The Washington Post's Colbert I. King is a regular TV commentator, a
Pulitzer prize winner and the deputy editor of the paper's influential
editorial page. But the column [1] he churned out for Saturday's paper amounted to little more than a lazy ad hominem attack on conservatives.
Dressed up as a Father's Day column, King argued that Newt Gingrich,
Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh should not criticize President Obama on
policy matters because Obama is a good family man and they are not. King then churned out paragraph after paragraph reciting the personal
laundry of these conservatives and, in the case of Palin, their
non-relatives.
Here's how it started off:
Family, marriage and the contribution of fathers come together as topics for reflection on Father's Day. So I'd like to know why Barack Obama, a husband and a father in a family structure that encompasses bonds deemed essential to our society, is constantly and savagely attacked by conservative leaders whose personal circumstances undermine the family values they espouse?
Consider Obama: Raised by a single mother in a middle-class family where hard work and education were watchwords, Obama graduated from two of the top schools in the country, Columbia University and Harvard Law School. His legal scholarship was recognized when he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He married and, equally important, has stayed married to Michelle Robinson, a Princeton graduate and Harvard Law alumna. He lives with his wife, two children and his mother-in-law. Obama: constitutional law professor, civil rights lawyer, state legislator, U.S. senator, 44th U.S. president, family man.
Now let's turn to Obama's foremost critics: Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, Newton Leroy Gingrich and Sarah Palin.
Limbaugh and Gingrich have said too many negative things about Obama to count. "I want him to fail" (Limbaugh) and "secular socialist" (Gingrich) are just two of their attacks. Yet two of the nation's loudest proponents of family-values issues are serial husbands. Between them, the two men have had seven wives.
King then rattled through Limbaugh's previous marriages, culminating
with this snotty aside: "Two weeks ago, Limbaugh married a Florida
party planner. He's still wedded to her as far as I can tell."
When he got to Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor was tarred
with the wrongdoings of her sister-in-law, her daughter's
ex-boyfriend's mother, and even the shenanigans of Levi Johnston
himself, as if Palin blessed his every move:
And the whereabouts of 19-year-old Levi on this Father's Day weekend?...Levi can be found on the cover of Playgirl magazine, his nude body blocked from full exposure by his strategically placed arm.
And to think, as we prepare to celebrate this day of men and family, Limbaugh, Gingrich and Palin have the unmitigated gall to look down their noses at our president.
-Rich Noyes is Research Director at the Media Research Center. You can follow him on Twitter here [2].