When looking for evidence of the national media’s attempt to extricate Barack Obama from his numerous ties to Rod Blagojevich, the Washington Post published a classic misdirection piece by Eli Saslow that is a museum piece of liberal propaganda.
The first clue ought to be the title, “Obama worked to distance self from Blagojevich early on.” It was published about a week after Blagojevich was arrested by the federal government in December 2008.
It ought to be read fully to appreciate the depth of its effort to rewrite history, but here are two glaring omissions or misrepresentations:
1. Saslow failed to mention that despite all Obama’s apparent “early distancing” from Obama, he endorsed his candidacy for governor in 2006 when nearly every newspaper in Illinois had noted that Blagojevich was under intense federal investigation and was disgracing the office.
2. Saslow characterized the U.S. Senate seat episode as Blagojevich pathetically reaching for federal favors and getting rebuffed by Obama. He completely ignores evidence that Obama personally and his team reached out to Blagojevich repeatedly to get the governor to appoint Valerie Jarrett.
Also, the story includes this gem from Abner Mikva, the retired judge and Clinton lawyer who liberals like to prop up as an arbiter of integrity.
“Obama saw this coming, and he was very cautious about not having dealings with the governor for quite some time,” said Abner Mikva, a former congressman and appeals court judge who was Obama’s political mentor in Chicago. “The governor was perhaps the only American public officeholder who didn’t speak at the convention, and that wasn’t by accident. He’s politically poisonous. You don’t get through Chicago like Barack Obama did unless you know how to avoid people like that.”
This is the same Mikva that was aggressively defending Blagojevich’s integrity just two years earlier, an absurdity noted here and here.
“I don’t like government being used as a tool to reward political favors and I never have. I don’t like to see limited state funds wasted on unnecessary employees. And I don’t like seeing public officials accused of wrongdoing when there is nothing to substantiate the accusations,” Abner Mikva wrote in an Op-Ed that appeared in the Sun-Times on June 13, 2006.
“I worked on Gov. Blagojevich’s transition team to advise the incoming administration on how to set up systems for running state government efficiently and transparently. From the beginning, the administration indicated that it wanted to clean up and improve the state’s massive bureaucracy so as to better serve the public.
Mikva, of course, never gets asked about his defense of Blagojevich. No liberal does, including Obama.
I don’t know if Eli Saslow was part of the liberal narrative bending group JournoList. He has a long history of rewriting history in Obama’s favor.
It is amazing that Obama ever complains about the press when he has sychophants like Saslow on duty 24/7 throwing inconvenient facts down the memory hole.
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