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October 31, 2009

America's Moral Drift: A Horror for the World to Behold

 

 

Former White House Spokeswoman Dana Perino, whom I had the delightful opportunity to meet at the Royal Automobile Club in London last August, knows a thing or two about dealing with a hostile press. However, despite the overwhelming percentage of reporters hostile to Bush personally over those even somewhat critical of Obama’s policies, the Bush White House, as Dana put it in a recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, took the high road.

 

 

 

Transcript excerpt (courtesy LexisNexis):

 

 

PERINO: Here's what I think. I think -- let's step back for a second. When you are the White House you don't just speak to the 16 reporters who are in the room. What you say at that podium really matters. What you say -- as the chief of staff or other members, the senior staff, matters to everybody, including emerging democracies around the world.

 

And what they see is what they see like dictators do, right? They go after a legitimate news organizations. […]And they think that that's OK. I actually think that they should just step back. I understand not doing opinion shows. But don't rub their nose in it. Just let it go and take the high road.

 

 

Clearly, regardless of who holds the White House, the Constitution must be upheld. If we are to begin sliding into this eerily grey area of questionable spite-fests against those whose job it is to keep government honest, what then will happen when the other party takes power and follows the precedent set by the one prior? Evidently, the Obama administration hasn’t thought about that.

 

During all of my time being critical of President Bush and his policies of not being aggressive enough on China, not investing more in DoD programs, his position on illegal immigration and its toll on legal immigrants and natural-born citizens, and avoiding pushing a flat or national sales tax to replace the graduated income tax, I never once felt this man would send his goons after me and abridge my God-given Constitutional right to speak out. Nor did I seriously spend much time worrying about Mr. Clinton, for that matter.

 

The Obama White House, however, has set a far different tone; one that has made even fellow liberal Democrat partisans and otherwise fans of his both inside and outside the media uneasy. Since White House Communications Director Anita Dunn’s attempt to shut Fox News out of the press pool last week, for instance, it is beginning to appear that various usually obsequent news outlets have begun a bit of chirping about Obama policy shortcomings and even aspects of his private life.

 

Most notable was the Associated Press publication of perhaps its first sharply critical piece about Obama’s lack of stimulus job creation, to much consternation and angst from the White House. CNN has also begun throwing tough questions as Obama officials, at times catching them flat-footed expecting no doubt the usual softer round of questioning, as happened recently with White House Advisor Valerie Jarrett. During this same period, criticism has begun to emerge over the First Couple's lavish date nights and private concerts as the rest of the country faces greater unemployment and other hardships. 

 

And perhaps this is good, considering how important it is for the press, no matter the issue, to keep government on its toes, but perhaps more so given the Obama team's rather lengthy history of creepy repressive tactics against its opponents, such as when the Obama campaign attempted in some states like Missouri and Pennsylvania to have opposition ads taken off the air and even criminal charges brought up against those vociferously opposing Obama the candidate in last year’s election. In the case of Pennsylvania, the man behind that iron curtain was none other than Anita Dunn’s husband Bob Bauer who now is on a fast track to replace Greg Craig as White House Counsel.

 

The tragedy in the mean time is that both Obama’s policies and actions have caused negative human rights and strategic reverberations around the world. His refusal to condemn human rights violations In Iran, China, Venezuela, and so on, to aggressively challenge Iran on its nuclear weapons program, to support rule of law and the Constitution in Honduras, and to allow more troops in Afghanistan to languish and die for months without proper support because he is afraid to make a decision have all given aid and comfort to our enemies and put countless innocents in peril.

 

If anything, Obama’s choice domestically to persecute opposition media, it seems, along with his foreign policy penumbras of silence and nuances of acquiescence, is to create perhaps Obama’s most resolute statement to date: that we are no longer a nation that stands for right or a nation which stands up and defends the little guy against the tyrant and the oppressor. Instead, as Obama’s manufacturing czar Ron Bloom recently quoted the world’s most murderous thug Mao Zedong as saying, the noble aspirations that made America so great should be thought of as a lie and instead we should surrender to the barbaric notion that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”  Such a statement and a belief stands without question in stark contrast to the ideas of civil and free political discourse which has marked our comparatively genteel and by far, freer and more just society.

 

The behavior that we have seen as a result not only stands to dull the prestige of the Office of the President, and by extension the country, it is contemptible in every other moral and historically American sense. Whether it is done through a cynical game of power as was witnessed during the Nixon administration or a combination of Chicago-style power-mongering and an imported murderous ideology, the end result bears little difference, for it is a thugocracy by any other name.

 

It is also very much about not denying our leadership in the world. As Perino mentions here – and it very much bears mentioning – the way in which the administration chooses to act towards what is a Constitutionally ordained free and adversarial press will show dictatorial thugs around the world how much they can get away with. If Obama, in the freest country on earth, persecutes and delegitimizes the free press – and by extension a 222 year old Document that protects them – regimes like Venezuela, like Iran, and like China will proceed with horrifying impunity assailing to ever greater degrees the rights of their people and others around the world.

 

 

Posted by Martin at October 31, 2009 12:21 AM

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