Not a Big Truck

Matt Drudge is continuing his pattern of ignoring negative stories about McCain and highlighting even the silliest of stories that make Obama look bad.  Here’s a current example: Drudge links to this article, entitled “Joe Biden loses Barack Obama the Catholic vote.”  This article, from The Telegraph, is utter garbage.  The author argues that Biden is costing Obama the Catholic vote, because Catholics were split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans before Biden joined the ticket, but now that he is on the ticket, Catholic leaders are heavily criticizing him and other pro-choice Catholic politicians.  The author claims that this increased attention means Catholics are going to turn away from the Obama-Biden ticket, even though he cites no statistics to support this conclusion, and even though one would assume that the 50% of Catholics who were supporting Obama were already aware of the fact that he and most other prominent Democrats are pro-choice.

Yet as Drudge links to tripe like this, he ignores McCain’s incompetent, bumbling response to the ongoing crisis on Wall Street, in which the Arizona senator has said he would fire the SEC chairman (the president can’t do that) and has confused the SEC with the FEC.

I’m pretty close to the point where I will start boycotting Drudge.

The “controversy” ginned up by Matt Drudge about Sarah Palin not being invited by Oprah to appear on her show is nonsense.  There’s no reason why Oprah should have to have Palin on her show.  The fact that Barack Obama appeared on her show before he declared his presidential candidacy in no way compels her to take a standing vice presidential candidate on the air less than two months before the election.  Sure, Oprah is an Obama supporter, but then her show isn’t supposed to be an impartial news broadcast and she is under no journalistic ethical obligation to interview Sarah Palin.

This is yet another example of how Matt Drudge has disappointingly turned against Obama, as I wrote in an earlier post.

I’ve been interested to observe in recent weeks a shift in how Matt Drudge presents Obama-related material on his news-aggregation website, the Drudge Report.  During primary season, several commentators noted that Drudge adopted a favorable attitude towards Obama; many times he emphasized stories that made Obama look good while ignoring or giving low placement to stories unfavorable to Obama.  This was surprising because Drudge is an acknowledged libertarian with a conservative bent, and he is famous for breaking and driving stories such as the Lewinsky scandal and the Swift Boat campaign tactics that were detrimental to Democrats.

Well, I am now convinced that the only reason Drudge was nice to Obama is because he couldn’t stand Hillary Clinton and despaired at the prospect of having to produce the Drudge Report under four years of a Clinton administration.  He wanted new blood, so he did what he could to help Obama emerge from the Democratic primaries, but now, Drudge has swung hard in the other direction, in favor of McCain.

The last few days are a case study in this.  Drudge has covered the emerging disaster that is the Sarah Palin pick with almost no attention to the skeletons that are coming out of her closet.  He did, however, put a quote from Joe Biden at the top of the page: “Biden: She’s good looking…”  That quote makes Biden look bad, but he actually said that as an example of the difference between Palin and himself — in other words, he was making fun of himself.  But Drudge put up his misleading headline anyway.  What’s worse, he is now blaring a headline “I’ve Got More Experience Than Her!” under pictures of Obama and Palin — as if Obama said those words when in fact he did not.

I’m just disappointed to see Drudge so blatantly in the tank for McCain, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.  Hopefully Drudge won’t be as influential this time around compared to ‘04.

Anyway, the good news is that Obama has finally cracked 50% in the polls for the first time.