Imagine that Hillary Clinton was campaigning in Iowa, and she promised to visit a family farm. The family gets all excited, and starts making preparations. They clear their pasture of cattle and brush for parking, arrange bales of hay for people to sit on, and they arrange for portable toilets that the Clinton campaign assures them will be paid for. They get their hopes up and wait for the big day. But then the campaign asks them how much money they are worth, and when the answer comes back that they’re poor, they get snubbed–the Clinton campaign cancels the event. John McCain’s campaign jumps on it first, offering to campaign there instead.

Drudge would be all over this is a New York minute, Fox News would gleefully spring on the story, with every single reporter and pundit screaming about how elitist, snobby, and downright bad Hillary was, and the mainstream media would be right on their heels, eating the story up like nothing else was news. The story would last longer than the fake news that Pelosi had demanded a huge jet–it would be better, because this story would be real.

And it is real–except that it wasn’t Clinton who snubbed the Iowa farmers–it was Rudy Giuliani.

Media reaction: silence.

Well, not complete silence–the Des Moines Register has a nice story on it, as does the Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier, and precisely two local Iowa TV stations. That’s it. It’s fully contained to Iowa. Despite the blogs being all over it, despite there even being an AP story out about it on the wires. Nobody outside Iowa is picking this up. More newspapers have picked up the story about how a Rush Limbaugh billboard in Baltimore got defaced.

And the reason Giuliani snubbed them? Because he wanted to campaign against the Estate Tax, and because the VonSpreckens were not rich enough to be hit by it. Not surprising, as there are only a handful of such farmers who exist; the idea that the Estate Tax affects family farms is a conservative myth. Something else the “liberal media” doesn’t cover much.