Far be it from me to tell the President what he should do, or who he should talk to but, frankly, if somebody doesn’t point a few things out to the man, he is just not going to make many new friends.
You see once again, just as I have said he would continue to do, Mr. Obama has shown his lack of good judgment in going into an all out war with Fox News.
Now I am not here to defend Fox. I agree that as a whole the network is extremely right wing. Their programming is right wing; their talking heads are right wing and the only thing fair and balanced about them is that they equally present both right wing and extreme right-wing positions while offering up a token Liberal for public debasing. But that is what their audience wants.
And they have the audience; for there to be so many people not in tune with conservative and GOP policy that the Democrats won such a resounding victory in 2008, the lion’s share of cable news viewing goes to the Righties. Is this a sort of silent majority coming on again, or something entirely different?
Those that watch the other networks do so because, just as with Fox viewers, people want to hear news that leans the way they see the world. While that isn’t news reporting, it is what people watching the cable networks think news is. The audiences who watch MSNBC and CNN are watching to see and hear the same shtick Fox plays, just from their side, complete with token conservatives for sacrificing.
Give me one example, [other than a week or so of reports surrounding 9-11] from the 2000 election forward, of a time when President Bush wasn’t ripped to pieces daily on the Liberal news channels for being an illegitimate president or accused of being incompetent. Sound familiar? Now be honest, did you ever hear that the Bush administration was cutting off the access or cooperation with them? No, you didn’t.
But just as we learned long ago, when he was picked on about the size of his ears, our President can’t take any heat from the other side about anything without getting all pouty.
We have seen this before you know? That’s right, another Nixon analogy* has come up. Nixon was a media paranoid who knew, for the most part, how to manipulate the media. The ones he couldn’t he put on an enemies list. Which is more or less what Rahm Emanuel and Robert Gibbs are doing with Fox News. They just don’t call it that, it’s not politic you know. And we all can agree that in Obamalot, they control the media. Except for Fox that is.
What Mr. Obama seems to not get is that it didn’t work for Dick and it won’t work for him. I mean, if there was any place he should be saturating exposure of himself and his team and thir policies and plans, it is on Fox.
Unless you don’t care about changing the opposition’s minds and only are happy preaching to the choir, you sort of have to go out into the wilderness to preach the word. But alas, that doesn’t seem to appeal to the President, it seems that he is telling Fox “you’re with us or against us.” Hey wait a minute, where did we hear that before? Didn’t Keith Olbermann say you couldn’t give those sorts of ultimatums? Oh yeah, that’s right, it was Bush, it was only wrong then. Now I remember.
So come on Mr. President, toughen up and hit the Fox airwaves. I know you would be welcomed with open arms. Unless, of course, Glen Beck is in studio. If he is, just stay away until they get him medicated.
*Previous Nixon / Obama analogies include Vietnam /Afghanistan and Cambodia / Pakistan.
