Oh, That Liberal Media (Part 83,284)
[Dean] also said the president was partly responsible for a recent Supreme Court decision involving eminent domain.
“The president and his right-wing Supreme Court think it is ‘okay’ to have the government take your house if they feel like putting a hotel where your house is,” Dean said, not mentioning that until he nominated John Roberts to the Supreme Court this week, Bush had not appointed anyone to the high court.
The Townhall.com news item I quote here made it clear why Dean’s statement was so ridiculous:
Dean’s reference to the “right-wing” court was also erroneous. The four justices who dissented in the Kelo vs. New London case included the three most conservative members of the court - Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was the fourth dissenter.
The court’s liberal coalition of Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer combined with Justice Anthony Kennedy to form the majority opinion, allowing the city of New London, Conn., to use eminent domain to seize private properties for commercial development.
“We think that eminent domain does not belong in the private sector. It is for public use only,” Dean said.
(Via John Cole.)
So, at a time when the nomination of a Supreme Court Justice is one of the hottest stories in the news, the head of the Democrat party makes an impassioned speech that (though he doesn’t realize it) is an argument for more conservative Justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas.
Does that sound like news to you?
In the days since Dean made this statement, it has been reported in exactly one Big Media outlet: the “Political Grapevine” segment of Fox News’s “Special Report with Brit Hume.” Nothing in the New York Times. Nothing in the Washington Post. Nothing in the Los Angeles Times or the Chicago Tribune. Nothing on CBS, NBC, ABC, or CNN.
Nothing.
Meanwhile, Dean’s words have reverberated throughout the Internet. Blogs like John Cole’s Balloon Juice, Protein Wisdom, Q&O, Say Anything, RightWingNews, Lifelike Pundits, and many others have noted Dean’s gaffe. A poster at Kos was stunned, saying: “There’s simply no way that Dean’s comments can be spun to make them even remotely defensible.”
Will Big Media ask Howard Dean about this? The next time Howard Dean is on a Sunday talk show, will the host ask him if he is more likely to support a conservative like John Roberts because he would likely be a vote for property rights?
Time will tell . . . but I doubt it.
UPDATE: Thanks to Instapundit for linking this post. I’d encourage new readers to do two things (after bookmarking my main page, of course):
1) Go visit one of the fine blogs listed in this post, all of which had this story days ago; and
2) Write your local newspaper and ask them why they haven’t run this story.
P.S. I’m not including Kos in suggestion #1 . . . unless you’re a masochist.
