Dreams from his uncle, cont’d

I would like to say that I will continue to update this series until the New York Times publishes a story about Obama’s Uncle Onyango (or Obama’s uncle Obama, as the case may be), the long-time illegal alien apprehended for drunk driving in Framingham, Massachusetts, when he nearly plowed into the vehicle of a local police officer. He is now being held at the Plymouth County House of Correction on the deportation order that was entered in his case twenty years ago.

I don’t know if I can keep this series going until the Times publishes a story on Uncle Onyango. It may be a long time. The Times is obviously determined to avoid reporting the story by all means necessary.

Now, however, the Times goes this far: it publishes a post by Helene Cooper under the heading “No slack for Obama’s uncle.” on the White House reaction to the story. Here it is in its entirety, all five sentences:

President Obama’s uncle won’t be getting any slack from federal law enforcement authorities, White House officials said Thursday.

The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, said Thursday that the president wasn’t aware that his uncle, Onyango Obama, had been arrested and charged with drunken driving in Framingham, Mass., last week, or that he was being held in immigration detention on charges of overstaying his visa.

Mr. Carney said that he informed Mr. Obama of the arrest Thursday morning after reading about it in a newspaper. He said that the president would not be intervening on behalf of his uncle, and that he expected the Justice Department to handle the case in a routine manner.

Onyango Obama, from Kenya, is the half-brother of the president’s father, Barack Obama Sr.

We can make one observation with complete certainty. The newspaper Mr. Carney was reading — it wasn’t the New York Times.

Omitted from Cooper’s brief account is any mention of Uncle Onyango’s declaration upon his arrest last weekend that he wanted to use his one phone call to reach his nephew in the White House. Uncle Onyango is not big into the news; he hadn’t heard that his nephew was vacationing nearby, over on Martha’s Vineyard, at the time that he needed to reach him.

Cooper is almost unbelievably discreet. She doesn’t mention that Uncle Onyango has overstayed his visa by a generation or two.

Does the fact that the president won’t be intervening in Uncle Onyango’s immigration proceeding mean that there is “[n]o slack for Obama’s uncle,” as Cooper’s heading has it? Not at all. Witness the case of Obama’s Aunt Zeituni, another item that goes missing in Cooper’s post. Compare Cooper’s post with the Boston Globe article on Carney’s comments.

The Times’s treatment of the story of Uncle Onyango shows the Times performing its important filtering function for sensitive liberals. For a good exploration of the symbolic importance of the story, see Michelle Malkin’s column America’s Uncle Omar problem.”