Ask Not Who You Can Smear For Your Country

On the subject of the Kennedys' endorsements of Barack Obama, Soccer Dad commented, "Think that any members of the MSM or Democratic Party will say, 'I knew Jack Kennedy ...?'"

... and you, sir, are no Jack Kennedy. Dan Quayle's ears probably still hurt from the verbal cuffing he got from Lloyd Benson during the VP debate, yet Barack Obama remains pretty much uncuffed by such unflattering comparisons.

Until today.

Writing in the Washington Monthly under the coy headline Ask Not, Ted Widmer lays out why Obama is no Jack Kennedy. Here's one of several paragraphs Widmer spins out on the topic:

Kennedy, of course, was a decorated veteran of World War Two, which he fought in the South Pacific. But before and after the conflict, he had acquired travel experiences that most people take a lifetime to accumulate, richly detailed in biographies like Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life. His father was ambassador to the United Kingdom in the pivotal year 1938, and young Kennedy was in the audience of the House of Commons as the Munich deal was furiously debated (the experience shaped his first book, Why England Slept). As a young man, he made American officials uneasy with his relentless desire to see parts of Europe and the world that few Americans ever encountered. In 1939 alone, he took in the Soviet Union, Romania, Turkey, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Greece, France, Germany, Italy and Czechoslovakia. As the war was ending, he attended the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations, filing seventeen dispatches for the Chicago Herald American.

There's more, and it's all interesting, including how Widmer lionizes Kennedy's youthful encounters with Europe will dismissively brushing away Obama's youthful encounters with South Asia.

Now keep in mind that Widmer was a speechwriter for Bill Clinton.

Oh.

So, the answer to Soccer Dad's question -- will the MSM do a forthright comparison of Kennedy and Obama, a subject Caroline Kennedy's endorsement makes so ripe? -- remains "Not yet."

We have today a well planted counter-attack from the Clinton camp, a sign of a well-oiled political machine. But the overwhelming silence from the media is itself a sign of an MSM that has turned its back on Clinton and is "objectively" cheering Obama on.

Is it because they like Obama so? Maybe a bit. But if we conservatives know that Hillary will be the easier of the two to beat in November, don't you think the the overwhelmingly Democratic leadership of the MSM (the NYT editorial board notwithstanding) gets that, too?

Hat-tip: RCP; Illustration: Kyo