The Double Standard About Journalists' Bias

By John Stossel

I made The New York Times last week. It even ran my picture. My mother would be proud.

Unfortunately, the story was critical. It said, "Critics have leaped on Mr. Stossel's speaking engagements as the latest evidence of conservative bias on the part of Fox."

Which "critics" had "leaped"? The reporter mentioned Rachel Maddow. I wouldn't think her criticism newsworthy, but Times reporters may use MSNBC as their guide to life. He also quoted an "associate professor of journalism" who said my speeches were "'pretty shameful' by traditional journalistic standards." All this because I spoke at an event for Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a "conservative advocacy group."

It is odd that this is a news story. In August, AFP hired me to do the very same thing. I give the money to charity. The Times didn't call that "shameful."

But in August, I worked for ABC News. Now, I work for Fox. Hmmm.

It reminds me of something that happened earlier in my career.

I was one of America's first TV consumer reporters. I approached the job with an attitude. If companies ripped people off, I would embarrass them on TV -- and demand that government do something. (I now regret the latter -- the former was a good thing.)

I clearly had a point of view: I was a crusader out to punish corporate bullies. My colleagues liked it. I got job offers. I won 19 Emmys. I was invited to speak at journalism conferences.

Then, gradually, I figured out that business, for the most part, treats consumers pretty well. The way to get rich in business is to create something good, sell it for a reasonable price, acquire a reputation for honesty and keep pleasing customers so they come back for more.

As a local TV reporter, I could find plenty of crooks. But once I got to the national stage -- "20/20" and "Good Morning America" -- it was hard to find comparable national scams. There were some: Enron, Bernie Madoff, etc. But they are rare. In a $14 trillion economy, you'd think there'd be more. But there aren't.

I figured out why: Market forces, even when hampered by government, keep scammers in check. Reputation matters. Word gets out. Good companies thrive, and bad ones atrophy. Regulation barely deters the cheaters, but competition does.

It made me want to learn more about free markets. I subscribed to Reason magazine and read Cato Institute research papers. Then Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Aaron Wildavsky.

My reporting changed. I started taking skeptical looks at government -- especially regulation. I did an ABC TV special, "Are We Scaring You to Death?" that said we TV reporters often make hysterical claims about chemicals, pollution and other relatively minor risks. Its good ratings -- 16 million viewers -- surprised my colleagues.

Suddenly, I wasn't so popular with them.

I stopped winning Emmys.

I was invited on CNN's media program, "Reliable Sources," to be interviewed by The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz and an indignant Bernard Kalb. They titled the segment, "Objectivity and Journalism: Does John Stossel Practice Either?" It was in big letters over my head.

Apparently, I had broken the rules.

On the air they told me that I was no longer objective. I was too stunned to defend myself effectively. I said something like: "I've always had a point of view. How come you had no trouble with that when I criticized business?"

In hindsight, I wish I'd said: "Look at the title on the wall, you hypocrites! It shows you have a point of view, too. Many reporters do. You just don't like my arguments now that I no longer hew to your statist line. So you want to shut me up."

But I didn't.

So I'll say it now: Reporters who think coercive government control is generally good and I, who thinks voluntary market forces are generally better, both have a point of view.

So why am I the one called biased?

I like what "Americans for Prosperity" defends. I'm an American, and I'm for prosperity. What creates prosperity is free and competitive markets. That means limited government.

And I will speak about that every chance I get.

The Dissing of Laura Bush

By choosing Fort Bragg for her first official trip outside the capital last Thursday, Michelle Obama signaled that she will use her position as First Lady to promote one of America's most deserving causes: our military families. Plainly the families loved it. Just look at the smiles on those children as she read them "The Cat in the Hat."

So it was just a little disconcerting the next morning to hear the First Lady explain how she came to this issue during last year's campaign. "I think I was like most Americans," she told ABC News. "Pretty oblivious to the life of military families. Sort of taking it for granted."

Perhaps Mrs. Obama did take these families for granted. Surely, however, it's extraordinary to suggest that "most Americans" did the same. Certainly not the McCains, the Bidens and the Palins, each of whom had at least one son in uniform. More to the point, the presidential campaign in which she says the issue started "taking shape" for her came nearly seven years into a war that has inspired millions across America to step forward to help our troops.

The informal help includes everyday things such as providing meals or rides for a neighbor or church member whose spouse has been deployed overseas. The Web site AmericaSupportsYou.mil lists many of the more formal initiatives, which range from sending CARE packages overseas to helping homefront spouses find jobs. Under the category "military family support," the Web site provides links to more than 200 programs or organizations.

If the ABC interview was a one-off thing, it would be easy to overlook. But these days the reporting seems to reflect an assumption that if the Obamas haven't done something, nobody else has, either. Certainly the Washington Post did not challenge the First Lady's social secretary when she said, "one idea Michelle had was to have an event for military families -- here they are sacrificing so much for the country and many of them probably have never been invited to the White House."

This uncritical reportage does Laura Bush an injustice. In hundreds of ways -- picnics on the South Lawn, fund-raising for scholarships for the children of sailors on the USS Texas, unheralded visits with the wounded and families of the fallen, the work she did for military kids under her Helping America's Youth initiative -- Mrs. Bush showed our troops and their loved ones how close they were to her heart.

Possibly the difference in treatment owes something to Mrs. Bush's graciousness. Though she had many of her own initiatives -- from improving opportunities for Afghan women to giving voice to the advocates of democracy persecuted by Burma's ruling junta -- she also picked up some of the work of her predecessor, Hillary Clinton. For example, whenever Mrs. Bush spoke about her Preserve America program for national monuments, she would also give credit to Hillary Clinton's Save America's Treasures initiative.

That graciousness, alas, seems only to feed the orthodoxy that condescends to any American woman deemed insufficiently progressive on the received wisdom. This Stepford Wife treatment was on embarrassing display in a recent New York Times profile of Mrs. Obama. "[I]n a departure from her predecessor," gushed the Times, "Mrs. Obama has also begun promoting bills that support her husband's policy priorities." It repeated the point later in the piece.

Only one problem: It's not true. To mention just two, Mrs. Bush took a lead role in the reauthorization fights for No Child Left Behind and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Her advocacy included holding coffees in the residence with key legislators, working with Cabinet members, and promoting these policies in high-profile speeches in places from Africa to the National Press Club. It's just flat-out wrong to suggest otherwise, and the Times owes Mrs. Bush an apology.

Alas, as bad as the slights are, the compliments can be worse. In another recent article on Mrs. Obama, the Associated Press did include a paragraph about Mrs. Bush's work on Burma, Africa and so on. That paragraph was introduced by this sentence: "Even Laura Bush, widely viewed as a traditional first lady, broadened the role."

Even Laura Bush. In that gratuitous "even," the curtain is pulled back on the small-mindedness of an entire class.

Michelle Obama is an accomplished professional and the loving mother of two beautiful girls. In the coming years, she will make her own contributions to a more hopeful America. As she does, is it too much to ask our national press corps to find a way to give Mrs. Obama full credit for these achievements without denying Mrs. Bush the credit she deserves for hers?

SNL: Countdown with Keith Olbermann

NY Times presidential endorsements

Ho hum, last week the New York Times endorsed Barack Obama for president. Accompanying the endorsement, however, was an online feature of interest to anyone fascinated by the history of presidents or newspapers: "New York Times Endorsement Through the Ages," a compilation of every Times general-election presidential endorsement starting in 1860.

Although the paper's first six endorsements all went to Republicans, between 1884 and 1936 it gave the nod to every Democratic nominee except the populist William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was nominated three times, occasioning two Republican endorsements, for McKinley in 1900 and Taft in 1908. In 1896 the Times endorsed John Palmer, a Democrat who favored the gold standard and ran under the banner of the National Democratic Party. Palmer got just under 1% nationwide and a whopping 1.33% in New York state, which is why you've probably never heard of him.

The Times endorsed Republican Wendell Willkie in 1940, in part out of discomfort at the thought of giving Franklin D. Roosevelt an unprecedented third term. The Times also faulted FDR for "fostering the idea that there exists a great fund of wealth which has only to be divided more equitably in order to make everyone prosperous" and "permitting important members of his Administration to preach the doctrines of class jealousy and class hatred." Ah, the good old days.

The paper switched back to FDR in the wartime election of 1944, supporting him over Republican Thomas Dewey. It endorsed Dewey over Truman in 1948, then Eisenhower in both 1952 and 1956. In 1960, John F. Kennedy got the nod--and so did every subsequent Democrat, 13 in a row and counting.

A political endorsement is, to some extent, an act of prognostication, and as we read through the old editorials we were amused at some of the predictions that turned out to be quite wrong:

In endorsing Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the Times noted that the Senate was certain to remain under Democratic control, and thus predicted that his tenure would not be all that consequential:

There will be no hostile legislation at Washington--no "overt acts" of aggression which will call for a declaration of independence on the part of the Southern States. Things will go on very much as they have hitherto--except that we shall have honesty and manliness instead of meanness and corruption in the Executive departments, and a decent regard for the opinions of mankind in the tone and talk of the Government on the subject of Slavery.

Other than the Civil War, the prediction was accurate.

In 1872, the Times opined that "[Horace] Greeley's election would mean, so far as New-York State is concerned, the revival of Tammany, and the utter loss of all the positions we won last year.--Grant's re-election would bury Tammany and all its supporters fifty fathoms deep." Grant won, but Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine, remained formidable until FDR's election in 1932.

Of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, the Times predicted: "He will be carried to the White House by the force of popular confidence, made all the stronger by his non-participation in the struggle for party victory." In fact, his opponent, Democrat Samuel Tilden, received a majority of the popular vote, and Hayes became president only after a prolonged controversy over four states' electoral votes.

In 1912, the Republicans split. President Taft, the party's nominee, was challenged by former president Theodore Roosevelt as well as Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The Times issued an odd dual endorsement titled "Wilson First, Taft Second":

It is in the interest of the Nation that the Republican Party should be preserved as an organized, coherent opposition. It is of great moment, it is of urgent need, that the Republican candidate should come out second in the poll, second, not third, in the Electoral College and in the popular vote. The party will then be in a position to rebuild, to free itself from the influences that have diminished its estate, to hold again the place in the politics and in the affairs of the Nation to which it is entitled by its historic achievements.

Roosevelt surpassed Taft in both the popular vote (27% to 23%) and the electoral (88 to 8). But the schism did not last. By 1916 the party was unified behind Charles Evans Hughes, and in 1920 it again won the White House, going on to dominate politics until the stock market crash of 1929.

In 1928 the Times endorsed Alfred E. Smith on the strength of a single issue: Prohibition, which Smith opposed:

It is the first opportunity which Americans opposed to prohibition have ever had to register their opinion and make it felt by the politicians. If this opportunity is not grasped, years may pass before it comes again. All the Dry forces are militantly for Hoover. . . . If [Smith] is defeated every fortress will be in the hands of the Drys. Congress will more than ever accept the voice of the Anti-Saloon League as the voice of the American people. . . . If Hoover is elected, every anti-prohibitionist who voted for him should acquiesce in present conditions without further complaint.

Hoover was elected, but political tides turned. Less than two weeks before Hoover left office, Congress, then in Democratic hands, proposed the 21st Amendment, which was ratified by the end of 1933.

In endorsing FDR's 1936 re-election, the Times found reassurance in the calming of political rhetoric:

No responsible Republican any longer froths at the mouth in charging that President Roosevelt is setting out to be a dictator after the style of Stalin or Hitler. The wild assertions that he intends to tear up the Constitution and destroy the Supreme Court are not heard today from any serious speaker.

In 1937, however, Roosevelt proposed legislation that would have expanded the Supreme Court, allowing FDR to nominate six new members immediately. Congress balked at his "court packing" plan. As for the suggestion that FDR was setting out to be a dictator, it did arise again in 1940, when he sought a third term:

The doctrine of one man's indispensability is a new doctrine for the United States. It is a doctrine which less scrupulous men in Europe have used to root themselves in power.

That quotation is from the Times's endorsement of Wendell Willkie.

Endorsing Kennedy over Nixon in 1960, the Times praised his restraint on the then-burning question of Quemoy and Matsu, a pair of Chinese islands under Taiwanese control that the Red Chinese had attempted to conquer:

There are large areas of the world--particularly in Southeastern Asia--where ideological conflict between communism and anti-communism may break out at any moment into local warfare. Are we, as Mr. Nixon suggests, to use American manpower to prevent the loss of "one inch of free territory" in such areas? The choice is not so easy as Mr. Nixon implies. It involves the question of the intrinsic importance of each such area to the security of the United States, the question of allied assistance, the possible cost of American intervention in terms of American lives. The oversimplification of Mr. Nixon's sweeping declarations in these matters is not reassuring.

As it turned out, it was Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, who got America into a shooting war in Southeast Asia.

In 1984 the Times thought Walter Mondale would be a better Cold War president than the incumbent:

Lawyer Mondale offers pragmatic skill at making the best of reality. Ideologue Reagan offers the same tenacity that has brought him out diplomatically empty-handed. Who is likely to do better in arms negotiations in the next term, Walter Mondale or the President who tickles the religious right by reviling the Soviet Union as an Evil Empire?

This was not quite disproved, since Mondale never got the chance, but it's hard to imagine he could have turned out better on this score than Reagan did.

Since we've had some fun at the expense of the Times's errors, we thought we'd compile all of The Wall Street Journal's presidential endorsements and take a look at them as well. Fortunately, our job was easier than the Times guys', for here is the complete list:

• 1928: Herbert Hoover (defeated Alfred E. Smith)

The Hoover endorsement was less than full-throated, and, like many of the Times's endorsements, it cannot be reckoned a prognosticatorial triumph:

The Wall Street Journal has criticized the tariff more than it has ever praised it and regards the device of the Tariff Board as bad in principle and worse in practice. It was opposed to the Eighteenth Amendment. It regards the plea that labor is more efficient under Prohibition as a thoroughly immoral argument for chattel slavery. Nevertheless it advises its readers to vote for Hoover, as the soundest business proposition for those with a financial stake in the country.

Like Mondale and arms control, Smith never got a chance to be tested as a "business proposition." But of course things got bad enough under Hoover that it is difficult to imagine they would have been worse.

ABC News.com: Media's Presidential Bias and Decline

The traditional media are playing a very, very dangerous game -- with their readers, with the Constitution and with their own fates.

The sheer bias in the print and television coverage of this election campaign is not just bewildering, but appalling. And over the last few months I've found myself slowly moving from shaking my head at the obvious one-sided reporting, to actually shouting at the screen of my television and my laptop computer.

But worst of all, for the last couple weeks, I've begun -- for the first time in my adult life -- to be embarrassed to admit what I do for a living. A few days ago, when asked by a new acquaintance what I did for a living, I replied that I was "a writer," because I couldn't bring myself to admit to a stranger that I'm a journalist.

You need to understand how painful this is for me. I am one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I'm cut. I am a fourth-generation newspaperman. As family history tells it, my great-grandfather was a newspaper editor in Abilene, Kan., during the last of the cowboy days, then moved to Oregon to help start the Oregon Journal (now the Oregonian).

My hard-living -- and when I knew her, scary -- grandmother was one of the first women reporters for the Los Angeles Times. And my father, though profoundly dyslexic, followed a long career in intelligence to finish his life (thanks to word processors and spellcheckers) as a very successful freelance writer. I've spent 30 years in every part of journalism, from beat reporter to magazine editor. And my oldest son, following in the family business, so to speak, earned his first national byline before he earned his drivers license.

So, when I say I'm deeply ashamed right now to be called a "journalist," you can imagine just how deep that cuts into my soul.

Now, of course, there's always been bias in the media. Human beings are biased, so the work they do, including reporting, is inevitably colored. Hell, I can show you 10 different ways to color variations of the word "said" -- muttered, shouted, announced, reluctantly replied, responded, etc. -- to influence the way a reader will apprehend exactly the same quote. We all learn that in Reporting 101, or at least in the first few weeks working in a newsroom.

But what we are also supposed to learn during that same apprenticeship is to recognize the dangerous power of that technique, and many others, and develop built-in alarms against them.

But even more important, we are also supposed to be taught that even though there is no such thing as pure, Platonic objectivity in reporting, we are to spend our careers struggling to approach that ideal as closely as possible.

That means constantly challenging our own prejudices, systematically presenting opposing views and never, ever burying stories that contradict our own world views or challenge people or institutions we admire. If we can't achieve Olympian detachment, than at least we can recognize human frailty -- especially in ourselves.

Reporting Bias

For many years, spotting bias in reporting was a little parlor game of mine, watching TV news or reading a newspaper article and spotting how the reporter had inserted, often unconsciously, his or her own preconceptions. But I always wrote it off as bad judgment and lack of professionalism, rather than bad faith and conscious advocacy.

Sure, being a child of the '60s I saw a lot of subjective "New" Journalism, and did a fair amount of it myself, but that kind of writing, like columns and editorials, was supposed to be segregated from "real" reporting, and, at least in mainstream media, usually was. The same was true for the emerging blogosphere, which by its very nature was opinionated and biased.

But my complacent faith in my peers first began to be shaken when some of the most admired journalists in the country were exposed as plagiarists, or worse, accused of making up stories from whole cloth.

I'd spent my entire professional career scrupulously pounding out endless dreary footnotes and double-checking sources to make sure that I never got accused of lying or stealing someone else's work -- not out of any native honesty, but out of fear: I'd always been told to fake or steal a story was a firing offense & indeed, it meant being blackballed out of the profession.

And yet, few of those worthies ever seemed to get fired for their crimes -- and if they did they were soon rehired into even more prestigious jobs. It seemed as if there were two sets of rules: one for us workaday journalists toiling out in the sticks, and another for folks who'd managed, through talent or deceit, to make it to the national level.

Meanwhile, I watched with disbelief as the nation's leading newspapers, many of whom I'd written for in the past, slowly let opinion pieces creep into the news section, and from there onto the front page. Personal opinions and comments that, had they appeared in my stories in 1979, would have gotten my butt kicked by the nearest copy editor, were now standard operating procedure at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and soon after in almost every small town paper in the U.S.

But what really shattered my faith -- and I know the day and place where it happened -- was the war in Lebanon three summers ago. The hotel I was staying at in Windhoek, Namibia, only carried CNN, a network I'd already learned to approach with skepticism. But this was CNN International, which is even worse.

I sat there, first with my jaw hanging down, then actually shouting at the TV, as one field reporter after another reported the carnage of the Israeli attacks on Beirut, with almost no corresponding coverage of the Hezbollah missiles raining down on northern Israel. The reporting was so utterly and shamelessly biased that I sat there for hours watching, assuming that eventually CNNi would get around to telling the rest of the story & but it never happened.

The Presidential Campaign

But nothing, nothing I've seen has matched the media bias on display in the current presidential campaign.

Republicans are justifiably foaming at the mouth over the sheer one-sidedness of the press coverage of the two candidates and their running mates. But in the last few days, even Democrats, who have been gloating over the pass -- no, make that shameless support -- they've gotten from the press, are starting to get uncomfortable as they realize that no one wins in the long run when we don't have a free and fair press.

I was one of the first people in the traditional media to call for the firing of Dan Rather -- not because of his phony story, but because he refused to admit his mistake -- but, bless him, even Gunga Dan thinks the media is one-sided in this election.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those people who think the media has been too hard on, say, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, by rushing reportorial SWAT teams to her home state of Alaska to rifle through her garbage. This is the big leagues, and if she wants to suit up and take the field, then Gov. Palin better be ready to play.

The few instances where I think the press has gone too far -- such as the Times reporter talking to prospective first lady Cindy McCain's daughter's MySpace friends -- can easily be solved with a few newsroom smackdowns and temporary repostings to the Omaha bureau.

No, what I object to (and I think most other Americans do as well) is the lack of equivalent hardball coverage of the other side -- or worse, actively serving as attack dogs for the presidential ticket of Sens. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Joe Biden, D-Del.

If the current polls are correct, we are about to elect as president of the United States a man who is essentially a cipher, who has left almost no paper trail, seems to have few friends (that at least will talk) and has entire years missing out of his biography.

That isn't Sen. Obama's fault: His job is to put his best face forward. No, it is the traditional media's fault, for it alone (unlike the alternative media) has had the resources to cover this story properly, and has systematically refused to do so.

Why, for example to quote the lawyer for Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., haven't we seen an interview with Sen. Obama's grad school drug dealer -- when we know all about Mrs. McCain's addiction? Are Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko that hard to interview? All those phony voter registrations that hard to scrutinize? And why are Sen. Biden's endless gaffes almost always covered up, or rationalized, by the traditional media?

Joe the Plumber

The absolute nadir (though I hate to commit to that, as we still have two weeks before the election) came with Joe the Plumber.

Middle America, even when they didn't agree with Joe, looked on in horror as the press took apart the private life of an average person who had the temerity to ask a tough question of a presidential candidate. So much for the standing up for the little man. So much for speaking truth to power. So much for comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, and all of those other catchphrases we journalists used to believe we lived by.

I learned a long time ago that when people or institutions begin to behave in a matter that seems to be entirely against their own interests, it's because we don't understand what their motives really are. It would seem that by so exposing their biases and betting everything on one candidate over another, the traditional media is trying to commit suicide -- especially when, given our currently volatile world and economy, the chances of a successful Obama presidency, indeed any presidency, is probably less than 50/50.

Furthermore, I also happen to believe that most reporters, whatever their political bias, are human torpedoes & and, had they been unleashed, would have raced in and roughed up the Obama campaign as much as they did McCain's. That's what reporters do. I was proud to have been one, and I'm still drawn to a good story, any good story, like a shark to blood in the water.

So why weren't those legions of hungry reporters set loose on the Obama campaign? Who are the real villains in this story of mainstream media betrayal?

The editors. The men and women you don't see; the people who not only decide what goes in the paper, but what doesn't; the managers who give the reporters their assignments and lay out the editorial pages. They are the real culprits.

Bad Editors

Why? I think I know, because had my life taken a different path, I could have been one: Picture yourself in your 50s in a job where you've spent 30 years working your way to the top, to the cockpit of power & only to discover that you're presiding over a dying industry. The Internet and alternative media are stealing your readers, your advertisers and your top young talent. Many of your peers shrewdly took golden parachutes and disappeared. Your job doesn't have anywhere near the power and influence it did when your started your climb. The Newspaper Guild is too weak to protect you any more, and there is a very good chance you'll lose your job before you cross that finish line, 10 years hence, of retirement and a pension.

In other words, you are facing career catastrophe -- and desperate times call for desperate measures. Even if you have to risk everything on a single Hail Mary play. Even if you have to compromise the principles that got you here. After all, newspapers and network news are doomed anyway -- all that counts is keeping them on life support until you can retire.

And then the opportunity presents itself -- an attractive young candidate whose politics likely matches yours, but more important, he offers the prospect of a transformed Washington with the power to fix everything that has gone wrong in your career.

With luck, this monolithic, single-party government will crush the alternative media via a revived fairness doctrine, re-invigorate unions by getting rid of secret votes, and just maybe be beholden to people like you in the traditional media for getting it there.

And besides, you tell yourself, it's all for the good of the country &

This is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNews.com "Silicon Insider" columnist since 2000.

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission.

BIDEN'S BUNGLES: A BLATANT BIAS

Hatin' Palin

The abuse being heaped on Sarah Palin is such a cheap shot.

The complaint against the Alaska governor, at its most basic, is that she doesn't qualify for admission to the national political fraternity. Boy, that's rich. Behold the shabby frat house that says it's above her pay grade.

NBC

Sarah Palin appears with Lorne Michaels on Saturday Night Live.

Congress has the lowest approval rating ever registered in the history of polling (12%!). She isn't the reason polls are showing people want the entire Congress fired, with many telling pollsters they themselves could do a better job.

Sarah Palin didn't design a system of presidential primaries whose length and cost ensures that only the most obsessional personalities will run the gauntlet, while a long list of effective governors don't run.

These rules have wasted the electorate's time the past three presidential elections, by filling the debates with such zero-support candidates as Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Al Sharpton, Duncan Hunter, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden (8,000 total votes), Wesley Clark and Alan Keyes.

Out of this process has fallen a Democratic nominee who entered the U.S. Senate in 2005 fresh off a stint in the Illinois state legislature, with next to no record of political accomplishment. He may be elected mainly because, in Colin Powell's word, he is thought to be "transformational." One may hope so.

By not bothering to look very deeply at the details beneath either candidate's governing proposals, the media have created a lot of downtime to take free kicks at Gov. Palin. My former colleague, Tunku Varadarajan, has compiled a glossary of Palin invective, and I've added a few: "Republican blow-up doll," "idiot," "Christian Stepford wife," "Jesus freak," "Caribou Barbie," "a dope," "a fatal cancer to the Republican Party," "liar," "a national disgrace" and "her pretense that she is a woman."

If American politics is at low ebb, it is because so many of its observers enjoy working in its fetid backwash.

The primary discomfort with Gov. Palin is the notion that she doesn't have sufficient experience to be president, that Sen. McCain should have picked a Washington hand seasoned in the ways of the world. Such as? Here's an opinion poll question:

If as Joe Biden suggests the U.S. is likely to be tested by a foreign enemy next year, who of the following would you rather have dealing with it in the Oval Office: Nancy (of Damascus) Pelosi, Harry Reid, John Edwards, Joe (the U.S. drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon) Biden, Mike Huckabee, Geraldine Ferraro, Tom DeLay, Jimmy Carter or Sarah Palin?

My pick? Gov. Palin, surely the most grounded, common-sense person on that list of prime-time politicians.

The established political pros let the selection process come to this. Presidential candidates such as John McCain and Barack Obama have become untethered from the discipline of party institutions, largely because the parties have lost coherence. So we get celebrity candidates made famous, fundable and electable by dint of their access to the Beltway media. For voters, this election is a national Hail Mary.

For nearly two years, all the major candidates have rotated through our lives as solitary personalities attended by careerist campaign professionals. Barack, Hillary, Rudy, Mitt, Mike, McCain. When the moment arrived to pick a running mate, input from the parties was minimal. That famous party boss, Caroline Kennedy, advised Barack Obama. They picked a three-decade denizen of the Senate. John McCain's obligation was himself and his endless slog to this big chance.

The quick surge of party-wide excitement and campaign contributions after his selection of Sarah Palin made clear that the McCain candidacy was moribund and headed for a low-turnout debacle. If he had picked any of the plain-vanilla men on his veep short list -- Pawlenty, Sanford, Romney or Lieberman -- they'd have won approval from the media's college of cardinals, and killed his campaign.

The stoning of Sarah Palin has exposed enough cultural fissures in American politics to occupy strategists full-time until 2012. We now see there is a left-to-right elite centered in New York, Washington, Hollywood and Silicon Valley who hand down judgments of the nation's mortals from their perch atop the Bell Curve.

It seems only yesterday that the most critical skill in presidential politics was being able to connect to people in places like Bronko's bar or Saddleback Church. When Gov. Palin showed she excelled at that, the goal posts suddenly moved and the new game was being able to talk the talk in London, Paris, Tehran or Moscow. She looks about a half-step behind Sen. Obama on that learning curve.

Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of "Saturday Night Live," lives on the forward wave of American life. This week he gave his view of Sarah Palin to EW.com: "I think Palin will continue to be underestimated for a while. I watched the way she connected with people, and she's powerful. Her politics aren't my politics. But you can see that she's a very powerful, very disciplined, incredibly gracious woman. This was her first time out and she's had a huge impact. People connect to her."

Uh-oh. Sounds like the cancer could be in remission.

Biden's warning

If the prospect of an Obama presidency doesn't make you nervous, Joe Biden's latest comments, reported by ABC News, may change the way you feel:

"Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you--not financially to help him--we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

As Commentary's Jennifer Rubin notes, this adds up to a pretty good argument for electing a president who is experienced and tough--i.e., John McCain. "This is material for an ad that's a lot more credible than Hillary Clinton's '3 a.m.' ad," observes Rubin. "That one came from his arguably frantic opponent–this one is from his running mate."

Which brings us to yesterday's Obama endorsement from Colin Powell on "Meet the Press." Sour conservatives have noted that endorsements don't generally make much of a difference; that Powell, in making his endorsement so late, when Obama seems a nearly certain winner, is not exactly a profile in political courage; and that Powell has never been much of a Republican to begin with.

All this is true (although this column dissociates itself from the assertion by bitter conservatives that Powell is acting merely out of racial solidarity). Powell is essentially a weathervane, and you don't need one to see which way the wind is blowing. Nonetheless, Powell's endorsement is useful to Obama, particularly at this juncture.

What Powell offers is reassurance. As a military man who has never sought elective office, he stands above politics. His Republican credentials are weak, but that makes him more of a nonpartisan figure. He is a man of the establishment--and if he supports Obama, that will assuage the doubts of some voters who still worry that the young senator is either unready or radical.

Biden's comments yesterday, by contrast, make one wonder why Obama chose as his running mate someone with a propensity for running off his mouth. (We assume it was not because we said we'd find it entertaining.)

In an odd way, Biden's gaffe is reassuring, too. It suggests that the Democrats are not really naive enough to believe that if Obama is elected, everyone will like America again and the world will stop being dangerous.

Yesterday we noted that Joe Biden had warned supporters in Seattle that he expects a major crisis to strike during the first six months of an Obama administration, told them that he expects Obama's response to the crisis to be unpopular, and exhorted them to be prepared to stand by him, even if he appears to be wrong.

Hugh Hewitt thinks he knows what Biden has in mind:

Biden has been receiving the sorts of briefings that nominees receive, and he's been to the sort of meetings where our allies talk candidly of the gathering storm they see coming closer.

And Biden suspects that Obama will react to the coming crisis in a way that demoralizes the country and which shatters public confidence in Obama.

Biden dismisses the ability of the American military to deal with far flung threats, tells the audience "Mark my words," and then preemptively implores them to "be prepared to stick with us," after telling them "we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him."

The most obvious interpretation of this ramble is that an Iran-Israel confrontation is coming, and that if Obama is president, America will sit it out with, at best, words that do nothing to support Israel or deter Iran.

Biden's meaning is nowhere near as clear to us as it is to Hewitt. According to ABC News, which reported the comments, Biden said, "I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," and he "emphasized that the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border is of particular concern."

But let's apply what Biden said to a hypothetical confrontation between Israel and Iran. We'd say Hewitt's reading is a plausible one, but so is the opposite reading. Today, at least, there is little public appetite for another war, and this is especially true among Obama's supporters. Maybe he is preparing them for the necessity of a military strike against Iran, or some other muscular response to a crisis that would make Obama unpopular among the MoveOnCodePink crowd (and that might not immediately overcome the skepticism of hawkish Republicans about whether Obama is strong enough).

The real point here is that we don't know, and some elaboration from Biden of just what he has in mind would be useful for voters who have yet to make up their minds. Could we trouble Biden's traveling press to press him for some answers?

We realize we are at risk of sounding like a broken record, but that Biden comment--which we noted Monday and wrote about again yesterday--is really bothering us. And not just us. In a column for the New York Post, Kirstin Powers, a Democrat, says the media's "scattered coverage" of Joe Biden's disturbing remarks reflect an "incredible bias." Powers and NewsBusters.org both note that even Dan Rather said, "Certainly if Sarah Palin had said this it would be above the fold in most newspapers today."

CBS News reports that Barack Obama pooh-poohed his running mate's comments: "You know I think that Joe sometimes engages in rhetorical flourishes." Or, to put it another way: "We're gonna have an international crisis. . . . It's not gonna be apparent initially . . . that we're right." Only words!

The idea that America's adversaries are likely to test a new administration is not shocking. It seems prudent to prepare for such an eventuality. What's disturbing about Biden's remarks is that he seems to anticipate a domestic crisis of sorts as well--that Obama's response to the crisis will be unpoular among the public, or some segment of it, and that his backers will simply have to have faith. But Biden gives us no clue as to what he thinks Obama will do that will prompt a backlash--or which segment of the public he expects to lash back. To hear Biden tell it, a vote for Obama is a vote for God-and-Joe-Biden-only-know-what.

In the absence of clarity from Biden and Obama, people have begun speculating as to what may lie in store. The Boston Globe reports that in a speech yesterday, Palin picked up on the Biden remarks:

Yesterday in Reno, Nev., Palin told supporters, "I guess we gotta say, 'Well, thanks for the warning, Joe.' " She then imagined the "crisis scenarios," based on what she described as Obama's foreign policy agenda: his pledge to meet with rogue leaders without preconditions, though he has amended that vow; and Obama saying he would go into the tribal areas of Pakistan to go after Osama bin Laden if the Pakistani government wouldn't, though Palin has supported a similar policy.

"Crisis scenario number three," she said, is that Obama's plan for withdrawing US combat troops from Iraq within 16 months of taking office would leave "some 25 million Iraqis at the mercy of Iranian-supported Shi'ite extremists and Al Qaeda in Iraq" and could force US troops to return.

Palin asserted that after the Russian invasion of Georgia in August, "Senator Obama's reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence," which could encourage Russia to invade Ukraine next. "That would be crisis scenario number four," she said.

"But I guess the looming crisis that most worries the Obama campaign right now is Joe Biden's next speaking engagement. Let's call that crisis number five," Palin said as supporters laughed uproariously.

But this is not a joke--well, OK, it's not just a joke. There really could be an international crisis--or more than one--in the early days of a new administration, and more specificity about this Biden warning would be helpful in evaluating whether an Obama presidency is too risky--or whether we should take comfort that his instincts would be the right ones.

The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz points to one possible crisis:

Senior Tehran officials are recommending a preemptive strike against Israel to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear reactors, a senior Islamic Republic official told foreign diplomats two weeks ago in London.

The official, Dr. Seyed G. Safavi, said recent threats by Israeli authorities strengthened this position, but that as of yet, a preemptive strike has not been integrated into Iranian policy.

The Ha'aretz report does not discuss the U.S. response to a possible Iranian strike against Israel, although Safavi does say "that a victory by U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama would pave the way for dialogue with Washington, while a John McCain presidency would bolster Iran's extreme right, which opposes dialogue."

Yesterday we noted Hugh Hewitt's theory that Biden was warning that an Obama administration would not support Israel in a confrontation with Iran. We noted that Biden's remark was open to multiple interpretation and asked for clarification for voters' sake. Reader Ray Hendel observes: "What may be more important is a clarification so Iran does not interpret Biden's remarks the way Hugh Hewitt does and see it as a green light."

Meanwhile, "IJane," a contributor to the Hillary Clinton Forum, a dead-ender Web site, speculates that Obama's response to whatever crisis arises will be to impose a military draft. She quotes from Obama's comment at a widely ignored Columbia University forum last month:

But it's also important that a president speaks to military service as an obligation not just of some, but of many. You know, I traveled, obviously, a lot over the last 19 months. And if you go to small towns, throughout the Midwest or the Southwest or the South, every town has tons of young people who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's not always the case in other parts of the country, in more urban centers. And I think it's important for the president to say, this is an important obligation. If we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some.

Let's throw this open and see if we can shed some light on Biden's mysterious and troubling remark. If you have an idea of what he meant, email us at opinionjournal@wsj.com. We'll compile the best ones and include them in a column soon. If Obama and Biden won't tell us what they mean, maybe we can figure it out ourselves.

"We're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy"

If the prospect of an Obama presidency doesn't make you nervous, Joe Biden's latest comments, reported by ABC News, may change the way you feel:

"Mark my words," the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday. "It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy."

"I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate," Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. "And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you--not financially to help him--we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right."

After speaking for just over a quarter of an hour, Biden noticed the media presence in the back of the small ballroom.

"I probably shouldn't have said all this because it dawned on me that the press is here," he joked.


As Commentary's Jennifer Rubin notes:

Well, golly, if Obama is so untested that we will have a series of international crises — at the very time we are in a financial meltdown — which will make the Cuban Missille Crisis look like a walk in the park, shouldn’t we vote for the other guy who will keep all the miscreants in their place? Now, maybe we should rest easy because, according to Biden, “I’ve forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know, so I’m not being falsely humble with you.” (Maybe Hezbollah’s occupation of Lebanaon was one of the things he forgot.)

Something tells me this is material for an ad that’s a lot more credible than Hillary Clinton’s “3 a.m.” ad. That one came from his arguably frantic opponent–this one is from his running mate.

UPDATE:

Rudy Giuliani and Randy Scheunemann, McCain-Palin Foreign Policy Adviser, just completed a media call on the Joe Biden comments. Scheunemann invoked Michael Kinsley — a gaffe is when a politician is caught speaking the truth. Giuliani dubbed the remarks “extraordinary” and said that he never recalled a VP candidate announcing that electing his candidate would provoke multiple challeneges to test his mettle. Giuliani suggested that Biden must “continue to harbor serious doubts” about Barack Obama’s readiness to be commander-in-chief.

At the conclusion of the call, both McCain surrogates urged the press to start asking Biden what he meant. Giuliani remarked that only Biden knows for sure what he meant, but that Biden’s remarks that the Obama camp would need the support of the top donors because they might not “get it right in a crisis. . . totally baffles me.” They both observed that, had a Republican made the remarks, it would be on the front page of the New York Times.

Bottom line: the mega-gaffe came at a remarkably good moment for McCain. The McCain camp certainly hopes it will have as great or greater an impact as the Colin Powell endorsement. But given the MSM declared priority–getting The One elected–I suspect they won’t be staying up late to check the Gray Lady’s front page for Tuesday.

Biden's Fantasy World

In the popular media wisdom, Sarah Palin is the neophyte who knows nothing about foreign policy while Joe Biden is the savvy diplomatic pro. Then what are we to make of Mr. Biden's fantastic debate voyage last week when he made factual claims that would have got Mrs. Palin mocked from New York to Los Angeles?

AP

Start with Lebanon, where Mr. Biden asserted that "When we kicked -- along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, 'Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't know -- if you don't, Hezbollah will control it.' Now what's happened? Hezbollah is a legitimate part of the government in the country immediately to the north of Israel."

The U.S. never kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, and no one else has either. Perhaps Mr. Biden meant to say Syria, except that the U.S. also didn't do that. The Lebanese ousted Syria's military in 2005. As for NATO, Messrs. Biden and Obama may have proposed sending alliance troops in, but if they did that was also a fantasy. The U.S. has had all it can handle trying to convince NATO countries to deploy to Afghanistan.

Speaking of which, Mr. Biden also averred that "Our commanding general in Afghanistan said the surge principle in Iraq will not work in Afghanistan." In trying to correct him, Mrs. Palin mispronounced the general's name -- saying "General McClellan" instead of General David McKiernan. But Mr. Biden's claim was the bigger error, because General McKiernan said that while "Afghanistan is not Iraq," he also said a "sustained commitment" to counterinsurgency would be required. That is consistent with Mr. McCain's point that the "surge principles" of Iraq could work in Afghanistan.

Then there's the Senator's astonishing claim that Mr. Obama "did not say he'd sit down with Ahmadinejad" without preconditions. Yet Mr. Biden himself criticized Mr. Obama on this point in 2007 at the National Press Club: "Would I make a blanket commitment to meet unconditionally with the leaders of each of those countries within the first year I was elected President? Absolutely, positively no."

Or how about his rewriting of Bosnia history to assert that John McCain didn't support President Clinton in the 1990s. "My recommendations on Bosnia, I admit I was the first one to recommend it. They saved tens of thousands of lives. And initially John McCain opposed it along with a lot of other people. But the end result was it worked." Mr. Biden's immodesty aside, Mr. McCain supported Mr. Clinton on Bosnia, as did Bob Dole even as he was running against him for President in 1996 -- in contrast to the way Mr. Biden and Democratic leaders have tried to undermine President Bush on Iraq.

Closer to home, the Delaware blarney stone also invited Americans to join him at "Katie's restaurant" in Wilmington to witness middle-class struggles. Just one problem: Katie's closed in the 1980s. The mistake is more than a memory lapse because it exposes how phony is Mr. Biden's attempt to pose for this campaign as Lunchbucket Joe.

We think the word "lie" is overused in politics today, having become a favorite of the blogosphere and at the New York Times. So we won't say Mr. Biden was deliberately making events up when he made these and other false statements. Perhaps he merely misspoke. In any case, Mrs. Palin may not know as much about the world as Mr. Biden does, but at least most of what she knows is true.

The Tears of Clowns: A bummed MSNBC.