If You Remember The Lies, You Weren't There

BY rights, it is the syllogism that should launch a thousand defections from Senator Barack Obama: yes, certainly he would meet Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "without preconditions"; Mr Ahmadinejad is a terrorist; ergo: Senator Obama will negotiate with terrorists. Even Kevin Rudd, to his great credit, is working on an International Criminal Court case against the Iranian President for inciting genocide. That won't achieve anything practically, of course, but it is a substantive act of solidarity with Israel and, potentially, an important phase in what should be a relentless campaign against that evil man. It was therefore cowardly and mendacious for Senator Obama to respond the way he did to 83 words in George Bush's rightfully praised address to the Knesset this week. Taking umbrage at the President's warning about the danger of parleying with terrorists, Senator Obama hoped nobody would be so rude as to recall it was his stated policy to do so. He was thus exposed as both a callow egotist and a dishonest political scoundrel.

Given that President Bush didn't mention him - or, indeed, any other person who had been actively appeasing terrorists or canvassing the possibility of doing so - Senator Obama's outraged reaction confirmed his guilty conscience and his tendency to play victim when put under pressure. Famously, when asked about Jimmy Carter meeting Hamas chiefs, he pleaded for the right to be left alone so he could eat a waffle. Now, on Mr Ahmadinejad, he's pleading for the right to waffle so he'll be left alone. And the incredible and disturbing thing is that liberal- dominated media have been more than willing to oblige. Owning up to something of which he wasn't accused so as to condemn a President who made no accusation must rank as one of the most contrived and self-indulgent acts in the entire 2008 campaign. But the majority of journalists have reported what should have been an embarrassment for Senator Obama as instead an example of his feisty willingness to take on Mr Bush in a necessary "debate" on national security.

In a brilliant article for The Times today, Gerard Baker explains how it's come to this. Since the White House foray and death of Robert Kennedy, liberals in the United States have returned again and again to a salvific view of Democratic candidates and the presidency. On the 40th anniversary of the red letter event that was 1968, cultic fanaticism for a young black Chicagoan was inevitable. Baker describes a recent Time magazine feature on Team Obama as "a little like a cross between Fr Alban Butler's Life of St Francis and the sort of authorised biography of Kim Jong Il you can pick up in any good bookshop in Pyongyang."

Baker is not exaggerating, especially if the iconography is anything to go by. Even disciple Andrew Sullivan has objected to this depiction of the hidden imam emerging - possibly because he reviles kitsch rather than the metaphysical fantasy per se. Jim Geraghty has observed the same grotesque messianism, only his examples are from the covers of mainstream news magazines. The phenomenon is part of that same soixante-huitard liberal piety that turned the execrable Che Guevara into a wallposter hero and Bobby into a Christic martyr. (That anyone now could go on mocking the influence of religion in the Republican Party is itself laughable). An Obama assassination seems to be central to the new faith's eschatology. Within that theology of end times the Kingdom of Heaven never quite triumphs because of the wickedness of the gun, the Right Wing Hate Machine and the Unfairness of It All. What remains is the Trinity and HOPE. The spirit infusing it all is the perpetually sophomoric espirit de corps of The Long 1968.

That Hobsbawmian idea is one way of seeing how a celebrated year of revolutionary nothingness lived on beyond its calendar allotment to dominate not merely the philosophy of the Democratic Party but the mainstream media as well. It also helps explain the victimhood of the Democratic frontrunner and the solicitude of a Fourth Estate going to almost Soviet lengths to propagandise, distort, muddle and outright lie on his behalf. In February the New York Times attempted to throw the election by taking out John McCain on a bogus charge of marital infidelity. This its own public editor condemned. Two months later, the same newspaper slammed as "shameful" and "ugly" a State GOP ad showing Jeremiah Wright yelling "God damn America." He invented the Audacity of Hope and he's off limits? Vanity Fair remembers RFK's tilt in 1968 as the 'The Last Good Campaign' in its latest edition. With the AFP claiming "Bush ignited the row" on appeasing terrorists, the 08 contest may be remembered for its Orwellian forgetfulness.