The Omerta Presidency

The news that a 2005 photograph of Barack Obama and Louis Farrakhan was buried at the behest of a senior member of the CBC until now, has, predictably, not hit the mainstream media like a bombshell, giving further credence to notions that “objective” journalism not only has its collective thumb on the scales but might be directly responsible for perpetuating the “darkness” in which it fears democracy is doomed to die.

Never mind that certain other more blatantly partisan publications only consider the good Reverend to be “controversial” at worst.  

Or that photographer Askia Muhammad must have remembered how his NOI colleagues promised to “make an example” out of Milton Coleman for reporting Jesse Jackson’s “Hymietown” remarks in 1984.  

Or that Obama’s 2008 statements regarding Farrakhan—“I did not solicit his support; I can’t say to somebody that he can’t say that he thinks I’m a good guy”—sound vaguely like Trump’s statements about David Duke, only more disingenuous because Trump never met with supremacists, and Obama did.

On one hand, anyone who made any use of the “birther” conspiracy—whether or not they actually bought into it, or just cynically used it as political ploy—should be kicking themselves, because this photograph might have been the ultimate nip-in-the-bud career ender even in a pre-YouTube age.  It would have been much easier to sully Obama’s image and reputation with Farrakhan, a national bigot, that it proved to be with a not yet nationally known figure like Jeremiah Wright, therefore leaving Obama enough wiggle room during the 2008 campaign.

The shame of it is that more reasonable conservative publications still seem to be going out of their way to opine that Obama certainly doesn’t personally hold by Farrakhan’s views.  With all due respect to their staying classy about this, they could be a little more forceful in legitimately sullying both the reputation and historical legacy of the very premises of the Obama Presidency.  At the very least they could point out that Farrakhan’s repudiations of Obama (unlike Rev. Wright, who was more circumspect about Obama “abandoning” him), was a rebuffed attempt at political prostitution of the worst sort,  like Bill piping out Hillary to Putin and the Russians through uranium deals on behalf of the Clinton Foundation, only to have Putin run off with Trump.  (At least Bill walked away with half a million.)

The irony of it is that now Hillary might be kicking herself very hard for not pushing her contacts in the DNC and CBC for finding what would have been the Holy Grail of oppo research: it would have killed what ended up being her first non-coronation; apparently the Clintons weren’t liked that much even back then.   And now she can’t say anything, because the last thing she can afford to do as an already tenuously tolerated member of the “resistance” is cast aspersions at the first Black President of the United States.  She can’t tarnish his legacy without destroying hers.