What next ... an ACTUAL lynching?

I was sitting at Cafe Ivanhoe yesterday on a chilly, quiet afternoon, flipping through the Sunday Herald Sun, when Paul, the affable proprietor, asked if I'd seen 'THE' photo. I asked him to elaborate. He said, 'There's a picture in there of Obama checking out a woman's behind'. I found the photo and shared a laugh with Paul, agreeing it wasn't a dignified shot, especially with French President Sarkozy practically drooling beside him.

It's nice living in Australia. I don't have to bear the stench of US right-wing smears and scare campaigns unless I stumble upon them online. The photo seemed out of context when I saw it in the paper, and less than 30 seconds spent online produced video footage showing what Obama was doing that, in a millisecond, resulted in the 'scandalous' photo. How a cafe owner in Australia came to believe an African-American president was acting lascivious on the world stage offers a crystal-clear cross-section of how today's mainstream media (MSM) mimics human waste secretion. Let's begin:

It starts with Drudge (ascending colon), moves through the right-wing blogosphere (transverse colon), gets further broken down by Limbaugh/Hannity/Beck/etc (descending colon) and finally splashes across the pages & broadcasts of the MSM (rectum).

Meanwhile, this same coterie of hacks blames media bias for the sudden resignation of their pin-up girl, a woman whose only discernible qualification for public office was an appeal to white/rural voters and whose innumerable public gaffes have been serially overlooked by the mostly white/male/postgraduate/balding right-wing media mob.

Through the bulk of US history, it didn't take much for a black man to get strung up in a tree by a pack of braying whites. All it took was a look, or the accusation of a look, at a white woman.

Plus ca change, plus c'est le meme chose ...