The last time we had a President who was so insecure that he had an enemy's list, the country suffered through a terrible trauma. When the current administration singles out Rush Limbaugh and now Fox News for odium, it is alarming. It highlights some aspects of the Obama administration that have been troubling for some time. It suggests that Obama is extremely thin-skinned and hypersensitive to criticism. These are characteristics that often bespeak a difficulty in learning from experience. That is, if all criticism is a personal attack, the content of the criticism is discounted a priori, which means that no learning can actually take place.
When even those on the left are becoming alarmed, it can no longer be dismissed as a product of the "vast right wing conspiracy." [HT: Glenn Reynolds]
Obama's dumb war with Fox News
There’s only one thing dumber than picking a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel -- picking a fight with people who don’t even have to buy ink. The Obama administration’s war on Fox News is dumb on multiple levels. It makes the White House look weak, unable to take Harry Truman’s advice and just deal with the heat. It makes the White House look small, dragged down to the level of Glenn Beck. It makes the White House look childish and petty at best, and it has a distinct Nixonian -- Agnewesque? -- aroma at worst. It is a self-defeating trifecta: it distracts attention from the Obama administration’s substantive message; it serves to help Fox, not punish it, by driving up ratings; and it deprives the White House, to the extent it refuses to provide administration officials to appear on the cable network, of access to an audience that is, in fact, broader than hard-core Obama haters.
There's more from Glenn Reynolds, worth noting, in response to Claudia Rosett:
ROSETT: First, they came for Fox News . . . . “This would be a very good moment for all those other news organizations — CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, the newspapers and the news web sites – to offer President Obama the perspective that it is utterly inappropriate for White House personnel to be opining publicly on the overall fitness of specific news outlets.” Some of ‘em have — but I think others are still angling for a government bailout . . . .
An Instapundit reader notes:
This kind of tactic can work, providing the established media plays along.
And Glenn responds:
They’ve been pretty supine so far. The question is whether Palmieri, in search of her “echo chamber,” will find it as easy to eunuchize the New York Times, the Washington Post, et al. as she did Matthew Yglesias. . . .
When the press no longer does their jobs it is a threat to our democracy. The citizenry needs to be informed and the media once prided itself on "speaking truth to power." Now, for most of the MSM, "speaking truth to power" has become an affectation, a pose they adopt to feel virtuous and brave while behaving in a craven manner. Their shrinking business is richly deserved.
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