Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life:
It’s pretty unremarkable to describe the Obama White House’s growing enemies list — the insurance companies, Chamber of Commerce, Fox News — as ‘Nixonian.’ But there’s one place where, if you venture such an opinion, you’d better be prepared to apologize — quickly and profusely.
On National Public Radio’s “Talk of the Nation” Wednesday, NPR political editor Ken Rudin said the White House campaign against Fox News is a bad idea. “It’s not only aggressive, it’s almost Nixonesque,” Rudin said. “I mean, you think of what Nixon and Agnew did with their enemies list and their attacks on the media; certainly Vice President Agnew’s constant denunciation of the media. Of course, then it was a conservative president denouncing a liberal media, and of course, a lot of good liberals said, ‘Oh, that’s ridiculous. That’s an infringement on the freedom of press.’ And now you see a lot of liberals almost kind of applauding what the White House is doing to Fox News, which I think is distressing.”
It’s not the usual thing you hear from NPR analysts. Reaction from the NPR audience was negative, and within 24 hours, Rudin was in backtrack mode. “I made a boneheaded mistake yesterday,” Rudin wrote on his NPR blog. “Comparing the tactics of the Nixon administration — which bugged and intimidated and harrassed journalists — to that of the Obama administration was foolish, facile, ridiculous and, ultimately, embarrassing to me. I should have known better and, in fact, I do know better. I was around during the Nixon years. I am fully cognizant of what they did and attempted to do.”
“I apologize for a dumb comparison.”
As Glenn Reynolds adds, “Minitrue was not pleased.”
Be seeing you!
Related: “While it truly didn’t matter what anyone said about W, because he had such a firmly established core being, it matters utterly what the critics say about the UR’s clothes, because there is no emperor.”
Update: The right corner ad at the top of the blog posts rotates, but it must be at least a little content-specific based on the ad I screen-caped for posterity, or at least until Room 101 is ready for use.
Related: “Our Obama-Approved News Team At Work.”
Update: Another sleeper agent discovered by P.J. Gladnick of Newsbusters:
“Jon Corzine is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”
Okay, Jonathan Tamari didn’t use those exact words when he wrote an incredibly fawning Philadelphia Inquirer article about Governor Jon Corzine of New Jersey who is running for re-election but the words he did use sure come close to that sentiment. See, Corzine’s problems weren’t really because he presided over a massive budget deficit.The real problem was his difficulty in proper communication…at least according to Tamari:
In his formal introduction to Trenton, his inaugural speech, Corzine read from notes, barely looking up, absorbed in his own message. Problems with communicating would come to plague his term in office.
“Reading from notes? Absorbed in his own message?” Difficulty translating rhetoric into believable action? (Not to mention the inconvenient occasional bagman, of course.) I’m sure the TOTUS has heard more than a few similar complaints about his boss. (Who’s been dispatched to the Garden State to prop up his fellow self-absorbed liberal.)
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