The Discerning Texan

Earlier today, Barack Obama’s campaign released an ad attacking John McCain for not knowing how to send an e-mail. Their crack research team apparently never heard of Google or Lexis-Nexis, but Jonah Goldberg does. He discovers why McCain doesn’t use a keyboard — his torturers made sure he couldn’t. The Boston Globe reported it eight years ago:

McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain’s encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He’s an avid fan - Ted Williams is his hero - but he can’t raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.

After Vietnam, McCain had Ann Lawrence, a physical therapist, help him regain flexibility in his leg, which had been frozen in an extended position by a shattered knee. It was the only way he could hope to resume his career as a Navy flier, but Lawrence said the treatment, taken twice a week for six months, was excruciatingly painful.

”He endured it, he wouldn’t settle for less,” said Lawrence, who rejoiced with McCain when he passed the Navy physical. ”I have never seen such toughness and resolve.”

Making fun of a war hero’s severe injuries — smooth move, Team O. Talk about computer illiteracy! Doesn’t anyone on the Obama campaign know what they’re doing? Didn’t it ever occur to them that a man who can’t raise his arms above his head might have a physical barrier to using a computer?

The Great Snarl that has arisen and is directed at Sarah Palin has registered at a very deep level outside of the coastal elites. I know because I talk with people in the midwest and south every day, as well as in the suburbs of Atlanta, near the Rockies, in the smaller towns of Minnesota. They love Sarah Palin, and now they are increasingly angry with the MSM and especially with Obama and his campaign operatives.

These people hear the attacks on Palin and understand them --rightly-- to be attacks on themselves and their families. The dismissal they hear from studio talking heads are directed not just at Sarah Palin's life experiences, but at theirs. The contempt American media elites feel for their viewers has never been so sharply on display.

This is not an objection to asking Palin tough questions. I don't think there is a serious objection to Charlie Gibson's tone or subject matter when he sat down with Palin. She answered all of his many questions with hardly a stumble, as opposed to Obumble's repeated pratfalls in debates past.

But there is resentment that after a year-and-a-half there is not one interview of Obama --who wants the top job not the understudy role-- remotely as tough, with sustained lines of questions on sensitive issues of foreign affairs peppered with probing interruptions. Not one. Obama has always been allowed to filibuster, and every interviewer has retreated from attacks that have put Obama on the defensive. The cowing of the MSM by the left-wing bloggers is complete, and they know better than to push The One very hard.

That's just the way it is with a deeply-biased, almost openly partisan MSM, but a very, very media-savvy American public knows exactly what is going on. The voters' distaste for the great prop-up of Obama showed itself first in the late primaries where Hillary racked up win after win and now in the sudden shift of independents towards McCain-Palin.

Read the whole thing.