The 'Buck Up' Brothers

As caught by Matt Drudge, this seems to be the talking point du jour:

“People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up,” Obama told Rolling Stone in an interview to be published Friday. The president told Democrats that making change happen is hard and “if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.”

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And again:

“And so those who don’t get — didn’t get everything they wanted, it’s time to just buck up here, understand that we can make things better, continue to move forward and — but not yield the playing field to those folks who are against everything that we stand for in terms of the initiatives we put forward,” Biden said on MSNBC.

And you know, you go into those typical small towns like the District of Columbia, people get bitter, and they cling to outmoded Alinksy tactics:

President Obama is pulling no punches when it comes to Fox News, declaring the cable news outlet to be “destructive to [America’s] long-term growth.”In a more than 8,000-word interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, Obama compared the cable news channel to papers owned by William Randolph Hearst at the turn of the 20th century that unabashedly pushed the media titan’s own political views.

“You had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition – it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view,” Obama told the magazine.

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And you had folks like Jann Wenner who grew extremely wealthy using their magazine very intentionally to promote his own viewpoint. I think Rolling Stone is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. The problem is that 45 years ago, it was part of the counter-culture. Now it is the culture, and it’s willing to do anything to stop another countercultural revolution from brewing.

Or as Matt Welch writes, “Jann Wenner to Obama: Tell Me, Mon Comandante, How Awesome Are You?”

Meet the old boss…

At Newsbusters, Lachlan Markay adds:

So Obama’s objection is really that there is a news outlet that offers a meaningful check on his power — that plays the precise role that the First Amendment aims to foster. Since I’m right, goes the president’s logic, any force that prevents me from governing as I please is destructive and imperils the nation.

Obama’s statement therefore boils down to this: liberalism is right and, consequently, impeding the wholesale implementation of a liberal agenda is wrong. Therefore, a media outlet cannot legitimately criticize a liberal president.

Hence, Obama longs for an era when meaningful conservative political objections were a rarity among the media elite. The press was much more responsible, Obama seems to think, when it recognized that liberalism is the only reasonable political philosophy, and reported the news accordingly.

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Barack to the Future! When does he start threatening to hand out Iron Crosses to those journalists he disagrees with, as FDR did?

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