Gary L. Bauer: Media Discover Freedom Of The Press

We have often referred to the bullying tactics of this White House and its Chicago-style politics. There have been a number of conservative leaders, including Sarah Palin, who have used similar language, and inevitably they have been attacked for allegedly crossing the line and for using overheated rhetoric in criticizing the president.

Today, in a major article in Politico, members of the sympathetic media are making the same charges. The report states that despite their liberal leanings, the media’s relationship with the “thin skinned, “controlling” and “stingy” White House has turned “surprisingly hostile.”

More and more reporters are becoming disillusioned with Obama’s broken promises of transparency. When Press Secretary Robert Gibbs recently asserted, “This is the most transparent administration in history,” reporters in the briefing room broke out in laughter. Consider the following excerpt:

“Day-to-day interaction with Obama is almost non-existent, and he talks to the press corps far less often than Bill Clinton or even George W. Bush did. … The ferocity of pushback is intense. A routine press query can draw a string of vitriolic emails. A negative story can draw a profane high-decibel phone call – or worse. Some reporters feel like they’ve been frozen out after crossing the White House.”

Print a negative story and you’re screamed at with expletives? Imagine if the press wrote a negative story about George W. Bush (which happened virtually every day) and Karl Rove had picked up the phone and yelled profanities at the reporter. Do you think it would take a year and a half to hear about it? It would have been on the news that night. The offended reporter would have become an instant celebrity for defending freedom of the press against “the authoritarian Bush regime.”

I suppose we should be thankful that some journalists are slowly discovering that freedom of the press is more important than spouting spoon-fed talking points like loyal lap dogs. At the same time, the Obama Administration’s treatment of the media is yet another disturbing example of the Left’s intolerance for dissent.

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Two from Washington Examiner on Murtha

Michael Barone - The Murtha district

Presumably there will be a special election in Pennsylvania 12 to replace Murtha on May 18, which is primary day. This is the only district in the nation that voted for John Kerry in 2004 and John McCain in 2008. You might want to explain that as an affinity for Vietnam veterans. The better explanation is that it is part of the Jacksonian belt that starts in southwest Pennsylvania and extends along the Appalachians and southwestward to Tennessee and Texas an area where Barack Obama ran very poorly in both the primaries and the general election in 2008. In any case, it voted only narrowly (51%-49%) for Kerry and favored McCain over Obama by an even narrower margin (49%-49%, a margin of 873 votes).

David Freddoso - Rep. Steve Cohen, D, already chasing Murtha's ambulance
In a television interview this afternoon, Democratic Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen pronounced judgment on the doctors who were operating on Rep. Jack Murtha, D-Pa., when he died. Cohen, a government attorney before he began his political career, was asked about tort reform in health care when he brought up Murtha's death:

"As we speak today, Rep. John Murtha died. And he was my friend, and he served this country for many years...He died because, when he went in for gall bladder surgery, his intestine was perforated. And that shouldn't have happened. It was, from what I understand, malpractice."