The recent Big Government story revealing Barack Obama’s appearance alongside the New Black Panther Party has prompted Media Matters for America to tear away even more of the flimsy veneer of its “nonpartisan” mission statement. After Matt Gertz‘s knee-jerk defensive maneuvers for Obama, Simon Maloy quickly doubled down with an attack on National Review’s Andrew McCarthy. Could someone again explain to me how MMfA is a tax exempt organization?
Media Matters’ Simon Maloy
Mr. Maloy is so excited to “debunk” McCarthy, he engages in the common Media Matters tactic of presenting only snippets of the article he’s critiquing, going so far as to say “I’ll reproduce just the first paragraph of McCarthy’s post, because it’s really all you need” (he later goes on to quote other parts of the article). To stoop to limiting the information presented to his readers, either out of fear that they may read it in its entirety and (gasp!) think for themselves or out of a juvenile need to deprive National Review of traffic, betrays incredible insecurity behind his snide partisan vitriol. Mr. Maloy either knows better or he is lying, saying anything he can to make Andrew Breitbart look bad and distract the media from the story’s implications for Obama’s reelection campaign.
Maloy desperately clings to the objection that the purpose of the Selma march somehow mollifies Breitbart and McCarthy’s main point — that then-candidate Obama was mingling with The New Black Panther Party, doing nothing to distance himself from its radical, violence-inciting leaders. To develop McCarthy’s thought further, if both Rick Perry and the KKK both showed up to a bake sale to benefit children with cancer, that wouldn’t excuse the Republican presidential candidate sharing a podium with the racist group.
Maloy continues by hyperventilating that Mr. McCarthy would dare count Malik Zulu Shabazz as part of Obama’s “Panther entourage.” Last time I checked, Shabazz was a prominent figure in The New Black Panther Party, and while thousands attended the march, not many of those thousands spoke at the podium which both Shabazz and Obama used that day. For Gertz and Maloy to say one can’t associate Obama with the New Black Panther Party unless one counts the several thousand other attendees is the height of irony, as this is coming from the same organization that associates the entire tea party with planted crazies!
It is suspicious a “Malik Shabazz” appeared on the White House visitors’ log. Mr. Maloy thinks he’s smart by saying the White House identified Shabazz as a false positive. However, due to MMfA’s other predictable tactic of presuming a hyperlink to a tangential White House FAQ web page puts any and all questions to rest, Maloy ends up providing no “proof” to corroborate the White House’s denials. If you can find this proof in his maze of links (mostly back to … you guessed it, MMfA), please let me know. Unlike MMfA, I’ll admit when I’m wrong.
Mr. Maloy talks about Obama being several feet ahead of the Panthers while exiting the event, thus no one can possibly conclude they are together. So long as there’s a buffer of two or three rows between one person and another, they have obviously never, ever met each other. I’ll be glad to apply Mr. Maloy’s standard the next time he tries to associate people at Tea Party events with extremists or plants.
Finally, Maloy mocks Mr. McCarthy’s piece for including less than 400 words, as though that’s some sort of big deal. I encourage Mr. Maloy to read more articles in The Corner section of National Review Online because all the articles are very short. Did he consider that maybe, just maybe, there is a word limit to posts in that section?
This Media Matters post is bizarre, even more than usual for the organization. Is Mr. Maloy upset because Mr. Breitbart again exposed the Chosen One’s radical connections? Are he and MMfA that desperate to play defense for the President that they have to attack the number of words in Mr. McCarthy’s article? Again, how is MMfA tax exempt? When will they balance this coverage with, say, some fact-checking on a story about a rock painted over nearly thirty years ago? They won’t, because they are partisan to the core, and anyone with two eyes can see through their mission statement’s claims to the opposite.
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