Gray Lady [NY Times] hushes up SS breakdown in Dallas

Today the New York Times ran a big article, with the bizarrely self-reflexive headline, "Hushed worry about Obama's safety." It's date-lined Dallas, where, we're told, a lot of nervous Democrats, arrived in town to hear the candidate, kept reminiscing anxiously, "in conversation after conversation," about the murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The piece concludes with a somber reference to "Mr. Obama's motorcade pass[ing] Dealey Plaza, where the fatal shot was fired at President Kennedy in 1963."

"Several campaign aides looked out their windows, silently observing the scene," writes Jeff Zeleny. On the other hand, Obama was himself, as ever, blithe. He "later said he had not realized he was passing the site," Zeleny tells us, before quoting the cool candidate's assertion that he hadn't given any of that scary stuff a moment's thought. "'I've got to admit, that's not what I was thinking about,' he said. 'I was thinking about how I was starting to get a head cold and needed to make sure that I cleared up my nose before I got to the arena.'" (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23330293/)

Well, props to the Big O for his sang-froid. But while he was concerned with "clearing up" his sinuses, we should all should be trying to clear up something infinitely more important: i.e., why the Times itself "hushed up" the story of Obama's Secret Service detail, which, according to the Dallas cops, got remarkably laid-back about Obama's safety in the very town where JFK got whacked. According to the Star-Telegram (I sent this story out last week: http://www.star-telegram.com/dallas_news/v-print/story/486413.html), the SS's "order to put down the metal detectors and stop checking purses and laptop

bags came as a surprise to several Dallas police officers who said they believed it

was a lapse in security." Obama's federal bodyguards let people stream unchecked into Reunion Stadium "for more than an hour."

That news will also come as a surprise--if at all--to the readers of the New York

Times, which evidently sees that "lapse" as news not fit to print (unless, of course, Zeleny hadn't heard about it). And so, while we join Media Bloodhound in asking why NBC slighted this big story (below), we also have to ask what made America's Newspaper of Record black it out entirely.

MCM

Subject: SS Denies Obama Security Lapse While MSM Plays Dumb and NBC Plays Dumber;

Plus, Who Controls the SS

Why does the Secret Service think it's fine to let thousands of people go unchecked at Obama rallies? How did the Dallas Police Dept. spokesman and a "security consultant" attempt to spin this lapse into a "success" story? Why was NBC Nightly News probably better off not even allotting 75 seconds to this topic? Who controls the Secret Service, again? This and more: