Obama Compulsive Disorder

The hallowed NBC brand of old is now devolved into MSNBC's Matthews-Olbermann embarrassment. The once revered Atlantic Monthly now hosts blogger Andrew Sullivan trafficking in rumors that Gov. Palin's daughter really delivered her Down Syndrome child, and then hires an unhinged photographer (best known previously for making children cry to make political statements) who brags post facto that she tried to subvert her own cover photos of McCain, before posting creepy photo-shopped out-takes of him on her website. To read a NY Times columnist is to be told ad nauseam that Gov. Palin is a bumpkin hockey mom. Whether an US magazine cover picture of Palin, or the Washington Post's recycling old stories about Cindy McCain, the result is always the same: a concerted effort to ensure an Obama election.

The university crowd weighs in with op-eds warning us about white rural culture and the toxic landscapes that raised Sarah Palin, or why she is a counterfeit woman who piggybacked on the heroic work of pro-abortion pioneers. Every day another Hollywood dimwit—a Matt Damon, Lindsay Lohan, or Chevy Chase—attacks Palin or McCain in a fashion as crude as it is half-educated and incoherent.

Is it that hard to see, then, why McCain is dead-even or ahead—even when the incumbent Republican brand is suffering by association to war, economic uncertainty, and now financial meltdown?

There is a growing public anger at the petty amateurish biases of those who claim they are sophisticated and subtle; and it is not just that they sympathize with a smeared Palin, but are angry that the media thinks they are so stupid not to catch on. The odder thing still is that the media obsession has turned into some sort of compulsive disorder—they know that they are way out of bounds; know that they are hurting their own candidate Obama— and they know that they simply can't and won't quit now.

Victor Davis Hanson