Home Editor's Essays President Dares His Boys to Criticize Him

President Dares His Boys to Criticize Him

185
0
SHARE

[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img] You know you are dealing with the phoniest White House in decades when an error-prone, promise-betraying President of the United States can whiz through his first two months in office without attracting a single critical political cartoon by America’s leading satirists in any newspaper.

Not one.

Their daily drawings, instead, make fun of personalities gleaned from the Republican names on the Enemies List that the crude, bullying, childish Barack Obama not only admits but brays about.

No President ever has been nearly that brazen. Mr. Clinton came close. Mr. Carter asked, “What does brazen mean?”

When the giddily fawning boys and girls of the Washington press corps fall, exhausted, to their knees every night and mutter, “Now I lay me down to sleep,” a survey this morning showed 74 percent of them have begun directing their prayers to Mr. Obama rather than a more traditional figure.

There is another reason the lockstep lollipop cartoonists have scrupulously avoided caricaturing the arrogant, misstep-prone Mr. Obama.

Fear.

They will be punished if He Who Is Without Sin takes offense. Ask Jim Cramer. Ask Rick Santelli. Ask Rush. Ask Mr. Cheney.

Have you forgotten how the bouncer-mentality thugs in the White House muscled crowds of unemployed punks into the streets of New York last month to protest a cartoon that appeared in the conservative New York Post?

The moral of the immoral story: Don’t mess with God.

The Race Goes to the Weak or the Strong?

Don’t let this out, but the President is a racist. So are the cartoonists (and journalists), but from a very different perspective for a separate reason. As loyal liberals, the men of the media believe, devoutly, that no black liberal ever should be made fun of. His ancestors were horribly treated, they reason, and therefore black liberals have earned a years’-long respite, a lifetime honeymoon.

Mr. Obama, on the other hand, subscribes to the following analogous philosophy:

“Because I am (half) black, I am a permanent victim of an oppressive society. Anyone who criticizes or, worse, mocks, what I say or do, not only will be publicly held up to ridicule as a racist, he will go onto my Enemies List. And there is no exit from my list.”

What is the atmosphere like under God Obama in the White House?

Here is the first-hand take of a journalist, Nicholas Guariglia of pajamasmedia.com, in a piece he called “Welcome to Francis Ford Coppola’s White House”:

“The Obama-journalist relationship has been a one-sided love affair: the more they appease him, the more he disdains them. And yet, still, many journalists are all too willing to bow their heads, kiss the don's ring, and play the role of hit man, stuttering and stammering in the presence of their boss like an overly eager Luca Brasi rehearsing what he's going to say.”

Whom Do We Mock Next Edition?

Like bees who truly sting, the fawning boys and girls who form the heart of the Washington press corps — textually and graphically —flit from Rush to Cheney to Newt, slamming the unfortunate Wretch of the Day, whichever figure the thin-skinned Mr. Obama is maddest at that day.

Meanwhile, Mr. Obama is giving the boys of the media their meatiest material since Mr. Clinton was running through the White House with his pants at half-mast, and the media are uniformly ignoring Mr. Obama’s staggering administration of his ill-fitting office.

Like a habitual drunk, Mr. Obama has lurched from one incomplete policy decision to the next vaguely dishonest announcement.

You’d never know it, by reading The New York Times or the Los Angeles Times, but the overmatched Mr. Obama is heavily adopting many of the mainspring policies of the Bush administration, without having pesky journalists write down his escapades anywhere. Stay tuned. Something is bound to dribble out. Tired of being beat up, a journalist with integrity will run away. If we are fortunate, the walls of Mr.Obama’s bunker will spring a leak in the next 46 months. Even Chavez can’t maintain airtight control.