermann, MSNBC, Obama, Pirate Jenny, Sarah Palin

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