On Fox News Sunday, NPR's Juan Williams claimed Obama's Muslim father "presents a problem"

Media Matters has posted a useful timeline of the events following a nasty piece of yellow journalism published by InsightMag.com--a "news" outfit owned by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church--that claimed the Clinton camp "has discovered" that Barack Obama attended a madrassa as a child and was raised Muslim. Clinton has denied it and Obama has said he doesn't believe she was behind the report. But that didn't stop several major news outlets from running with it, especially those in the Murdoch empire. The Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune ran editorials blasting the smear campaign and debunking the InsightMag.com claims and their reverberations in the right-wing echo chamber.

The fad hasn't passed. On Tuesday, Terry Mattingly, who writes a religion column for Scripps Howard and runs the blog Get Religion, posted his critique of a Chicago Tribune article that looked at the career of Obama's pastor. It's a standard piece of religion journalism criticism, which takes the the writer to task for failing to unpack phrases like "the common sense of Scripture." But the post's headline is "Filling in that Obama faith timeline," and it begins with this:

Relax. I have little or no interest in the shoddy stories about Barack Obama and his alleged years studying in a madrassa in Pakistan.

"No," Mattingly assures his readers, "I am interested in the faith of the adult Obama." After running through his critique of the Tribune piece, he wraps up the post with this:

Finally, if anyone wants to know more about Obama’s faith, the new free daily called the Washington Examiner is running a series by Bill Sammon on “The 5 Most Important Things You Need to Know About Barack Obama.” Part one is about religion and it contains a wide range of interesting quotes about Obama’s faith—drawn from his own memoirs. It’s an interesting timeline. Check it out. Here’s the opening statement, which is hot but factual:

WASHINGTON — Although Sen. Barack Obama is a Christian, his childhood and family connections to Islam are beginning to complicate his presidential ambitions.

So there's that timeline Mattingly referred to in his headline. I also recommend reading the piece he links to, but probably for different reasons. Sammon dipped into Obama's books looking for anything on his "Muslim past." He found that Obama spent two years in a Muslim school. That Barack means "blessed" in Arabic. That his grandfather was Muslim. Sammon grants that Obama's father was an atheist by the time he met Obama's mother, but Sammon points out, "Still, when his father, a black Kenyan named Barack Obama Sr., died in 1982, 'the father wanted a Muslim burial,' Obama quoted his brother, Roy, as saying in Dreams." Obama's statement refuting the InsightMag.com hit piece, Sammon says, "referred to his father simply as 'an atheist,' without mentioning his Muslim upbringing."

There's much more along those lines, but the intended cumulative effect on the reader is clear: Obama has a long and deep connection to Islam--his name is even Arabic!--and possibly has Muslim sympathies. After all, Sammons notes, Obama said the United States is no longer just a Christian nation, and that he would stand by the Arab and Pakistani Americans he met with after 9/11 "should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."

Sammon asserts that Obama's campaign is greatly affected by pundits (pundits like this?) asking questions about candidates' faith--he cites Romney--but doesn't offer word one of analysis about how these tenuous connections to Islam matter. The only bit of quoted analysis in the piece comes from Juan Williams:

“He comes from a father who was a Muslim,” said civil rights author Juan Williams of National Public Radio. “I mean, I think that given we’re at war with Muslim extremists, that presents a problem.”

Watch the exchange for yourself. Williams is talking about the issue of race and Obama. He's talking about how Obama is perceived. This isn't how Sammon presents it. But, in that vein, perhaps it's better to give you some information about Sammon to help you understand his past.

Bill Sammon is senior White House Correspondent for the Examiner. Before that, he had the same job at the conservative Washington Times, which, like InsightMag.com, is owned by Sun Myung Moon's church. He's written books like, At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election, John Kerry and the Bush Haters, and Strategery: How George W. Bush Is Defeating Terrorists, Outwitting Democrats, and Confounding the Mainstream Media.

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/post/index/747/Obamas-alleged-Muslim-ties

It makes me wonder if Juan Williams has spent too much time working as a Fox News commentator when he is this wrong about the facts. This was one of the questions that Williams asked President Bush during his exclusive interview with President Bush yesterday:

WILLIAMS: "One last thing, Mr. President, with the Democrats. You asked the Democrats on a bipartisan basis to form an advisory council and monitor the war, work with you. They haven't responded at all. What do you take from that?"

Not true. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid responded promptly with a joint letter to Bush on Jan. 19.

Excerpts of the Pelosi-Reid letter:

We believe that Congress already has bipartisan structures in place, like the committee system and other Congressional working groups such as the Senate’s National Security Working Group, that could produce the result you described in your speech.

We look forward to working with you within these existing structures, in a bipartisan and fully consultative way, to make progress on efforts against terrorism and other important matters.

http://demagogue.blogspot.com/2007/01/juan-williams-gets-it-wrong.html

At first, I thought someone played a practical joke on me by switching the radio station from NPR to FOX. Then I realized that the reporter throwing softball questions to President Bush was none other than Juan Williams. I was stunned, listening to President Bush bumble his way through this political version of an infomercial, while Juan Williams helpfully put words in his mouth when the going got tough.

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http://shantigrrl.blogspot.com/2007/01/sad-day-for-npr.html

I used to really like Juan Williams. Prior to the Bush presidency, I thought of him as a tough, smart, and aggressive reporter. But the Bush years have cowed him. He is the poster child for the reporter who has become so concerned about being accused of a liberal bias that he has ceased to simply do his damned job. He's been relegated to being the house liberal on Fox, occasionally showing some spunk, but typically just falling within the range of liberal thought that is allowed on Fox just long enough to smack it back down again and laugh at.

So he was an odd choice to interview the President on NPR. I guess they figured they couldn't just let the Hannity's and the O'Reilly's of the world interview him and have any credibility. So they go with the pseudo-liberal Williams to do a mock-up of an interview while they pretend Bush is venturing into enemy territory.

Let's look at the interview, shall we?

About halfway through, Williams thinks he's caught the President and the Veep in a showdown, with Cheney saying there's been enormous success, while Bush says, eh, not so much. Williams pins Bush down:

MR. WILLIAMS: But there's no distance between you and Vice President Cheney in terms of the strength of his resolve that things are going, as he put it, you know, successfully.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, we both agree that something needed to change. In other words, when I made the decision to change the strategy in Iraq with a focus on Baghdad – in other words, reinforcing our troops, he fully understands that needed to happen and supported it.



Williams really missed the point. Of course he's not going to get Bush to admit that there's "distance" between himself and the VP. The point is that the two men are issuing contradictory statements. Not that they disagree with one another, but that Cheney's comment is a flat-out refusal to acknowledge reality, and that this administration has habitually put on rose-colored glasses and failed to realize the extent of the situation, even as, in this interview, Bush continues to dodge the term "civil war". So the question is not, "is there distance," the question should be, isn't this just another attempt by the VP to put a positive spin on events in Iraq in order to avoid the political consequences of admitting the failure that Iraq has become?

Williams' next question is friggin' journalistic malpractice.

All right. You know, people are praying for you; people – the American people want to be with you, Mr. President, but you just spoke about the polls and they indicate the public – and you know about what's going up on Capitol Hill with the Congress, some in the military. Even many Iraqis, according to the polls, don't like the idea of sending more troops into Iraq. So I wonder if you could give us something to go on, give us something – say, you know, this is a reason to get behind the president right now.



Praying for you? Praying for you? Are you friggin kiddin me? This question is right there with, "How has your faith sustained you?"

Notice, though, that Williams leaves a predicate hanging. "You just spoke about they polls and they indicate...", and then Williams doesn't say what they indicate. The end of that question really needed to be asked: "the polls indicate that the public strongly opposes the war and wants you to withdraw. Why won't you?" Instead, it turns into the mealy-mouthed and enabling, "get behind the president" softball.

Still, Bush manages to give as limp-wristed and idiotic an answer as could be imaginable. First there is this Mississippi River of a sentence: :Well, one way to – and one of the things I have found here in Washington amongst those who were skeptical about whether the Iraqis will do what it takes to secure their own freedom, is to remind them of what would happen if there's failure." He never finishes the thought--what is "one of the things"? And then when we get to "them" in the sentence's closing clause, the antecedent is totally FUBARed. Williams' question, weak as it may have been, was about the American people who need a reason to support the Preznit. By the end, "them" has become, "those (in Washington) who were skeptical about whether the Iraqis will do what it takes to secure their own freedom." In other words, nobody. Nobody said that, Mr. President. You made it up. It's called a straw man, and you are as addicted to them as you once were addicted to booze, coke, and God knows what else.

Bush continues, "In other words, there would be chaos. If we did not work to secure Baghdad and help the Iraqis to secure Baghdad, the country could evolve into a chaotic situation, and out of that chaos would emerge an emboldened enemy."

Again, where is Williams? It could "EVOLVE" into chaos? I could have cried right there. It would be funny if it weren't so pathetically, criminally sad.

And then, since Bush has gone a whole minute without being stupidly condescending, his internal smugness alarm forced him to utter this bit of nonsense. "See, the difference, Juan, between other conflicts in the past and this one is that failure would endanger the homeland." Holy history lesson, Batman, I guess Grandpa Ersel (That really is my grandpa's name, by the way, and his gradfather's name was Herschel Waldo. Seriously.) was wrong when he thought he needed to go to France to stop the Nazis and the Japanese, who, if I'm not mistaken, were seriously intent on attacking the homeland, but then again, it was just California.

Sorry, let me drop the sarcasm for a second, and just think about that sentence. See, the difference, Juan, between other conflicts in the past and this one is that failure would endanger the homeland. It's not bad enough that he's seriously, miserably, incredibly wrong, but in addition to being wrong, he is being smug and superior as though he's teaching Juan Williams a lesson. And Williams thanks him for it. Why can't someone--just once--interrupt the President and say, "I'm sorry sir, that's just not right. That's an incorrect statement, if you'll forgive me." I'm not suggesting rudeness. Just a simple demand for accuracy in his statements.

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http://www.ohdave.net/2007/01/reporter-reporter-my-kingdom-for.html