It's not a crime! It's legal, perfectly natural...

I'll be going off tonight on fake scandals and the reporters who love them, but make sure to scroll down and play dkon's youtube clip first, since it'll put you in a better mood either before or afterwards (or both).

My current favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Barack Obama, found himself enmeshed in a scandal today...only, it turns out that it's not really much of a scandal at all. He turned over proceeds from his book into a blind trust, realized later that he was receiving more info about the investments he let a broker make than he should, and decided the best course of action was to take all his money and place it into mutual funds instead, to avoid a conflict of interest. Thankfully, Obama understands the fast-paced media cycle and responded in the same day:

Senator Barack Obama said today he did not believe it was a conflict to seek investment advice and use the brokerage services recommended by a friend and political contributor. He said he was not aware he had invested money into two of the same companies supported by some of his top donors.

“At no point did I know what stocks were held,” Mr. Obama told reporters. “And at no point did I direct how those stocks were invested.”

I'm not even sure that this is a scandal even if he knew, since he and supporters were investing in the same companies, not in each other's projects, and as mentioned before he didn't even know about where his money was going so one can't really say he meant to do anything. Still, it's good to know that the story got smacked down, because otherwise it is safe to assume that FoxNews would have had a field day, like they did with the fake madrassa story, and the fake controversy over his church's creed, and the fake controversy about his middle name, and ....

Obama's not the only one whose been bitten by crappy gotcha journalism. John Edwards was gotcha'd for selling his house through a realtor below market price to a political opponent. Again, I have no idea how this is supposed to be a conflict of interest, and neither did the Washington Post ombudsman, who smacked down the reporter who filed the bogus story, John Solomon. Solomon, formerly of the AP, is famous for misleading hit pieces, most recently on Harry Reid for another non-scandal, and was once described thus: "The consensus: he's lazy, and takes hit jobs handed him on a platter by opps research teams (and anyone will do.) And doesn't do much to clean it up.".

Seemingly every presidential candidate is vulnerable to this crap. Hillary got pilloried by the Drudge Report, and then CNN et al., for a quote taken massively out of context. Even St. John McCain, the patron saint of moderation and maverickosity was on the receiving end of another Solomon smear that was considered so blatantly unfair that lefty bloggers were up in arms.

Remember, many politicians are out-and-out criminals, like Duke Cunningham, Bob Ney, and likely Tom DeLay. Sen Pet Domenici and Rep. Heather Wilson, both Republicans from NM, seem to have interfered with an active investigation, thus obstructing justice, in the recent US Attorneys scandal. Still, not every scandal is real, and many of these stories are steaming piles of donkey poo, poorly sourced and poorly fact-checked, designed to attack a candidate without giving them a fair chance to respond. For goodness sakes, it's not like investigative journalists can't find enough real scandals out there, but some are just too lazy to do it.