Obama: Wholly Lacking In Grace

There have been a lot of things in the past week or two worldwide that have really gotten under my skin. At the forefront of those many different items has been the White House's assault on Fox News and his predecessor, George W. Bush.

While speaking to an audience of clear supporters, Obama made the following comments:


My guy, Jay Nordlinger, made the following comments that you can find in this post in The Corner over at NRO:

Barack Obama is pretty interesting when he gets in front of his money-givers — his biggest fans, I guess. In New York, he said, “Democrats are an opinionated bunch. You know, the other side, they just kinda sometimes do what they’re told. Democrats, y’all thinkin’ for yourselves.” Last year, in San Francisco, he said of Middle Americans, “It’s not surprising . . . they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them . . .”

O’s New York commentary reminded me of the notorious Washington Post line, that conservative Christians are “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command.” When you think about it, Obama has a pretty easy time commanding people — millions of them, including important people in media and academia. Including, almost, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee! But some of us, he cannot command — and he seems not to like or respect us all that much.

Long ago, I grew tired of the conceit that Democrats think for themselves, while the rest of us just take orders from some politburo: composed of Rush, Fox, and whoever. All my life, I’ve heard Democrats quote an old Will Rogers line: “I belong to no organized party, I’m a Democrat.” Ha, ha, ha! Oh, aren’t we grand, we Democrats? We beautiful, smart, unorganizable Democrats! Well, Rogers may have had it right at one time; but in my own time, the Democrats have been a pretty disciplined bunch — and pretty ruthless, when it comes to dissent. When it comes to odd-men-out.

I have 30 more things to say, of course, but here’s one more: Do you recall President Bush insulting Democrats, as Obama has insulted us, explicitly? Sometimes our post-partisan president can be a rather nasty piece of work.

Rich Lowry had the following to say about Obama's campaign in this article:

In international forums, Obama acts as if Bush were the former president of another country, or a disgraced former leader ousted in a coup. No calumny is too much to heap on him, and no defense is ever offered. Obama might at least avoid implicitly accusing his predecessor of war crimes. He might at least credit his predecessor’s, and his country’s, good intentions in toppling Saddam Hussein and promoting democracy in the Middle East. No, he’s incapable of it.

Obama should be grateful that Bush ordered the surge in Iraq against Obama’s opposition. If he hadn’t, Obama likely would have — on top of everything else — inherited a strategically central Middle Eastern country in full-scale civil war. Does Obama express any appreciation, or any humility about his own mistaken call? Of course not.

But his aides blame Bush for the state of the Afghan War, which White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says was adrift “for eight years.” If the war was under-resourced, the complaining about Bush has the whiff of pre-emptive excuse-making should Obama pull up short in his “necessary war.” We would send Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan only if Bush hadn’t already lost the war.

When Obama first burst on the scene, he seemed to respect the other side. That refreshing Obama is long gone. Now, he impugns his immediate predecessor with classless regularity, and attributes the worst of motives — pure partisanship and unrestrained greed — to those who oppose him. Their assigned role is to get the hell out of his way.

The acid test of the White House inevitably exposes a president’s character flaws: Nixon’s corrosive paranoia, Clinton’s self-destructive indiscipline, Bush’s stubborn defensiveness. Obama in the crucible is exhibiting an oddly self-pitying arrogance. It’s unbecoming in anyone, let alone the most powerful man on the planet.

And Lowry highlights at length what I think is so unbecoming of our President - he's a lion feeding at a carcass, but worried about the flies that also smell the rotting flesh. The most powerful man in the free world feels it necessary to not only constantly defend himself against criticism, but demean anyone who opposes him. Recently, it has even come to the extent of belittling a news network that has found fault with him. Fox News is a drop compared to the sea of other media sources that only praise the O, but he's so threatened that his entire White House staff sees fit to attempt to marginalize the network.

Just a few days ago, the administration attempted a boycott of Fox News:

At first, there was little reaction from other media. Then on Thursday, the administration tried to make them complicit in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department made available Ken Feinberg, the executive pay czar, for interviews with the White House "pool" news organizations -- except Fox. The other networks admirably refused, saying they would not interview Feinberg unless Fox was permitted to as well. The administration backed down.

The author of the above article, Charles Krauthammer goes on to say in this newspaper article:

This was an important defeat because there's a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they're engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

There's nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.

Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand "the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties." They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other -- and an otherwise imperious government.

Factions should compete, but also recognize the legitimacy of other factions and, indeed, their necessity for a vigorous self-regulating democracy. Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimize and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian.

Representative Eric Cantor (R-Va.) also comments in this post on the subject:

This episode is about much more than just Fox News. Today, the administration’s target is Fox; tomorrow, it could be someone else. The administration apparently feels entitled to receive friendly (or what it subjectively deems “balanced”) news coverage at a time when it is making monumental decisions that will have sweeping consequences for years to come. Its heavy-handed treatment of Fox is unseemly in a democracy that depends on the free flow of information. Even commentators and journalists from other rival networks have expressed alarm.

Friction between the media and the elected officials they cover is inevitable. I know this from experience. But lawmakers and the executive branch should be able to agree that going after individual news organizations for no other reason than to sully their reputations (oddly enough, the administration’s clash with Fox will only increase the latter’s profile) is not good for our nation. President Obama should know better. He is above this.

As the White House bickers with a cable-news network, the challenges facing America grow more formidable by the day. Since January, millions of Americans have lost their jobs. Our military commanders say we risk losing the war in Afghanistan unless we boost troop levels; and our military men and women risk their lives each day waiting for a decision from their commander in chief. And a flood of new government spending threatens to blow a hole in the national debt, devalue the dollar, and place an insurmountable burden upon our children and grandchildren.

Freedom of the press is a celebrated right that has shaped our society for more than 200 years. Accordingly, tough scrutiny by the media is something all administrations should expect and accept. Our nation faces many difficult challenges, and the White House should be focused on the truly pressing issues that require our prompt attention.

Obama should be above all of this behavior, but evidently, he's not.