The so-called “mainstream media” has spent the past week trying to determine how anywhere from one-fifth to one-quarter of the American people could conclude that President Obama is a Muslim.  The commentary has almost universally condemned Americans as “ignorant,” “ill-informed,” “racist,” or “bigoted,” asserting disdainfully that it’s “obvious” that Obama is a Christian.

“Obvious?” What IS obvious is what the media has overlooked: themselves, President Obama, and Muslims.

Author, and proud Muslim, Asma Gull Hasan wrote in Forbes Magazine (February 2009) that  “since Election Day, I have been part of more and more conversations with Muslims in which it was either offhandedly agreed that Obama is Muslim or enthusiastically blurted out. In commenting on our new president, ‘I have to support my fellow Muslim brother,’ would slip out of my mouth before I had a chance to think twice.”

But the mainstream media is now mocking the increasing number of Americans who believe Obama is a Muslim. Well, now that we’ve demonstrated that those Americans are in agreement with these Muslims, does this make the Muslims bigoted or the media?

Had they done their job investigating Barack Obama during the last election, Americans might have a better handle on even the basic dimensions of America’s 44th president.  But the media completely abdicated its responsibility, failing to provide any coverage skeptical of the Obama campaign’s own tightly-scripted narrative.

So invested were they in Obama’s victory, the mainstream media ignored, or in some cases, actively jeered at any storylines that called into question Obama’s fitness for office.  This included his shocking lack of experience; his decades-long association with domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn, and his anti-American “minister,” Jeremiah Wright; his relationship with now-convicted tax-evader and all around sleazy character Tony Rezko; and his father’s Muslim heritage.

Remember, this is the media that so thoroughly browbeat a third-tier surrogate of the McCain campaign for referring to “Barack Hussein Obama,” that John McCain himself subsequently declared, publicly, that his opponent’s middle name was henceforth off limits.  [And speaking of names, you would have been fortunate, indeed, to discover the fact that Obama had for decades answered to the groovy, 70’s moniker, “Barry,” until it became politically advantageous for him to adopt “Barack” as his ethnic-novelty name.]

But nothing earned the media’s contempt during the ’08 election quite like the suggestion, however muted, that Obama might be a Muslim . . . or might harbor socialist ideals.  Any purveyor of such outlandish rumors was met with fierce derision.  This, even after Obama was filmed declaring his intention to “spread the wealth around,” and even after he was taped at a wine and cheese party in San Francisco, attacking Christians for “clinging to their guns and religion.”

So miserably deficient was the campaign coverage — and so deficient has been the ongoing “investigative” coverage of the man in office — that the American people have simply been left to fill the void on their own . . . often with Obama’s distortions and fabrications about Islam’s greatness.

Obama’s actions have led many Americans to conclude that he must be a Muslim.  Who can blame them? Not only did he declare that America was no longer a Christian nation, but he also claimed that America is the world’s largest Muslim nation. He doesn’t attend a church, he supports the Ground Zero Mosque, and he is on record saying he “will stand with them” whenever they face attack.  Significantly, he refuses to acknowledge that radical Islam has declared war against us.

It isn’t just Obama’s overt Islamic advocacy.  It’s also that so many Americans now recognize his inherent dishonesty.  They no longer trust him because he smears his critics with outrageous falsehoods, with the hope that he’ll polarize the majority of people in his direction.  Fortunately, he underestimated Americans’ distrust of his fawning allies in the mainstream media.

And Americans’ distrust of the media is so deep that if the media insists that Obama is a Christian, then a sizeable segment will automatically embrace the exact opposite position.  So when the Washington Post declared recently that Obama is a Christian (obviously!), the majority of the relatively few people who read it must have immediately concluded there was a good reason to believe otherwise.

Despite all the noise, diversion, and debate, we remain steadfast in our opinion: Obama may not be a Muslim . . . but he sure as communion couldn’t be a Christian; otherwise, the mainstream media and other Democrats would despise him.

Scott Wheeler is a former investigative journalist, and the Founder and Executive Director of the National Republican Trust PAC. Buckley Carlson is a Washington-based writer and political strategist.