[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]Perhaps the scarlet-colored fervor of unrequited love between the boys in the media and President Obama never will cool. Even though the President is giving them darned near daily opportunities to accuse him of flagrantly flip-flopping on his solemnly intoned campaign promises of last year, the boys in the media have news for their virginal hero:
“No matter how swiftly you spin, sir, remember that you are fooling with the inventors of the art — we can spin the facts so fast that you will look good whether you say ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘I can’t make up my wispy mind.’”
When President Obama issued two ground-shattering reversals of, ahem, “conviction” last week, once again it was snack-time for them there good ‘ol boys in the media.
If President Bush had engineered this kind of double reversal stunt, them there boys in the media would have howled for weeks to their readers that Mr. Bush lied in his previous pronouncements to the American public.
However, with the change of administrations, the former bully boys have quietly morphed into the bullied boys.
Them boys of the liberal press twisted themselves into heavily salted pretzels last week in telling their twisted, novelized tales from Presidential Fairyland to the gullible purveyors of America’s many left-wing journals.
The Quintessential Free Ride
For the moment — though not in the overall picture — it is incidental that Mr. Obama rendered two exactly morally correct decisions:
• Without a hint of remorse, the unembarrassable President reversed himself and stated he would oppose releasing the American abuse photos from Abu Ghraib prison, and
• Once again without embarrassment a couple days later, Mr. Obama, speaking as if he were not stunningly reversing himself, in fact reversed himself — for the 25th time since Jan. 20 — when he announced he would restart the military commissions, or tribunals, for some Arab terrorists at Guantanamo. This was a practice he vehemently condemned as a candidate last autumn.
That, dear reader, was a rare and juicy Obama twofer. Even actors don’t flip that fast. Not even the weakest President of the 20th century, Jimmy Carter, could summon the gall to turn himself upside down twice in one week.
President Obama’s perpetual wedding party, them there good ol’ boys in the media, did not even wait for He Who Is Without Sin to finish speaking before they began creating the darnedest scenarios to justify why their hero flipped his much adored self.
Reporter Bill Glaberson of The New York Times would have gotten himself pitched out of sixth-grade writing class for grossly abusive dishonesty if he had submitted — even to an LAUSD teacher— the snotty report that appeared in the guise of news in Saturday’s edition.
Before proceeding, you should know that in order to justify his flip-flop on the much-maligned, Bush-ordained Gitmo military commissions, Mr. Obama made a couple of incredibly flimsy, meaningless cosmetic changes in the Bush program. Ladies, think lingerie. If you are attending a klieg-lights event and decide to wear a pink slip beneath your dress instead of a white slip, that is the totality of the nuanced changes Mr. Obama made.
So Much for Changing Underwear
It would have been too politically embarrassing even for the unembarrassable President to adopt Mr. Bush’s strategy intact.
Mr. Glaberson, one of the top two left-wing excuse-makers among Washington media boys, performed Saturday like the tautly politically correct seal the Times has trained him to be.
Since his primary responsibility is to safeguard Mr. Obama’s virginal character, Mr. Glaberson refused to take a chance on harming his boss’s rep by not even directly identifying the guilty party in his story. In his lead, he generically cited “The White House” as the agent of drastic policy reversal, not the man himself.
In the second paragraph, Mr. Glaberson mentioned the President by name for the first time. Whew. However, since the reporter walked softly by favoring the passive voice, you might not have guessed it was a flip-flop. Apologetically and deflectively, not to mention evasively, the sly Mr. Glaberson defined the turnabout this way:
“(C)ritics said the move was a sharp departure from the direction President Obama had suggested during the campaign.”
This is as brassily dishonest as speeding through three consecutive red lights. Fearing the wrath of his editors, Mr. Glaberson wormily said that “according to critics” it was a reversal of direction instead of reporting that it was a flat turnaround by Mr. Obama himself.
This yarn gets better.
To summarize, forcefully absolving Mr. Obama of all blame for changing from the wrong direction to the correct one was only the opening salvo for the pretzeled Mr. Glaberson.
By the ninth paragraph he had, magically, concluded that the President with the softest attitude toward America’s enemies since FDR had engineered a pretty darned meritorious move. Mr. Glaberson wrote:
“The decision benefits the administration politically because it burnishes Mr. Obama’s credentials as a leader who takes a hard line toward terrorism suspects.”
Was that line a joke? Or was the smarmy Mr. Glaberson puffing something illegal?
First he wrenches his body into an inhuman contortion to throw critics off the scent, then he throws a lei around Mr. Obama’s neck for his enviable acuity.
As long as Mr. Glaberson and similar-thinking colleagues gaspingly cling to their fragile seats at the nearly broke New York Times, He Who Is Without Sin will remain undefeated.
