Michelle Obama has a new memoir out called "Becoming." Add two words: "Very Wealthy." The Obamas struck a $65 million book deal for his-and-hers memoirs, and next to it is their $50 million production deal with Netflix. They are set to cash in to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. One outlet has called them a "billion-dollar brand." None of their media sycophants find this the tiniest bit controversial. They are the royal family. They cannot possibly be compensated enough.

(President Trump's wealth? Wealth generated by a lifetime of work in the private sector? Unacceptable.)

Mrs. Obama's interviews — entirely with women, and mostly black women — are servile in every "objective news" venue and even worse during TV promotional pit stops. Ellen DeGeneres aired a sappy tribute video stuffed with adoration and proclaimed that Obama is "a human being that we all look up to." She said, "You inspire all of us. So, we put together a little something for you to just show you how amazing you are."

No one asks about any Obama scandal, like the 2012 Benghazi attack. No one asks about her controversial, heavy-handed school lunch rules, which Trump thankfully threw out. And no one asks about greed. She has a 10-city stadium tour charging $300 a ticket or more for the superfans to hear her speak. Is it appropriate to cash in on her FLOTUS status this way? How much, if any, has gone to charity? These kinds of questions are unacceptable. This is Michelle Obama.

Republican first ladies can only dream of this kind of treatment.

To understand the fawning nature of this coverage, consult Andrea Mitchell's "reporting" on the "NBC Nightly News." On Nov. 9, Mitchell offered an infomercial for Mrs. Obama, saying, "After fiercely guarding her privacy in the White House years, now the most revealing memoir ever written by a former first lady, ripping President Trump's false accusations about her husband's citizenship as bigoted and dangerous."

Michelle's body "buzzed with fury after the infamous 'Access Hollywood' tape," Mitchell said. To break up the commercial, there were a few seconds of a clip of President Trump saying, "She got paid a lot of money to write a book, and they always insist you come up with controversial ..." NBC wouldn't even air the end of the sentence.

Did Michelle's body buzz with fury when former President Bill Clinton's accusers resurfaced to remind people that he sexually assaulted them? Nobody asks.

Mitchell finished the Obama report talking about "intimate details" that were the publisher's talking points, like Obama's "devastating miscarriage" and some marriage counseling she went to with Barack. Oh, and Mitchell said Obama is "on a tour befitting a rock star."

Now compare. Eight years ago, first lady Laura Bush's memoir was released, and there was Andrea Mitchell. She began with then-President Bush's mangling of the Hurricane Katrina optics, saying: "She writes about Katrina. August 31st, two days after the hurricane struck, the levees had failed. People were desperate. The president flies over instead of visiting." Mrs. Bush says the president flew over to keep his convoy of vehicles from blocking helpful supplies.

For rebuttal, NBC put on liberal historian Douglas Brinkley, who bizarrely claimed the government was conspiring against help: "The federal government was stopping trucks from Walmart and Kmart with water and food from even arriving."

Then Mitchell discussed the Bushes' fear of being poisoned at a German summit in 2007. And then, for a trifecta of "good news," she brought up Bush's "lifelong guilt" over having killed a 17-year-old friend in a car accident.

If that contrast sounds like a joke, it is. But it's also real.

Most Americans would like the media to tread lightly with the first ladies, especially after they've lived in the White House. But the liberal media have savaged Nancy Reagan and the Bush wives, and they're not exactly rolling out a red carpet for Melania Trump. The favoritism cannot be more obvious.

COPYRIGHT 2018 CREATORS.COM

On the radio Monday night, LevinTV host Mark Levin took aim and opened fired at the legacy media’s fascination with fired White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman and her arsenal of secret West Wing audio recordings.

Levin took issue with the “slobs and hacks and thugs in the media” who covered the story with little regard for the legality or security implications of what had been recorded and released. He added that Manigault Newman was "doing the equivalent of political blackmail."

The goal, Levin explained, is just like it was with the media’s never-ending coverage of the Stormy Daniels drama — get someone on camera willing to bash the president at all costs and worry about the implications later.

Some people were scandalized when secular celebrities from Rihanna to Madonna dressed up in glitzy bishop hats and bejeweled crowns of crosses for the hot-ticket Metropolitan Museum of Art gala in Manhattan. The fundraiser was organized around the theme "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination," based on an exhibit containing items loaned by the Vatican.

The Catholic Church has a rich history of imagery for fashion designers to explore. But their tweaking of religious imagery was a child's game of patty-cake next to Time magazine, which delighted in publishing a related piece titled "The Story Behind This Photo of Stormy Daniels as the Virgin Mary."

"Let's try to remember 2002, when we were still a nation capable of shock," Time's Susanna Schrobsdorff mused. Artist Nika Nesgoda, who was raised Catholic, took a series of photographs in which she recreated iconic paintings of the Virgin Mary using porn actors as models, including a performer using the name Stormy Daniels. One painting exploits the 14th-century painting of the Annunciation with the archangel Gabriel that is now displayed in the renowned Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. Nesgoda told the East Hampton Star, "I was steeped in the church's iconography and the suspicion and guilt and everything that goes along with that iconography."

In the Time article, Nesgoda preposterously attempted to blur the sacred and the profane beyond all recognition. "The models in my pictures are both marginalized and glorified," she claimed. "Like the Virgin, they are untouchable and misunderstood." The writer gushed over this suddenly relevant photographer, saying, "There was no way she could have predicted that she'd wake up one day to find that one of her former models, Stormy Daniels, was at the center of a political, cultural, legal maelstrom that could alter the course of American presidential history, or at least the cold open of 'Saturday Night Live.'"

This was just the latest attempt by Time magazine, as it fades into oblivion like Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, to paint Daniels as a heroine. "As the reputations of almost everyone in the President's orbit implode in real time, she stands slightly apart from the verbal brawls between lawyers and pundits on cable TV," wrote Schrobsdorff.

A month ago, this same scribe gushed at the front of the magazine, "Stormy Daniels, porn star, director, entrepreneur and fiercely funny tweeter, might just be the woman the resistance needs."

It's one thing for liberal journalists to revel in the contradictions of a president dealing with the scandal of paying a porn star hush money at the same time he promotes religious freedom and the National Day of Prayer at the White House. It's another thing for the media to pretend they are somehow treading on the moral high ground next to the porn star/Resistance heroine as they peer down at the Trump team, endlessly proclaiming it might be "imploding in real time" and wishing it would.

In time, all these tabloid tactics from the so-called prestigious press will fade. In the Catholic imagination, the Virgin Mary forever holds a special place above all the faithful. In her glory at the right hand of Christ, she cannot be sullied by pop stars or porn stars, and their artistic and journalistic hucksters. She can only be saddened.