"Never before ..."

Laura Ingram (October 20, 2008):

Congratulations, Team Obama, we've still got two-plus weeks until Election Day and you're already destroying jobs. After last week's now-notorious encounter with Joe the Plumber, Obama's media foot soldiers were dispatched with a simple mission: destroy Joe. On Sunday's Fox and Friends, Joe announced their success; his business has been shut down.

Thanks to the intrepid reporting of journalists who've obviously lost all sense of perspective, it turns out Joe has been fixing Ohioans' plumbing without a government-issued license. Talk about irony. Joe came under fire for humiliating Obama by noting his tax plans interfere with Joe's American Dream. He wanted to buy his plumbing company and expand it, but higher taxes on small businesses threaten to turn that dream into a nightmare. The left, in other words, used Big Government to silence Joe Citizen for speaking ill of Big Government.

In turn, Americans have offered financial support to Joe - offers he's politely declined.

Americans have taken to Joe for his willingness to go where the media refuses - that is, for actually speaking truth to power. Nothing's more infuriating than reporters allowing themselves to be used by politicians, yet that's exactly what's being done on a daily basis at CBS, NBC, CNN, etc. Joe got the opportunity to tell Obama directly that his tax plans - which penalize hard work while claiming to further America's best interests - were an insult to his intelligence.

Meanwhile, conservative websites are left to do the real reporting on Obama. NewsMax's Ken Timmerman reports that as much as $63 million of Obama's $150 million September haul may originate from illegal foreign donations. (Conveniently, the campaign refuses to release the names of more than 80% of its 2.5 million contributors.) Obama's tax returns also indicate that in 2000 and 2002, he violated Illinois state law by accepting speaking fees while serving as a state senator.

The press is supposed to hold politicians accountable on behalf of the people. Yet while Obama collects millions in dubious donations and ACORN registers phantom voters in battleground states by the thousands, today's media is doing the Democrats' heavy lifting with its slash-and-smear campaign against people like Joe.

Never before in our history has the media establishment been so derelict in its responsibilities, so one-sided in its coverage, that today it is nothing more than a cheerleader for the Obama campaign. Never with so much at stake for America's security and our way of life, has the media worked with such single-minded zealousness to elect a dilettante with so little experience and such faulty judgment.

Is the type of bullying and intimidation that Joe's endured what Americans can expect from an Obama administration in response to serious criticism? Will the media closest to the people - talk radio and the blogosphere - be the next targets?

May God help us.

[Hat tip to C. Binder-Scapone]