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"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." - John 8:32
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Author:  Michael J. Gaynor
Bio: Michael J. Gaynor
Date:  March 14, 2008
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Obama Campaign: Politically Correct Sensationalism

In these heady days of the Obama campaign, inconvenient facts aplenty have been ignored and when Geraldine Ferraro opined that race and gender were working FOR Obama in his race against Hillary, in the name of political correctness, her candor was deplored.

Rookie United States Senator and “rock star” Democrat presidential hopeful Barack Hussein Obama is the hysterically hyped hope candidate of politically correct sensationalism this year.

Political correctness extremists not only shamelessly promote his candidacy, but discourage scutiny of him by savaging those who mention facts they want to be ignored (such as his middle name and his disproportionately high black support) or even ask questions about his background and connections (emailers identifying themselves as Kenyans have threatened as well as condemned me for that).

Political correctness extremists have not been so exciting since they were promoting the myth that Crystal Gail Mangum was a gang rape victim.

Some “would be astonished if a single vote in the national election could be swayed by anything that happens in” the pending lawsuits by members of the 2005-2006 Duke University Men’s Lacrosse Team.

If those cases call public attention to the evils of politically correct sensationalism, however, they will sway votes as voters learn.

They certainly should sway votes, since Obama is the candidate benefiting from politically correct sensationalism that is not only hyping him as the candidate of hope and change (despite his inexperience), but hammering those who point out inconvenient truths about him and the woeful general public ignorance about him and his conenctions.

Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, by Stuart Taylor Jr. and KC Johnson, focused on an egregious example of politically correct sensationalism savaging the lacrosse team members to sell the myth that an ex convict black stripper had been raped, sexually assaulted and kidnapped by some team members and then the whole team had covered up such heinous crimes by erecting a “blue wall of silence” (blue being the Duke color).

Fortunately, the truth—no rape, no sexual assault, no kidnapping--ultimately prevailed.

But, the forces of extreme political correctness remain unrepentant and move on.

These days, these forces are promoting the Obama campaign and railing against anyone who points out what, for them, are inconvenient truths, such as the media’s failure to scrutinize Obama and former Democrat vice presidential candidate Geraldine A. Ferraro’s assertions that being black is a net plus in Obama’s presidential campaign and being a woman is a net minus for his rival for the Democrat presidential nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Geraldine candidly acknowledged that if she had been a man, she would not have been the 1984 Democrat vice presidential nominee.)

Tragically for America, Until Proven Innocent did not receive the public attention it richly deserved--because it exquisitely exposed political correctness, the political correctness extremists did not want that widely publicized and key conservatives who did not receive more credit in the book forgot that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing and did not forgive that slight.

Chapter 9 of the Taylor/Johnson missive is titled “Politically Correct Sensationalism.”

The first paragraph of that chapter summarized what the political correctness extremists had done affirmatively with respect to the so-called Duke case: “In late March [2006], the journalistic echo chamber quickly spread the image of drunken, disorderly, publicly urinating lacrosse thugs around the world. [Democrat appointee district attorney running for reelection in largely black Durham County, North Carolina against a then more popular white man and a young black man with little criminal law experience Michael B.] Nifong whipped the national media into a feeding frenzy with his public assertions on March 27 and thereafter that the lacrosse players were clearly guilty of raping the ‘victim,’ of punding her with racial slurs, and of forming a ‘wall of silence’ to cover it up.”

Later in that chapter, the co-authors reported that the team members (all but one of whom were white) had been treated gently because they were white: “Amid this mass demonization of the lacrosse players, the media offered a stead stream of quotes and commentary suggesting that the players were receiving especially favorable treatment because of their race. Wrote syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts: ‘Imagine if the woman were white and reported being raped by three black members of the basketball team. You’d have to call out the National Guard.’ In the (London) Independent, a student at [North Carolina Central University] was quoted as saying, ‘If the tables had been turned and two white qwomen had been raped by the [NCCU} footbal team, the whole team would be in jail. They would not be walking around.’ Another NCCU student, Spirit Mitchell, told CBS, ‘If it was a Duke student and it was Central’s football team, the situation would have been hardly totally differently.”

To their eternal credit, the centrist Taylor and liberal Johnson effectively challenged this political correctness pap: “Such assumptions were dramatically refuted by the low-key reactions of the authorities, academics, and the media themselves to several other recent cases involving allegations of sexual by white women against black and Hispanic football players. The contrasting reactions to the Duke case and to these other cases suggest that any racial double standard in dealing with alleged sexual assaults by college athletes is the opposite of the one supposed by the conventional wisdom.

Five other cases are summarized at pages 126 and 127 of the book, immediately followed by this astute analysis: “In none of these cases did the media construct a metanarrative styling the accused as personifying broader social ills involving sex, class, or interracial rape. That is precisely what the media did to the ‘privileged’ Duke lacrosse players."

Exactly!

And, to that end, the media left out facts that did not “fit” its metanarrative of choice.

Chapter 9 ended this way:

”In fact, more than one-third of the forty-seven lacrosse players came from families of modest means. Four were sons of retired New York City firefighters. Other parents included a bricklayer; a medical officer worker; a beauty parlor proprietor; a science teacher; two nurses; a respiratory therapist; a school administrator; a 7-Eleven franchisee; two public school teachers, onme of them, a widow; the Hofstra lacrosse coach; a Johns Hopkins professor; and two professors at the City University of New York.

“The Duke team’s ‘privilege’ quotient may well have been less than that of the reporting and editing staff of The New York Times. In the heady days of March and April, however, such inconvenient facts were ignored.”In these heady days of the Obama campaign, inconvenient facts aplenty have been ignored and when Geraldine Ferraro opined that race and gender were working FOR Obama in his race against Hillary, in the name of political correctness, her candor was deplored.

If Barack were not half-black, I think Hillary would be carrying the black vote. Easily.

The exit polls support Geraldine: the black vote is breaking for Obama in about the same way as it broke for Bill Clinton when he ran against the first President Bush: 91 to 9.

If the white vote broke that way in Hillary’s favor, who besides David Duke would not think race was exercising a bad influence?

Michael J. Gaynor

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Biography - Michael J. Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.

Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.

The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.

Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.

Gaynor's email address is gaynormike@aol.com.


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