...and they called it ‘puppy love’

The former mainstream media’s enchantment with Barack Obama can only be described as puppy love, that desperate, deeply hormonal, urgent, irrational feeling made famous by Paul Anka and legitimized by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews who felt a “tingle running up his leg” when he heard Obama speak. David Brooks, the New York Times’ alleged token conservative has even lauded Obama for his flip-flops. In a June 20th op-ed column penned by Brooks, he praised Obama for being an opportunist.

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Brooks wrote: “And Fast Eddie Obama didn’t just sell out the primary cause of his life. He did it with style. He did it with a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding. Obama blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s. He claimed that private donations are really public financing. He made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Teresa’s final steps to sainthood.” With that kind of media adulation, it’s a small wonder that those who are of sounder mind and more skeptical disposition are disparagingly calling Obama ‘the Messiah’. For his part, the Messiah has been doing all he can to encourage the media’s infatuation. He has promised to “change this great nation of ours”, has promised to lower the levels of the rising oceans and has promised to provide well-paying jobs to those who aren’t working. He has promised healthcare for every American and peace in the Middle East. But the question remains, what is Obama capable of delivering? Given that Obama has voted “present” nearly 130 times during his Senate career, there’s no voting record that would indicate what Obama really stands for, except maybe Obama, as David Brooks pointed out in his almost fawning endorsement of Obama’s methodology. So one wonders what Obama has to do to garner critical coverage from obsequious former mainstream types. CNN’s Soledad O’Brien is so taken with Obama that she gave the Rev. Jeremiah Wright rave reviews for the nut bar speech he made back in April, even after Obama threw Wright under the bus. It seems clear that when America’s liberal media latch on to a politician they believe can walk on water, then nothing they do or don’t do matters. Remember the Clinton fiasco and how CBS’s Dan Rather was assiduously tossing softballs about President Bubba’s sexcapades on Sixty Minutes? Even in the face of the serious charge of rape leveled by Juanita Broderick, the liberal media stood by their man. Clearly, we have a trend of the media falling for liberal idols in a very sophomoric fashion. It happened with Jimmy Carter in 1976, Clinton in ’92, Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004. Now it’s happening with Obama, who Rick Lowry of the National Review predicts could become Jimmy Carter’s second term. But that’s the thing about puppy love; it isn’t governed by anything like reason or rationality, which is also the thing that makes it so deliciously exciting. Who would have thought that a simple teenage infatuation could govern the way a president is selected? “And they called it puppy love Just because we're seventeen Tell them all it isn't fair To take away my only dream”