CNN contributor Roland Martin’s Wednesday column on CNN.com bluntly accused Republicans of exhibiting "fear and desperation" in their criticism of Barack Obama: "McCain's campaign is no longer about issues. He and his supporters want to bring up anything and everything to derail Obama, and nothing is sticking, so they just keep returning to their old bag of tricks." This "bag" apparently includes bringing up issues like Obama’s 20-year relationship with left-wing firebrand Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the socialist labeling of the Democratic presidential candidate, and his associations with terrorist Bill Ayers and ACORN.

Martin first labeled McCain an "old fighter," but not as a compliment: "Watching Sen. John McCain and top Republicans swing wildly in their attempts to slam Sen. Barack Obama, with less than two weeks ago to go before Election Day, is like watching an old fighter -- clearly out of gas, his legs turned to rubber, and all he can do is grab, hold, punch behind the back, just anything to try to win." He then used his "old bag of tricks" line.

During a report on Monday’s Anderson Cooper 360 program, CNN investigative correspondent Drew Griffin presented many of the missing details about the relationship between Barack Obama and left-wing terrorist William Ayers that two earlier "Truth Squad" reports on the network on Sunday and Monday omitted. Griffin stated that despite the spin of the Obama campaign and their mainstream media supporters, "...the relationship between Obama and Ayers went much deeper, ran much longer, and was much more political than Obama said."

Host Anderson Cooper introduced Griffin’s report, which began 19 minutes into the 10 pm Eastern hour, as one of the CNN program’s "Keeping Them Honest" features. Oddly, a on-screen graphic that read "The Dow Plunges," which had nothing to do with the subject of the segment, ran during its entirety. The correspondent began by repeating Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn’s background in the Weather Underground, "an anti-Vietnam War group that bombed federal buildings, including the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon." He then gave Obama’s early characterization of his relationship with the 1960's radical, that the Democrat "confirmed... that he knew Ayers, and, when pressed, said they served on a charitable foundation board together, and Obama condemned Ayers' support of violence."

They make Reverend Wright and Trinity United disappear

The Media, Lining it Up

And for their next trick, the media will stuff Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s liberalism back into his hat.

On Sunday, the Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman gave us a 1,152 word news-ish story entitled “Obama Addresses His Faith”, which was a glowingly open forum for Obama to deliver “a highly personal account of his spiritual journey” and in which he proffered “a promise that he will make ‘faith-based’ social service ‘a moral center of (his) administration.’”

It’s hard to read the word “faith” in the same sentence as the name “Barack Obama” without thinking of the racist, anti-American radical Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who for twenty years served as the Senator’s pastor, and (as Obama described him) his “spiritual advisor” and “mentor”, in Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. It cannot be accidental that the Washington Post made no mention whatsoever of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Trinity United in a piece dedicated exclusively to the Senator’s religion.

Leave it to Mary Mitchell of the Chicago Sun-Times to get her kufi in a twist over the decision by Northwestern University to withdraw the honorary degree they had intended to bestow upon Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's racist "spiritual mentor."

In the sort of backwards logic of a woeful Black victim mentality -- Mitchell’s specialty -- Mitchell is claiming that the decision to rescind the racist Rev's honorary degree is an illegitimate one because the decision was made in March "before his image and words exploded on YouTube and became a headache for Barack Obama." Mitchell acts as if Wright's outrageous hate-speak was born fully-grown out of nowhere when he burst onto the national scene in March. But it was all rather well known in Illinois long before that.

Later in the segment on CNN’s "Newsroom" between Tony Harris, David Gergen, and Roland Martin after the Reverend Jeremiah Wright speech at the National Press Club (which Mark Finkelstein blogged about earlier), Gergen suggested that "it’s time for him [Rev. Wright] to get off the stage, and frankly, for the media, I suggest, to move on." He also twice characterized the whole affair as a "sideshow" [audio available here].

Shortly after a commercial break which came in the middle of the discussion, Gergen, in response to a question from "Newsroom" co-host Tony Harris, said of Rev. Wright, "Every time he appears, he just gives legitimacy and a hunger by those who oppose Barack Obama to re-run those tapes, to keep him at the center of controversy, to let this overhang and define Barack Obama, when it has, you know -- it has very, very little to do -- it's a very marginal piece of who Barack Obama is and what he stands for."

Gergen then talked about how the Rev. Wright issue was a distraction, and how the preacher should have handled himself after the controversy broke, all the while heaping praise on him, and at the end, making his "move on" suggestion.