Who’s behind the White House war on Fox News?

President Obama with Anita Dunn, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and Robert Gibbs (via White House Flickr stream)

My syndicated column today follows up on yesterday’s Fox News Derangement Syndrome post. Who has Obama stocked his communications shop with, you ask? Beltway flacks for corruptocrats. Meet some of the key people behind the White House war on Fox News.

Birds of a feather…

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Who’s behind the White House war on Fox News?
by Michelle Makin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2009

White House interim communications director Anita Dunn assumed the role of lead Fox News Channel-basher this weekend. The attack was a dud. The left-leaning Nation magazine ridiculed President Obama’s press shop for turning him into the “whiner-in-chief.” AOL media columnist Jeff Bercovici called the war on Fox a “loser’s strategy” that “signals weakness.” And that’s the friendly fire.

Dunn found refuge in rival CNN’s green zone, where she blasted Fox News as a “research arm of the Republican Party.” Unhappy with headline-generating Fox News hosts who have wrested control of the news cycle from Team Obama, Dunn complained about “opinion journalism masquerading as news.”

Well, that is certainly an apt description of an Obama-sympathizing “news” segment on Wolf Blizter’s CNN Politics show, which purported to “fact check” a Saturday Night Live skit mocking the president’s lack of accomplishments. Yes, the “real” news fact-checked the fake news to cover for Obama’s deficiencies. Zero complaints from the White House communications office about that. Or about authentic CNN journalist Anderson Cooper using his prime-time show to make vulgar sexual jokes about Tea Party activists. Or about the joint White House-ABC News health care reform infomercial that aired earlier this summer.

Some “opinion journalism” is more equal than others.

Debates about the blurred lines between opinion and journalism are all well and good. But don’t the talking points-crafters in the Oval Office have something better to do than carp about the talking points they don’t like hearing on the one cable network that hasn’t been completely overrun by Obama sycophants? (Full disclosure: I’ve been a Fox News contributor since 2001.)

Where are the seasoned press gurus to help Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama appear more presidential and less petty and thuggish?

The corruptocrat affiliations of Obama’s communications team are illuminating. His press shop can’t rise above the fray because they’ve been entrenched in the Beltway fray for years. They can’t help themselves.

Democratic media consultant Dunn’s claim to fame is her decade-long service as chief strategist for disgraced Democrat and former Senate Majority Leader-turned-health care lobbyist Tom Daschle. She was in the thick of his failed re-election campaign as Daschle asserted a bogus property-tax homestead exemption claim on his $1.9 million D.C. mansion – which he listed as his primary residence despite voting in South Dakota and claiming it as his primary residence in order to run for re-election. And Dunn was with Daschle during the years he failed to pay gobs of taxes on a luxury car and driver provided to him by crony donor Leo Hindery, Jr.

After working as communications manger for Obama’s political action committee and then as senior adviser to his 2008 presidential campaign, Dunn “trained” White House press secretary and anti-Fox sniper Robert Gibbs. Deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer is another young protégé of Dunn’s who worked with her on the disastrous 2004 Daschle re-election campaign.

(Another Daschle connection: Obama transition adviser John Podesta, who served as Daschle’s counselor and has helped staff the administration with many alumni of his left-wing think tank, the Center for American Progress. One CAP fellow, Hugo Chavez-admiring radical Mark Lloyd, has attacked conservative talk radio – second home of several Fox News hosts — and is now the FCC’s “Diversity Czar.”)

Dunn is married to Robert Bauer, a Washington, D.C. corporate lawyer who served as general counsel for Obama for America. It was Bauer who lobbied the Justice Department unsuccessfully last fall to pursue a criminal probe of American Issues Project (AIP), an independent group that sought to run an ad spotlighting Obama’s ties to Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.

It was Bauer who attempted to sic the DOJ on GOP donor Harold Simmons and sought his prosecution for funding the ad. It was Bauer who tried to bully television stations across the country to compel them to pull the spot. All on Barack Obama’s behalf.

While conservatives revel in the Left’s hysteria over Fox News Channel’s dominance, more of Obama’s friends hope he’ll wipe his nose and man up. Fat chance. As long as he’s surrounded by career flacks who demonize dissent to distract from the Beltway stench, the White House will remain an all-whine zone.

The best outcome of this attack by one branch of "We, the People's" government against dissent would be it it triggers a fresh look at the Constitution's protections for the people's liberty. Fox News could do the nation a great service by making available on its web site links to the writings of Jefferson, Madison, Washington, Adams, et al, on the subject of liberty and the need for constitutional restraints on those elected to serve. One of the most pointed of these remarks is by a Founder who, although criticized by the press of his day, made this declaration in favor of liberty:

"No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions."(Underlining for emphasis) --Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 1804. ME 11:33

On another thread, I posted the following comments which may also relate to the topic of this thread.

America's founding ideas of liberty were revolutionary in 1776, and they are revolutionary today! They exploded old concepts that some imperfect persons in a society were somehow entitled to make decisions for other likewise imperfect persons. They affirmed the "self-evident" truth that rights are not grants from government, but they are inherent in individuals, Creator-endowed, and, therefore, unalienable.

If today's youth and their parents suddenly were to be exposed to those common sense, "self-evident" truths explained in the writings of the Founders and Framers of our Constitution, they would be aroused to such action that the current Congress and Administration would be stopped in their tracks in their efforts to unconstitutionally "rule" this nation.

The problem is that the "censors" have, over the past several decades, removed those ideas systematically from the nation's textbooks and public discourse, and those who knew better did little to counter their actions.

Now, however, technology has made it possible to access the Founders' writings and to cause them to, once again, explode into the current debate.

Are there enough patriots who will cause this to happen? Is Fox News to be included in that group?

Ideas have consequences (Weaver)! In the battle of ideas, the ideas of liberty will defeat the ideas of tyranny, if they are allowed to be read and heard, because they appeal to the innate desire for liberty in each individual.

Of course, the counterfeit ideas of tyranny must be masked in order for politicians to gain the kind of power that has occurred in recent times. To gain that power, such politicians "buy" votes with promises of "goodies" and false solutions to "crises." Once they gain the power, then the tyranny begins.

Hope and change that is acquired in order to gain power over other people's lives is not a revolutionary idea. It is as old as the history of civilization and leads to tyranny.

Where to, America?

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