Radio Silence on Indicted Democrat State Senator Leland Yee -- He stands accused of conspiring to arm the Mafia, but the media won’t say it.

From Charles C. W. Cooke at National Review:

Having assiduously ignored one of the gonzo corruption stories of the last decade, CNN this week offered a peculiar defense of its silence. Rankled by a curious Twitter user, who asked why “the Leland Yee story appears nowhere on CNN’s website,” the outlet explained that the decision was “in line with us covering state senators & state secretary of state races just about never.” “You see another conspiracy?” the account asked its inquisitor, snippily.

There is a lot of space between bias and conspiracy, and one does not have to believe that CNN’s editorial staff is sitting around stroking white cats and cackling for its explanation to remain unsatisfactory. A search for the words “state senator” on CNN’s website returns more than 2,800 results, the vast majority of them stories about . . . state senators. “Wendy Davis” — one such state senator — yields 168 entries, many of which predated Davis’s running for governor; “Stacey Campfield,” a Tennessee state senator who has made some choice comments about homosexuals, returns five; and “Ted Nugent,” who is not an elected figure of any sort, returns 186, a substantial number of which relate to comments he made while supporting Texas attorney general and gubernatorial nominee Greg Abbott earlier in the year. For his part, Yee’s name returns just one result, a video in which, per the outlet’s own blurb, he “discusses a bill to help prevent children from having access to violent video games.”

If we were to take CNN at its word, then, we would conclude that state senators are unusually fascinating when discussing video games, homosexuality, or abortion, but utterly unremarkable when indicted by the FBI for negotiating with Muslim separatist groups in the Philippines and conspiring to put missile launchers and fully automatic weapons into the hands of the Mafia. “Conspiracy”? Nah. That requires self-awareness.

Still, compared with the alternative, CNN’s radio silence seems almost wise. Elsewhere, Yee has been cast as a bit player in his own extraordinary story. On Sunday, the Sacramento Bee flirted with the conceit that he was a mere pawn, casting the tale as one primarily of debt rather than criminality, and asking inexplicably whether it was “time to revamp the state’s campaign-finance system.”

It's because he's a Democrat.