The media seems to take an exceptional interest in Senator Lisa Murkowski when she’s uttering liberal talking points on ‘compromise’ or when she’s blasting Sarah Palin as being ‘not worldly enough’ for the office of the Presidency.
Case in point, as NewsBuster Brad Wilmouth pointed out, CBS recently highlighted Murkowski’s claim that she believes Palin lacks the ‘intellectual curiosity’ to run in 2012. And the rest of the main stream media ran with it, as reports on the ‘intellectual curiosity’ slap began cropping up at MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, ABC News, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, etc.
Then of course, there is the Anchorage Daily News (ADN), who’s seemingly made a living in coming to Murkowski’s aid. In fact, it wasn’t long ago that they were reporting on a Republican letter urging Tea Party candidate, Joe Miller, to start answering questions about his background, and offered their own editorial suggesting that personal matters are indeed fair game in an election.
So the MSM feels that an insult to Palin’s intelligence is legitimate news, while the local media in Alaska believes that past personal matters involving Joe Miller are legitimate news.
Yet, neither the national or local media saw news value when a story started circulating in the blogosphere prior to the election, pertaining to Murkowski’s alleged intellectual curiosity for cocaine.
In mid-October, blogger Dan Riehl was reporting on a second instance of Murkowski being confronted with claims of cocaine use and abuse; allegations which her campaign manager did not respond to.
The first instance came in 1998, when attorney Richard J. Helms said he ‘received many calls back then alleging that Ms. Murkowski used cocaine in substantial amounts for a prolonged period of time.’ According to Helms, when he confronted Murkowski with these accusations, she did not outwardly deny their accuracy.
Thus, two separate but similar tales of cocaine use, both of which went unanswered. Neither of which was of any interest to the media.
These are just allegations however, and surely not substantiated enough to warrant further investigation. After all, where else have you seen a candidate for a significant position smeared in the media over unsubstantiated cocaine allegations? Oh wait…
Another aspect of this that the media will not tackle, is the hypocrisy of somebody like Murkowski calling anybody’s intelligence into question. The Politico, via McClatchy Newspapers, revealed last month that Murkowski had failed her legal bar exam multiple times.
After graduating from Willamette University's College of Law in Oregon in 1985, Murkowski failed the bar exam four times until she finally passed the test in November of 1987.
Fortunately for Murkowski, her intellectual curiosity revealed itself on the fifth attempt at the bar exam.
But that’s not nearly as funny as somebody calling Sarah Palin stupid.
Because the target of Murkowski’s disdain was Palin, the media has been salivating at her comments without bothering to question the source.
Rush Limbaugh, on the other hand, has offered this counter-thought to the traditional Palin-haters in the media:
“Sarah Palin has the intellectual curiosity to figure out that Obama is destroying the country and has to be stopped, which makes her more intelligent than Lisa Murkowski.”
Rusty can be reached at The Mental Recession,or via Twitter @rustyweiss74.
