Shifting the Goalposts at the Washington Post
If you’re a politician on the right, reading that your views have “evolved” since taking office in the Washington Post is code that your ideology is slowly moving leftward. But when it comes to Barack Obama, voted the most liberal member of the Senate by the National Journal in 2007, just the opposite transformation has been taking place in recent months, as the Washington Post gears up to aid in his presidential reelection bid next year. The Post is morphing Mr. Obama into Barry Goldwater so slowly, I hardly even noticed. But let’s review the timeline anyhow, just for fun:
- “I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.”
– The late Deborah Howell, then the Post’s ombudswoman, November 14, 2008.
- “WE ARE ALL SOCIALISTS NOW”
– Headline on the cover of the February 16, 2009 edition of Newsweek, back when it was still owned by the Washington Post.
Flash-forward to 2011:
– Headline on column in the Washington Post by JournoList founder Ezra Klein, April 25, 2011.
– Headline on column in the Washington Post by E.J. Dionne Jr., December 25, 2011.
We’ll discount Charles Lane of the Washington Post recently claiming that longtime Obama mentor Jeremiah Wright shares the same foreign policy views as Ron Paul as a statistical outlier.
At least for now.
Related: At Commentary, Peter Wehner on Dionne’s “Old Rhetorical Tricks.” Wehner writes that “like Sam Tanenhaus, [Dionne] believes the role of conservatism is to ratify every radical gain of liberalism:”
Once ObamaCare is the law of the land, for example, repeal efforts become antithetical to conservatism. It’s also why Dionne was a passionate opponent of welfare reform in the mid-1990s; he believed that any effort to undo the welfare state achievements of liberalism was by definition un-conservative. This was (and remains) a terribly simplistic interpretation of conservatism.
Sadly, Dionne is now writing for a once great, now terribly simplistic newspaper. But read the rest of Wehner’s post; it goes on to describes a tactic we’ll see plenty more of next year from the left — and not at all “unexpectedly.”
If they truly believe Obama is a conservative, by any measure, then I expect none of them should vote for him. We all know that’s not the case though. What they’re trying to do is sell him as a conservative, hoping to once again appeal to the independents they’ve lost over the last three years.
And Ezra is highly overrated. Oh, he knows a lot. It’s just that everything he knows is wrong.
Sure, they want to convince you that he’s a centrist because (a) most people think of themselves as centrist, and (b) that makes anyone who disagrees with him an extremist.
And Obama is a centrist, by the standards of the British Labour Party ca. 1977. Well, domestically, anyway. On foreign policy, they were a damn sight more patriotic than him.
If people are stupid enough to fall for it, we deserve what happens to us.
So Jeremiah Wright is just like Ron Paul, eh? For all his eccentricities, I bet Ron Paul never stood in a pulpit for thirty years, screaming “God damn America!”
RebeccaH, you don’t know how right you are! Jeremiah Write did it from a pulpit, Ronp Aul did it in a series of newsletters. Completely dif’rent.
The Rev Wright owns “God damn America”; Dr Paul prefers to castigate the America which disagrees with him.
Cheers
Not in a pulpit, sure, just in a newsletter, eh?
Once again, lefty name calling with no substance. Ron Paul points out the distinctly un-American actions of the Federal Reserve and the other power elites both political and financial. He shows how these secretive and cabalistic (to coin a phrase) groups/entities/individuals act in ways that are antithetical to the freedom and prosperity of people in the US. Please provide a single quote, instance, happenstance, or incident where Ron Paul himself has stated that he wants anything other than the best for America. Also, feel free to provide a similar quote from Rev. Wright that he DOES want the best for America. We will all wait ….. tick, tick, tick tick …..