Caroline Glick notes that there may be an “Obama effect” different from the one hallucinated by the mainstream in inventing new reasons to celebrate Obama. Glick postulates an “Obama effect” on our mainstream media that is impairing our understanding of events in Iran and elsewhere. Glick’s Exhibit A is Helene Cooper’s exploration of “Iran’s unrest and the Obama factor.”
Glick’s Exhibit B is the Times account of Ayatollah Khameni’s Friday sermon. Khamenei’s sermon “effectively declared war on the protesters,” writes Glick, but the Times left out a few items of interest. Citing Russell Berman’s post on Khameni’s sermon, Glick writes:
The Times did not mention that Khamenei ascribed world events to a Zionist conspiracy which he believes controls the US. It similarly failed to mention his long rant against the US for the FBI’s 1993 raid on David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
Had the Times – and other major media outlets – properly reported Khamenei’s speech, they would have made clear to their readers that he is not a rational thinker. His view of world events is deeply distorted by his hatreds and prejudices and paranoia.
But then, if Times readers were permitted to know just how demented Khamenei’s views of the world are, they might come to the conclusion that Obama’s intense desire to sit down with him, and his constant pandering to Iran’s “supreme leader” are ill-advised and counterproductive. They might come to the conclusion that it is impossible to achieve a meeting of the minds with a man who calls Americans “morons” and leads his subordinate government officials in chants of “Death to America,” “Death to Britain” and “Death to Israel.”
Glick concludes that Obama’s media flacks fail to consider that by genuflecting to tyrants, Obama has made the US an international laughingstock: “Far from sharing their adulation of Obama and his cool demeanor, most of the nations of the world believe that the US has abandoned its leadership role.” Glick doesn’t cite the AFP report that “US says hot dog diplomacy still on with Iran,” but let’s just say it does not undercut any of her observations.
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