Rendell Rage

Is the healing complete between Hillary's camp and Obama? It doesn't seem to be.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell was supposed to give “closing remarks” during this afternoon’s Shorenstein Center-sponsored panel discussion with all three Sunday show moderators — NBC’s Tom Brokaw, ABC’s George Stephanopoulous and CBS’s Bob Schieffer — but instead, he opened up a can of worms about bias in 2008 election coverage

"Ladies and gentleman, the coverage of Barack Obama was embarrassing," said Rendell, in the ballroom at Denver's Brown Palace Hotel. "It was embarrassing."

Even though he's supposed to be supporting Obama now, the Pennsylvania governor couldn't restrain his anger over how Hillary was treated.

Rendell, an ardent Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter during the primaries, now backs Obama in the general election. Brokaw and Rendell began debating campaign coverage, including the on-air comments by Lee Cowan, and when MSNBC came up, Rendell went after the cable network.

It's so much fun to hear Democrats going after the media for something they'd always said just couldn't happen.

“MSNBC was the official network of the Obama campaign," Rendell said, who called their coverage "absolutely embarrassing."

Chris Matthews, Rendell said, "loses his impartiality when he talks about the Clintons.”

And he gets that tingle up his leg when he hears Barack speak!

At that point, PBS's Judy Woodruff, who was moderating the moderators event, said: "Why don’t we let Governor Rendell sit down."

How quickly they turn!

That was met with applause from the crowd of big-time media figures, which included Arianna Huffington, Gwen Ifill, Al Hunt, and Chuck Todd.

Woodruff allowed Brokaw to respond, and in defending the network, he said that Matthews and Keith Olbermann are "not the only voices" on MSNBC.

Now that's quite a defense of MSNBC.

McCain Strikes Back

McCain is using humor to highlight the media obsession with the candidate McCain's people refer to as "The One." Now, there are two videos up on his website mocking the obsession, with the opportunity to vote for which 60's love song best exemplifies the media's condition.


Nice job.

See them here.

Hiding in Afghanistan

He'd never been before, so it made sense for Barack to start his international campaign swing in Afghanistan.

KABUL - US Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama arrived in Afghanistan Saturday at the start of a major international tour that will also include Iraq, his office and the Afghan foreign ministry said.

Obama's office said the senator would visit some of the 36,000 US soldiers in Afghanistan as part of an international effort to defeat a growing extremist insurgency.

"He will meet President (Hamid) Karzai and they will discuss issues of mutual interest," added foreign ministry spokesman Sultan Ahmad Baheen, confirming Obama's arrival to AFP.

Barack is playing a game of "Good War, Bad War."

If he wins the November elections, Obama plans to commit at least two more combat brigades, up to 10,000 men, to Afghanistan, which is enduring a resurgence in fighting by the Islamic Taliban militia.

If he can find a war to support, he escapes accusations of being another Democrat who gets queasy around the idea of using the military to defend the nation. He's taking cover in Afghanistan.

"Iraq is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been."

Ah, that old mantra of the anti-war left. There's a logic problem here - this line of thinking ignores the fact of what the war in Iraq represents now, regardless of what it was when we went in.

Ironically, if you are a sincerely anti-war type and you're paying attention, Barack sounds more dangerous than McCain.

"Al-Qaeda has an expanding base in Pakistan that is probably no farther from their old Afghan sanctuary than a train ride from Washington to Philadelphia," Obama said.

"We cannot tolerate a terrorist sanctuary, and as president I won't."

Few will spend much time examining such realities. Barack will successfully inoculate himself with this tactic.