Pray To Improve?

The Constructive Curmudgeon, the blog of a Christian philosopher who has joyfully doubled as an Obama smear-machine for the last few months, has just published the latest of the many posts for which he disables comments, wondering why on earth the lowlife that hung Sarah Palin's effigy from a tree in West Hollywood has not been arrested. He goes on to say that had the same thing been done to an effigy of Obama the perpetrator would have been "rightly arrested", and concludes his post with this gem of misplaced victimhood: "I guess it is open season if you are a Republican female. God help us."

As usual, The Constructive Curmudgeon is misinformed, which would not be so bad were it for the fact that its misinformation leads to the misinformation of its readers.

Anyway, since I know that fact-checking is not the Curmudgeon's forte, a disability he shares with other conservative shills like Michelle Malkin, we at The Daily Fuel do the fact-checking for him.

First of all, not only was the news reported by Reuters, and picked up by many outlets. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC made the perpetrator today's Worst Person In The World.



Also, if the Curmudgeon had uncharacteristically bothered to look, he'd know that last month--at a Christian college no less--some idiot hung a cardboard reproduction of Barack Obama from a tree.

And a few days ago in Fairfield, OH, another patriotic American "displayed a ghost with Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama's name on it — hanging from a tree by a noose", as reported by many media outlets. I don't remember where I first saw the report, but it did not take me long to find one of the reports from a Cincinnati CBS affiliate.

I am not aware of any arrests being made in any of the above cases, but I would not be surprised if there weren't any after all, since even the most despicable forms of free speech are protected by the First Amendment.

Needless to say, anyone who stretches his freedom of expression to such lengths probably has plenty of room to rent upstairs, no matter end of the political spectrum.

Unfortunately, the news of Sarah Palin's effigy being hung from a tree, as disgusting as an example of the misuse of the gift of free speech is, pales in comparison to the news that the ATF discovered a (pedestrian) plot by neo-Nazis to assassinate 88 African-Americans, including Sen. Obama (a similar plot was unveiled in Denver, during the Democratic Convention.)

Predictably, not only did The Constructive Curmudgeon not know of, report on, or condemn any of the stories concerning Sen. Obama (not even the one involving the Christian college in Oregon,) but he jumped at the first available opportunity to portray Gov. Palin as a victim of the hatred for Republican females, and to decry the non-existent double-standard (at least in this case) that the media is supposedly guilty of.

For a blog that quotes as its goal "the willingness to sniff out the truth and expose lies and spin as best one can in humility", The Constructive Curmudgeon can and must do better. One should hope that the power of prayer will be summoned by that blog's mostly Christian readership, to rid The Constructive Curmudgeon of its harmful inaccuracies.