I speak for a lot of people, not some lunatic fringe, who desperately want to know why we haven’t heard anything from PBS’s David Brancaccio or Frontline?  We all breathed a deep sigh of relief when Tom Brokaw sat in front of the camera at CNN—but held it in again with he told us about Barack Obama’s “youthful…wrong turns.” 
 
Mr. Bergman, I, we, just want the truth.  If it turns out that Barack Obama is a good guy and deserves to be believed based on evidence that supports his words, that’s fine by us.  We currently don’t have that evidence and in fact have all evidence to the contrary.  We have been waiting for someone we can trust to give us some sort of rational view based on supporting evidence of these many questions.   If I’m any example, I believe we are all ready for the truth as painful as it may be.  Right now we can’t seem to get at the truth no matter how hard we try.  It feels like for the first time in a long time that our situation as a country is more than ever at a tipping point and this coming election will make or break us.  I know that sounds dramatic, but so many people are voicing that opinion.  Unlike the elections around WWII, we have a number of global developments that seem to hinge on how we make out as a country.
 
I hope to hear from you soon and thank you very much, again, for your kind consideration.
 
Sincerely,
(Abigail Adams)

Ordinary folks, like myself (I work from home as a recruiter in high-tech here in XXXXXXX and am raising a 12 year-old daughter) are suddenly thinking and talking openly about extraordinary things like deliberate suppression of the truth, conspiracies by the DNC to elect Obama since 2004 (under the Dean Plan), deep concern over Senator Obama’s relationships with people that have not been fully explored by the media.  A few months ago we were fearful of bringing these things up less we raise a few eyebrows and be thought of as a kook.  But in the past several weeks really ordinary people (by any standard of the term) are speaking openly about these fears and questions.  And instead of a true dialogue or real interest in what we have to ask the mainstream media as well as organizations like Moveon.org, we are met with open hostility, attempts to discredit us and bloggers whose sites have been repeatedly attacked and shut down.   We started out as individuals asking the same questions and found one another on the internet.  We discovered that we all have the same sorts of questions and want pretty much the same things—to have our questions answered honestly.  The question comes up about why average citizens who are asking legitimate questions are being targeted and pilloried this way.
 
Are you or anyone you know attempting to produce any sort of true reporting about the many questions people want answered about the Democratic primary; the candidate’s backgrounds, the media’s involvement and biased reporting, the effect of sexist, misogynistic or racist slanting of the “news” or why the DNC made the decisions they made and who is behind the meteoric rise of a junior senator who has no real background in the senate, is surrounded by highly questionable people and who has reversed his stance on nearly every issue on which he based his campaign?   Are you or anyone you know who is a real, trusted journalist attempting to get to the bottom of some of these things?
 
In the absence of unbiased reporting it is difficult to figure out the truth and many of us are just trying to sift through every scrap of information available in order to piece together something that feels like the truth for ourselves.  So far a lot of us have come to the conclusion that Senator Obama is a fraud—maybe an unwitting man who feels his own sense of power first and is not fully aware of a bigger mission those who back him have in mind.
 
I and many others search the television news shows for some sort of rational, reasonable programming about this election and it is a desert.  After the Jeremiah Wright episodes Bill Moyers, who I regarded as the voice of reason, did his Journal on him and interviewed him on his show.  I’ll have to go back and review the entire program, but my  reaction to Mr. Moyer’s interview was incredulity.  Where were the questions we were all hoping would be asked?  Questions about what Black Liberation Theology means and how could Senator Obama say that he’d never heard any sorts of sermons like the one the rest of America heard when that is the credo of TUCC?  Instead, Mr. Moyers made it sound like all African-American churches have their own version of Jeremiah Wright.  My hopes that anyone would be asking any more hard questions were dashed after seeing that show.
 
(continued, below)

So with that lengthy preamble, here is my email to him:

Dear Mr. Bergman,
 
Thank you for taking the time to read my email.  How I came to call your office at Berkley last week is a rather long story, so I’ll try to be brief and get to the point quickly.  My search for you or someone like you started because of the incredible events of the Democratic primary race; from the mass media’s shockingly biased reporting of Senators Obama and Clinton to the internet-based activities of Moveon.org and others.  There is evidence of Republican and Democratic party duplicity in efforts like “Democrat for a Day,” and rumors flying about George Soro’s relationship to this election and how he has used his money and agenda to sway voter’s decision.  On Youtube.com I even saw a video of a story reported by Al Jazeera about a Palestinian phone bank’s support of Sen. Obama.
 
In and amongst all of this craziness I keep hearing the same refrain from people all over the country:  “Where are our real investigational journalists?”  “Why isn’t someone with actual investigational background—someone who we admire for their determination to tell the truth—saying anything about any of this?”  There are thousands of us, probably millions of us, who are desperate for the truth on so many of the questions about why mainstream media has been so unutterably biased, why huge organizations like Moveon (but there are several more) have gotten away with calling themselves “grass roots” when we know that while they may have started out that way in response to the Bush administration, they are using the voice of their membership to support highly questionable actions.  I’ll be glad to share a personal, recent example of that if you like. 

(continued, below)
 

I was shocked to see how “young” Gibbs is – he is only 39 years old!  That is unless he’s turned 40 since I read that.  He looks in his mid 50′s to me and like a big-time geek.

Wow!  this video is so interesting for me.  My four sets of great-grandparents left the Volga Valley and the steppes above the Black Sea near the Ukraine in Russia just before the Stalin-caused starvation.  Many of our ethnic group remained and suffered greatly.  I did not know this about the NYT’s reporter.

In regard to the NYT’s reporting on the Holocaust, this video explains something to me.  I had a young student in a freshman research class who wanted to know how much common Americans knew about the Holocaust as it was happening.  I was interested, too, since I clearly remember first really learning about it as a thirteen year old when a film about the liberation of the concentration camps came out and we were reading Anne Frank’s diary.

Of course, one of the most common databases in any research library when I was teaching that allowed a student to find articles wiritten druing that time period is the NYT database of microfiche/film.  There were also all the old journal databases, and in many libraries that meant doing the painstaking search of the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature index and then hoping their library had a copy of any of those old journals–and then, if they didn’t,, waiting for the articles to come in through interlibrary loan.  Things are constantly being computerized now, but when this student was doing the research, she worked hard to find anything she could.  She was totally surprised that the stories she did find were small stories–pushed to the back, without much detail.  She did not find anything like this or any book at the time written after the fact to explain why possibly there was not much reporting.  She actually hunted down people my parents’ age (the ones who fought in WWII)  to interview them about what they remembered.  Her only conclusion was that perhaps, though people did know about it, they were too busy trying to beat the Nazis before they could do anything about it.

I’ll have to watch the whole series.

I’ll stick with “Mad Max” (he/she ain’t so crazy afterall)

Please don’t be so impressed with my teaching the research class.  Those classes are most often taught by “adjunct” teachers at pay so low as to be  laugable.  Since there are always so many of those courses scheduled because the registration is usually limited to no more thatn 25–at least here in CO–colleges and universities go begging for people with MAs to teach them (at least then when there was not the high unemployment).  I was doing adjuct work when I was in the Masters Program.  And I did it working part time as I was raising five kids, three not mine.  And then I did it again as a second evening and weekend job along with my full-time job as a documents editor, when I took time off teaching in public schools since it was too stressful dealing with teenagers at home and at work.

I loved reading all the papers because I learned a lot from the ones that were done well, and I just plain LOVE libraries.  It was so much fun helping those kids find information they wanted.

And, Cindy, that’s very interesting about your college roommate.  I really, really enjoyed Sarah’s effect on O, and certainly didn’t think she would be a threat as VP.  O ust seemed so frightened of her; and whenever anyone asked me how I could vote for her as VP, I would simply answer that I was voting for McCain as President.  I knew his mother has lived for a long time and seemed pretty coherent and spry, so I just didn’t feel any threat that he was going to die immediately.

I confess to kind of “liking” Dana Perino. Got me in trouble with my Democrat friends to whom she was a Republican so therefore liking her meant that I was being tempted to the dark side. If they had only known what was coming.  Or if I had.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/283191

David Brooks is on a search to find out how it was that we elected such a “moderate” president and wound up with the worst of big government liberalism and a polarized electorate. He seems stumped as he explores these questions in what can only be described as evasive phrasing….

For David Brooks and people like him, the primary criterion is social acceptability as understood in a particular circle … theirs. Obama dresses the part, he speaks in a carefully modulated near-monotone and his controversial views are at least fashionable enough to not set the Right People all atwitter.

Palin is, to them, way out there. It has nothing to do with truth, such a raw fundamentalist concept, so naive and retro. She hunts and kills things for goodness sakes, she actually worked on a smelly fishing boat, can you believe that? So outré. And had a retarded baby on purpose, tsk tsk tsk.

They just don’t understand her. She scares them, she has absolutes. Obama didn’t, because he doesn’t. It’s all style over substance, and not just any style, but their style. It trumps all for Brooks, and the many people just like him, and they’re now worried about feeling foolish because of it. So, another round of carefully modulated and oh-so-elevated navel gazing. Oh those rubes, they made a mess of things and spoiled the great hope of one of our own, how could this happen? It can’t possibly be that we were wrong, no, it must be something else. And on, and on.