I don’t even know what this MEANS, really, but I wanted to screencap it before it’s inevitably deleted: pic.twitter.com/kgTWhOAnav
— Jeff B@AoSHQDD (@EsotericCD) February 21, 2015
As Mark Halperin noted on the Today Show in 2012, “the media is very susceptible to doing what the Obama campaign wants.”
And how! Just ask Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin, as seen in the above tweet.
Just as a refresher, Halperin, in the midst of his earlier stint at Time magazine*, during a rare moment of clarity in November of 2013 when asked by an interviewer about “Death Panels” in Obamacare, responded unhesitatingly, “It’s built into the plan. It’s not like a guess or like a judgment. That’s going to be part of how costs are controlled.”
He’s now back to using schoolyard epithets against one possible GOP successor in the White House. Or as Mark Steyn writes in “O Beautiful, For Specious Guys…”
The US media have had a fit of the vapors over Rudy Giuliani’s suggestion that Barack Obama does not love America. As the Instapundit says, their reaction suggests that Giuliani hit a nerve. For my own part, I am way beyond that. By the way, I’m growing rather weary of the cheap comparisons of Obama with Neville Chamberlain. The British Prime Minister got the biggest issue of the day wrong. But no one ever doubted that he loved his country. That’s why, after his eviction from Downing Street, Churchill kept him on in his ministry as Lord President of the Council, and indeed made Chamberlain part of the five-man war cabinet and had him chair it during his frequent absences. When he died of cancer in October 1940, Churchill wept over his coffin.
So please don’t insult Neville Chamberlain by comparing him to Obama. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, because conspiracies are generally a comforting illusion: the real problem with Obama is that the citizens of the global superpower twice elected him to office. Yet one way to look at the current “leader of the free world” is this: If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?
That’s a question that everyone in the MSM should be asked.
After watching the brain of Dana Milbank of the Washington Post similarly explode like a character in Scanners, Jazz Shaw of Hot Air writes, “Milbank should at least be honest enough to wear a ‘Ready for Hillary’ t-shirt when he goes to work every day if this is how the upcoming election analysis is going to be handled.”
Well yes, hence the rather skewed ratio of stories lambasting a retired mayor’s remarks about a lame duck president versus the tiny amount of coverage of a front-running candidate’s funding “from questionable foreign governments and shady billionaires—something even Clinton’s defenders admit is a problem,” as Andrew Stiles writes at Hillary’s bête noire, the Washington Free Beacon.
At the start of the week, John Steele Gordon of Commentary wrote, “Republicans Should Declare War on the Mainstream Media:”
What should Boehner do? I think he, and every Republican, should do what George H.W. Bush did to Dan Rather as the 1988 presidential race was heating up: eat the mainstream media alive. They are the enemies of the Republican Party and should be treated as such. Stop trying to curry favor because you won’t get it. Bush laid a trap for Rather, insisting on the interview being live so it couldn’t end up on the cutting room floor. It totally flustered Rather, greatly energized Bush’s campaign, put the kibosh on his too-much-a-nice-guy image, and helped mightily to propel him to the White House. Make mainstream media bias the issue. Throw loaded questions and those premised on liberal assumptions back in their faces. Accuse them of bias when they are biased. Don’t be Mr. Nice Guy.
Why have the Republicans been such wimps when dealing with the media? The reason, I think, is that the Republicans were the minority party in this country from 1932 to 1994. The Democrats held the House for all but four of those 62 years and the Senate for all but ten of those years. In far too many ways, the Republicans still act as the minority party, begging for crumbs from the media. But they now hold more political offices, at both the federal and state levels, than at any time since the glory days of Calvin Coolidge. Instead they should, in dealing with the media, emulate Joan Crawford, at least as depicted by Faye Dunaway in Mommy Dearest, dealing with the board of Pepsi Cola (warning, she doesn’t use ladylike language).
After driving Halperin, Milbank, Ron Fournier and countless other Hillary apparatchiks into apoplexy, Rudy may have just hit on the poison pill to neutralize much of the MSM from within. Or at least have a “Hillary, Coordinate! Hillary, Coordinate!” pause while waiting for new programming from the Borg Queen, to mangle Star Trek metaphors.
This Rudy thing shows yet again you never know what is going to dominate political news; should remind us Nov ’16 is about 100 years away
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) February 20, 2015
Update: At the Pocket Full of Liberty Website, Jay Caruso sums it up: “In Obama [the media sees] themselves. What he wants to carry out is what they want and they are going to do what they can to make sure these last two years he gets to do just that, the consequences be damned.” Or to paraphrase Caruso’s headline, from the MSM’s perspective, when you attack Obama (or Hillary), you’re attacking us.
This was self-evident in 2008…
[jwplayer player=”1″ mediaid=”63670″]
…But I’m honestly surprised to see the MSM not distance themselves a bit seven years later.
* Mea culpa: When I wrote the first draft of this post, I had forgotten that last year, Halperin jumped from Time to Bloomberg. Of course, we shouldn’t forget that a decade ago during his salad days at ABC, Halperin was more than a little susceptible himself to doing what the Kerry campaign wanted.
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