In a silent way, cont’d

It stands to reason that if word of Barack Obama’s reorientation of NASA to group therapy for the Muslim world is to make it into the Washington Post, the word would arrive via the weekly column of Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer is both a trained psychiatrist and an astute observer of Obama. He is unwilling to abide the mainstream media taboo on the mention of NASA administrator Charles Bolden, who shared the instructions he received directly from Barack Obama regarding NASA’s mission with the viewers of Al Jazeera. At the New York Times, the taboo remains firmly in place.
Byron York reported the story in the Washington Examiner for those who missed it on Al Jazeera. (York is still on the case.) For Washington Post readers, Krauthammer spills the beans on NASA’s instructions to Bolden today in “The selective modesty of Barack Obama.”
I found Krauthammer’s column via a Google News search on Charles Bolden. Elsewhere in the mainstream media, the silence enveloping Bolden’s comments generally obtains. A Google News search also turns up Rich Lowry’s excellent column “Bedtime stories for for the Islamic world.”
The title of Lowry’s column reminds me of “Bedtime for Bonzo,” the 1951 movie starring Ronald Reagan (produced by Fred De Cordova and co-starring a chimpanzee) that the mainstream media were delighted to cite in connection with Ronald Reagan. Citation of the film was to remind readers that Reagan was not only an actor, but a dunce as well. You have bedtime stories, and you have bedtime stories. The difference is instructive.
The mainstream media picked up the “Bedtime for Bonzo” theme that it used against Reagan from two-term incumbent California Governor Pat Brown when Reagan ran against him in 1966. Brown liked to say that he had been solving California’s problems while Reagan had been making “Bedtime for Bonzo.” Reagan historian Lou Cannon recalls in one of his Reagan biographies: “The line was good for laughs, but not for Brown’s third-term aspirations.”
As Bill Otis suggests, Obama’s bedtime story for the Islamic world might be more destructive to Obama than “Bedtime for Bonzo” was to Reagan. Thus the silence.