Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Shameless Scumbags

Criticizing Ty'Sheoma Bethea - Joan Walsh - Salon.com
I thought it would come from Michelle Malkin or Rush Limbaugh, but Malkin is too busy planning her anti-tax tea parties while Rush gets ready for his close-up at the Conservative Political Action Committee this weekend (which is a collection of nuts so nutty even Sarah Palin stayed away).

No, it was the conservative Washington Times that cast the first stone at Ty'Sheoma Bethea, the Dillon, S.C., teenager who wrote to Congress seeking stimulus funds for her shamefully dilapidated school. Obama used her statement, "We are not quitters," as the coda of his speech Tuesday night, but now the Moon-owned paper tells us what's wrong with Bethea, in an editorial with the condescending headline, 'Yes, Ty'Sheoma, there is a Santa Claus."

Obama "presented" Bethea "as a plucky girl from a hopeless school who took it on herself to write the president and Congress asking for much needed help," the Times began, ominously. Wait, she's not a plucky girl from a hopeless school? The editorial depicts her instead as a player in Obama's "mere political theater" because the president has been using her school, J.V. Martin, as a "political prop" since he first visited in 2005. Wow. Dastardly. I'm getting the picture: Obama, that slick Democrat opportunist, has repeatedly visited one of the poorest schools in South Carolina, a state that voted for John McCain. You just know he leaves with his pockets stuffed with cash every time he makes the trip.

It gets worse. The Times insists Dillon residents haven't been callous about conditions at Ty'Sheoma's school; in fact they passed a 2007 bond measure to reconstruct it. That's true, but it's only part of the story: The Chicago Tribune's Howard Witt reported that the bond measure "ran aground of the national credit crisis: No bank will loan the school district the construction funds."