When a Dog Catches the Car

As Victor Davis Hanson wrote in February, “Now What? The Obama administration’s real problem is existential: What if it gets what it wants, but then finds that either it or the country really is uncomfortable with what it got?”

The same question applies to the MSM, which is but an extension of the Obama administration.  Or perhaps it’s the other way around. In any case, you can NBC see the cognitive dissonance at work by comparing two quotes; the first from the happy shiny birth of Hopenchange, when the Office of the President Elect was punking President Bush, the second from earlier today, during the administration’s possible twilight.

Here’s Tom Brokaw, hosting NBC’s Meet the Press, interviewing President-Elect Obama on December 7th, 2008, with a question that will live in infamy for the MSM:

Let’s talk for a moment about consumer responsibility when it comes to the auto industries. As soon as gas prices dropped, consumers moved back to the larger cars once again. The SUVs are the big gas consumers. Why not take this opportunity to put a tax on gasoline, bump it back up to $4 a gallon where people were prepared to pay for that, and use that revenue for alternative energy and as a signal to the consumers: “Those days are gone. We’re not going to have gasoline that you could just fill up your tank for 20 bucks anymore.”

Brokaw’s sentiments were echoed during that same month by the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Flash-forward to NBC alumnus Keith Olbermann on ABC’s This Week, earlier today. Despite his most recent former employer also being in favor of high gas prices (except during an election year), for Olbermann in 2012, high gas prices are suddenly a mysterious conspiracy with the potential to derail Mr. Obama’s reelection bid:

One of the things I turned to, to try to establish that was to look at the average gas price at various key moments, and the lowest price in the last six years, the nadir of gas prices at the pump, was the day of this president’s inauguration in 2009. There has to be some connection between that being the least busy political moment of a president’s career, where you’re not going to — you’re not going to hurt them, you’re not going to harm him that way, and the price of gas. There has to be an almost deliberate or at least a side effect quality to that. There must be.

There must be! Perhaps Faber College’s Eric Stratton knows the answer.