Imagine, then, that Mr. Trump hired a portraitist to paint Melania's portrait and that the artist turned out to be someone who did several paintings showing a white woman holding the decapitated head of a black woman in one hand and the knife in the other. The media would justly be beside itself with outrage and would surely present this as even more damning proof of his racism than his "good people on both sides" asseveration.
And what would be said of the artist? Anyone so full of race hatred as to paint such a repellant picture would doubtless never find work again in this country.
Well, this scenario happened, actually, although some of the details were otherwise. It wasn't Donald Trump who hired the artist, it was Barack Obama, and it wasn't a white woman who decapitated a black woman in the painting. It was vice-versa, and that, judging by the media silence about the episode, presumably makes everything okay.
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| Painted by Kehinde Wiley |
This painting is all the more jarring because the artist's entire oeuvre consists almost exclusively of paintings of black subjects, except for a few scenes taken from the Bible and this beheaded white woman. Why did the artist, Kehinde Wiley, make her white, and why did the Obamas commission Ms. Wiley to do their own portraits?
Perhaps there's a sufficient explanation. I'm certainly willing to give the Obamas (and Ms Wiley) the benefit of the doubt in this, but that's, I guess, the point. Why are President Trump's critics so loath to give him the benefit of the doubt?
In any case, the shameful one-sidedness of the media's treatment of political leaders, particularly by liberal cable outlets like CNN and MSNBC, the hostility they show toward those they oppose and the refuge they afford those they favor, brought to mind a few other examples of hypocrisy among our progressive politicos and media. For example:
- The Democrats have been demanding something be done about protecting the "Dreamers", people who were brought here illegally when they were children. President Trump offered the Democrats not only to protect the Dreamers, he offered them and a million other illegals a path to citizenship. It was more than the Democrats would have ever asked for, but they turned the offer down, ostensibly because the president asked that he be given in return the border wall and an end to chain migration. Their refusal gave the lie to their claim to deeply care about the Dreamers' plight and looked suspiciously as if they don't really want a solution for the Dreamers if Mr. Trump would get the credit for it.
- The media and Mr. Trump's political opponents have been condemning him and the GOP for months for undermining public confidence in the FBI by raising questions about corrupt political intrigues among the Bureau's hierarchy. Yet ever since it was revealed that the FBI had mishandled information they'd received about Nikolas Cruz, the Florida school shooter, the progressive media has been chattering incessantly about FBI incompetence. Evidently, when the Republicans are critical of the FBI liberals don their FBI ball caps and rush to the defense of law enforcement, but when it suits their own purposes for themselves to be critical they drop the hammer, and if public confidence in the venerable institution suffers that's too bad.
- For weeks the media has been running stories about how White House advisor Rob Porter had access to classified information even though he was denied a security clearance because of allegations of domestic abuse. Giving someone without a security clearance access to classified information has been cited as a serious breach of security and evidence of a careless, reckless, incompetent White House. Yet many of these same critics doubtless promoted the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton who as Secretary of State grossly, and arguably criminally, mishandled classified information by putting it on her personal server and making it accessible to every intelligence agency and amateur hacker in the world.
- There's been ongoing criticism of President Trump in the wake of the Florida school murders for not doing something serious about gun control, yet President Obama had a Democratic House and Senate in the first two years of his administration and could have pushed through any legislation he wanted but did nothing about gun control. In fact, it was during these two years that the Democrats passed the highly unpopular Affordable Care act, and the administration enacted numerous executive orders and bureaucratic regulations. The Democrats surely could have passed gun control legislation had they wished to, but they did nothing and received little to no media criticism for their negligence.
- Recently, the media has been titillated over the prospect that details of an illicit affair a decade ago between Donald Trump and a porn film performer might be forthcoming. This, we're told, is further evidence, if any were needed, that Mr. Trump is unsuited for the dignity of the office he holds. Perhaps so, but these claims would be far more persuasive were they not coming from some of the same people who idolized President Clinton who not only carried on numerous extra-marital affairs, but did so while he was president, and did so in the Oval Office of the White House.
They certainly give the impression that it's not racism, or Dreamers, or public confidence in the FBI, or national security, or gun control, or the dignity of the office they care about. Rather, what matters to them is not the issue itself but whether the issue provides them a cudgel with which to pummel their political adversaries.