Our Disgraceful National Fourth Estate

In the wake of last week's firing of General Stanley McChrystal and hiring of President George W. Bush's favorite general – David Petraeus – to run the War in Afghanistan, the snotty leftwingers who run MoveOn.org quietly removed their famous "General Betray-us" ad from their goofball website.  That characterization of General Petraeus was fine when he was working for the hated Bush and preparing to testify before a Democrat congress skeptical about his "surge" strategy in Iraq, but not so good for snotty leftwingers now that he's working for their hope 'n change savior, President Barack Obama.

The great irony of the McChrystal firing (an entirely justifiable act by President Obama) and hiring of Petraeus was the glowing praise Petraeus received from media blowhards and congressional Democrats who took great pleasure in ridiculing and slandering him while he was employed by President Bush.  This group of Democrats includes President Obama himself, who, as a Senator, strongly opposed Petraeus' surge, which of course became the hugely successful winning strategy in Iraq, and which Mr. Obama ultimately adopted in Afghanistan.  Of course, a consistency of thought and honesty of reportage long ago became lost concepts to the leftist news media in America, which is why they find themselves in a long, irreversible death spiral.

It was kind of a bad week for the leftwing media in general.  In addition to the utterly hypocritical reaction to the hiring of Gen. Petraeus, it was revealed about midweek that the Portland Oregonian and other admirers of Al Gore in the leftist news media had sat for four years on allegations in a police report that he groped a masseuse in a Portland hotel room in 2006.  So what media entity finally made this complaint public?  Why, the National Enquirer, of course – the same media entity that issued the original reporting on liberal hero John Edwards' affair and fathering of an illegitimate child with a former campaign staffer.

One would think that, sooner or later, the snotty leftists who run the New York Times would tire of being scooped by the Enquirer, but one would be wrong in that thought, at least when it comes to reporting on the foibles of leftwing folk heroes.

Then, of course, there is the announcement by CNN that it is pinning its prime time ratings hopes on a new talk show featuring disgraced former New York Governor Elliott Spitzer, who was forced to resign the office a few years back when it was revealed that he had been hiring high-priced call girls on the state's dime.  Can there be any doubt that CNN is out trying to bring in Gore as the show's weatherman, Bill Clinton as a political correspondent, and Tiger Woods as its sports anchor?  Now, that would be a lineup lefties could be proud of.

You really can't make stuff like this up.

The final failure of the lapdog leftist media I want to discuss here is its abject refusal to do any real reporting on the criminal negligence of the Obama Administration when it comes to the BP oil spill.  Were this a Republican Administration, the media would be making every effort to hound the president from office, as it did to President Bush following Hurricane Katrina.  We all know that is true – even the most hopeless snotty leftwinger knows that is true.

Take the refusal by President Obama to suspend the Jones Act for this national emergency.  For those unfamiliar with it, the Jones Act protects labor unions by requiring all vessels performing oil and gas-related operations in U.S. waters to be U.S. flagged, and operated by U.S. citizens, i.e., members of U.S. labor unions.  Were the President to suspend this disgusting law, there would shortly be dozens if not hundreds more vessels in the Gulf, skimming up this oil.  But he refuses to do so strictly due to the fact that labor unions in this country are tools of the Democrat Party.  And the news media sit idly by and allow him to get away with this kind of criminal negligence with impunity.  It's disgusting and disgraceful.

Seriously, after a week like the last one, you have to wonder if anyone at the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS or any of the other reliably leftwing mainstream media outlets around the country ever stops, takes a step back, and ponders the reality that the only news organs actually performing any investigative journalism in America are a scandal rag and a magazine staffed by stoners.  Of course, this would assume that those who run these leftist media outlets were remotely capable of the slightest bit of introspection, which they obviously aren't.

That is your fourth estate these days – nothing more than a lapdog propaganda organ for the national Democrat Party and this feckless, incompetent, criminally negligent Administration.

Last Monday Morning in the Oval Office...

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs:  'mornin', Mr. President.

President Barack Obama:  Hello, Bob, what can I do for you?

Gibbs:  Well, uh, I kind of need to talk to you about whole BP situation and the, uh, golf game you had this weekend.

Obama:  Yeah, it was great, man!  Shot a 78!  Can you believe that?  Of course, that was with 7 mulligans, and those great secret service guys kept kicking my ball out of the rough when they thought I wasn't looking, but still, best round of golf I've had since the whole BP thing started.  I'm finally getting that slice with my driver worked out, and…why are you looking at me like that, Bob?

Gibbs:  Well, you know, Mr. President, we're starting to take a little heat from all these golfing trips you've been having here recently.  I mean, you know that was the seventh round you've gotten in since this well blew out and…

Obama:  Yeah, this job's great!  I mean, if I'd known a President of the United States could just go out and have an entire golf course to himself and his foursome any old time he wanted to, I'd have run sooner.

Gibbs:  But sir, the impression all of this golfing and vacationing creates with the public is that you're more worried about your handicap than you are about all the people getting put out of jobs down there in hick country, er, Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama.

Obama:  Well, what could give anyone that idea?  I mean, I've already flown down there and given three speeches, walked around on those crummy beaches and met with all those losers who voted for McCain in '08 – I mean, c'mon, Bob, there's a real limit to how much compassion I can show to anyone south of the Mason Dixon line.

Gibbs:  Sir, don't forget, you won Florida…

Obama:  Oh, sure, Florida, throw that one in my face.  Besides, the beaches getting hit by the tar balls are up there in the Panhandle part of the state, and that's just South Alabama as far as I'm concerned.

Gibbs:  Ok, I'll give you that one, but still, sir, we have to think about appearances.

Obama:  'Appearances'???  Hell, BP's not worried about appearances – that Hayward guy spent Saturday at a yacht race!

Gibbs:  Well, yessir, I'll give you that one, too, but still…

Obama:  Still what?  There is no 'still' here – look, Bob, he's at a yacht race, I'm playing golf.  Every slob in flyover country plays golf, or at least that's what I'm told, but how many of 'em do you think get to go out and ride on a yacht?  I mean, if you put it in the right context, I'm the really common man here, doing what the common man does.

Gibbs:  Wow, you are good.

Obama:  You bet your butt I am, that's why I'm President and McCain's out there in Arizona having to fight with everything he's got to beat an ex-radio DJ who's been in more tanning booths than George Hamilton just to get his own party's nomination.  Meanwhile, I am somehow surviving with a walking gaffe machine as a vice president and have my main rival rendered completely irrelevant as my own secretary of state.  I am really, really good.

Gibbs:  Ok, well, having conceded you're really, really good, sir, I am going to ask you one more time to really, really consider lightening up on your golf game while this well is still out of control.

Obama:  Look, Bob, I already cut my vacation short by a full day to go make a speech down there – how much more sacrifice must I make here?  I mean, if I can't play golf, what can I do?

Gibbs:  Well, there's a bowling alley down in the basement…

Obama:  That was Nixon's deal – not for me.  Besides, you saw me bowl during the campaign – that probably cost me 40,000 votes in Akron, Ohio alone.

Gibbs:  Sir, all I'm asking you here is to focus more on governing and less on recreating while this thing is going on.  Maybe, you know, have some cabinet meetings about Afghanistan and Iran and stuff like that.

Obama:   Dude, you are one serious buzz kill, you know that?  Have you spent any time with my Cabinet?

Gibbs:  Well, not all that much, no…

Obama:  Well, you go spend two hours in a room with Janet Napolitano and tell me how you feel.   Gimme another idea here.

Gibbs:  Ok, how about I get you a pool table installed in the East Wing?

Obama:  All right, that's a start.  Pretty sure I can take Biden at billiards.  And if I can't, I can always get Rahm to break one of his thumbs.  Hey, this actually sounds like fun!

Gibbs:  So do we have a deal?

Obama:  Done!  But call that nitwit BP CEO and tell him he needs to hurry up and get that damn well plugged, because I really need work on my long irons.

Gibbs:  Consider it done.

Barack Obama: President of ... What?

The biggest problem with President Obama is that he so often seems not to have a grasp on just exactly what it is that he is president of.  There appears to be no recognition in this White House that, once the election campaign is over, the winner becomes the president of all 50 United States, along with every person who resides within them.

We have never had a president who so openly demonizes huge swaths of American society on such a regular basis as we have seen this President repeatedly do with Tea Partiers (even resorting to the obscene "tea bagger" reference), opponents of socialized healthcare, anyone making more than $100,000 per year, and the entire state of Arizona, to name just a few of his chosen rhetorical targets.  Then there are those segments of our society to whom this President and his gang of Chicago thugs offer nothing more than benign neglect:  The people of Nashville, who just weeks ago suffered through flooding comparable to what Katrina did to New Orleans with barely a mention from this President, millions of Americans living along the border with Mexico who suffer with the drug trafficking and violence that are a facet of daily life in the region while this Administration steadfastly refuses to do anything about enforcing the laws on the federal books, and the people of the Gulf Coast, who had to wait 37 days before this President summoned the interest to deign to hold a press conference about the ongoing tragedy of the BP oil spill.

To that growing daily list, we can add the families of America's fallen veterans, insulted on Monday by this President's choice to vacation in Chicago rather than take part in the traditional Memorial Day presidential ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.  The breaking of this tradition is just the latest in a long line of insults to the military offered by Mr. Obama and his Administration over the last year and a half.

Given these and many more divisive acts taken by this President, it is increasingly obvious that Mr. Obama considers himself the "president" only of those who voted for him and support his radical leftist political agenda.  Can there be any real question, for instance, that had it been a very blue-state Boston that suffered through massive spring flooding rather than deep-in-the-heart-of-a-red-state Nashville, this Administration would have staged a massive federal response to the disaster?

If the BP oil spill threatened the coastlines of blue-state California, Oregon and Washington rather than red-state Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas, does anyone really believe that this President and his minions would have sat benignly by for a full month doing little other than deflecting blame before finally and begrudgingly beginning the process of treating the event as a disaster of national proportions?  If you do believe that, well, you'd be much better off reading Alice in Wonderland than this column.

Whatever else one thinks about George W. Bush, as President – and as Texas Governor before that – he was studiously careful not to use derogatory rhetoric about any segment of our society.  Where Obama derides Tea Party activists at seemingly every given opportunity, Bush never lowered himself or the office he occupied to criticize those who participated in the thousands of obscene and often violent anti-war protests that became a staple of American life after the invasion of Iraq.

Bill Clinton was also very careful to avoid the use of divisive rhetoric against any segment of the American public, and clearly understood the necessity of any president staying above the fray.  In reality, until the elevation of Mr. Obama to the office, one would be at great pains to find an example of any sitting president since Woodrow Wilson who openly and frequently demonized large segments of the U.S. population for political gain.

Clearly, President Obama feels no similar need for restraint, and in fact obviously believes that dividing the nation is in his own self-interest.  As long as that political calculation holds at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, we can anticipate two and a half more years of a nation becoming increasingly and more bitterly divided.

And there is no reason to believe the political calculation will change.  This strategy is in keeping with the Obama Administration's adherence to the demonize-and-conquer strategies taught by late Chicago radical Saul Alinsky, whose teachings have guided this President throughout his adult lifetime.  This is who Mr. Obama is, and who he will remain.

This reality will bring joy to the hate-filled cretins who inhabit leftwing websites, but it won't do much for the rest of a population yearning for a President who actually gives a damn when a tragedy such as the BP oil spill devastates an entire region of the country, regardless of how that region voted in the 2008 presidential election.  For that, they will have to wait until January 20, 2013.