l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 Obama’s Superbowl Sunday interview
Rarely has a lame duck emitted such a strange series of quacks, as President
Obama sat down for a pre-Super Bowl interview with Bill O’Reilly in which
the latter asked the kind of tough questions Obama’s adoring media never
asks… and Obama refused to answer any of them.
Remember how Obama said he was more angry and frustrated about the failure
of the ObamaCare launch than anyone? Forget all that. He’s not going to
hold anyone accountable – he thinks “accountability” is just a magic word
that he needs to repeat until the scandal goes away.
Remember when Obama said the IRS abuse of conservative groups was totally
unacceptable, and swore he’d get to the bottom of it? Never mind. He now
says the whole thing is a creation of Fox News. Ditto for the Benghazi
scandal, in which Fox News was somehow able to hypnotize Obama, Hillary
Clinton, and their underlings into lying repeatedly about the deaths of four
Americans. Why, Bill O’Reilly was able to Jedi mind-trick Obama proxy
Susan Rice into repeating this lie on every single Sunday talk show! He
must have also compelled those IRS officials into admitting the targeting of
conservative groups was improper, because now Obama says there wasn’t a “
smidgen of corruption” about the whole affair. (Remember when it was all
supposedly the work of renegade low-level employees in Cincinnati, who were
going to be identified and severely punished?)
Total number of people fired by Obama over the IRS and Benghazi scandals
combined: zero. But Obama is prepared to repeat the word “accountability”
as often as necessary, on the very rare occasions someone in the media asks
him about these matters.
The Obama interview turned out to be eerie foreshadowing for the Super Bowl
game, in which Seattle kept scoring points, and Denver never answered them.
In the end, the Seattle Seahawks defeated the Denver 404 Errors, 43-8.
What the President was doing with this curious non-interview is checking off
a box. Now he can say he appeared on Fox News with the pugnacious Bill O’
Reilly. The rest of his swooning media fans wont’ care that he spouted off
a string of embarrassing lies and evasions. They’re not going to press
him on any of this stuff. Nobody from the lamestream media is going to
corner Obama next week and demand to know why all the early IRS internal
reports said there was seriously improper behavior going on, but now he
claims it was all just Fox News obsessing over a non-story. No other media
organization is going to step up for Fox News, or declare it outrageous for
the President to blame very real scandals – with a body count – on a
single media organization he dislikes. The rest of the press was only
briefly troubled by Obama spying on them.
That’s why no Republican could ever get away with this. The media would
network, close ranks, ask the same questions in unison, refuse to accept
evasions instead of answers. The old Beltway wisdom held that the worst way
to handle a scandal was to drag it out, because the constant drip-drip-drip
of new revelations and punctured talking points would be the death of a
thousand cuts. Obama and his team always knew that didn’t apply to them.
They can drag out any scandal for as long as they please, knowing that the
press will not object to their delaying tactics, or bounce the story back to
the front page every time a new revelation comes out. On the contrary,
full and prompt disclosure would be the worst thing for them, because it
would oblige the media to treat these stories as a really big deal for at
least one news cycle.
Give Obama credit for understanding, perhaps better than any major national
figure before him, that in the world of 24-7 online news coverage, victory
comes one news cycle at a time. The system only has lingering attention for
a story if the media builds it into a Narrative – i.e. how all of the
scandals Obama refused to discuss candidly with Bill O’Reilly come together
into a story about an Administration willing to abuse authority for
political gain, obfuscate every inquiry, and handle even the most important
matters with seat-of-the-pants improvisation by inept political appointees,
confident they can clean up any resulting messes on the next round of Sunday
shows. Since the press will never, ever spin such a narrative about Barack
Obama, he can follow a scandal management strategy of saying the most
ridiculous, patently false things for a week or two, “winning” the spin
war, and then consolidating victory by declaring the story “old news.”
And really, what are you going to do about it? America missed its chance to
remove him from office, in part because his say-anything news cycle war of
attrition worked, with a very timely assist from “moderator” Candy Crowley
during a crucial debate. It’s dangerous to leave someone like Obama in
power, because he’ll do the same things again, as we saw when Benghazi
tactics were used to survive the ObamaCare launch debacle. But that’s what
America did, and at this point, even if Obama’s ego allowed for frank
admissions of failure, his political interests would not be well-served by
actually doing anything about the scandals O’Reilly brought up.
If he fired anyone, that person would become a loose cannon with good reason
to cook up a tell-all book. (Imagine the book Kathleen Sebelius could have
written, if Obama had sacked her in October: “A Woman Alone: How I Was
Abandoned By My President and Left to Manage His Signature Achievement.”)
He’d also be putting meat on the bones of a story by actually holding
someone accountable, which would make the kind of performance he turned in
for O’Reilly impossible – he couldn’t say Benghazi was a nothingburger if
the sort of head that turns up on talking-head shows had rolled. And he’d
demoralize his hardcore True Believers by following through on his loud Day
One promises to get to the bottom of scandals they don’t want to think
about. (Well, Day Two promises, really, because Obama always claims he didn
’t learn about these unfortunate developments until he read the newspaper
the following morning.)
This is what happens when you install a President the media loves with
romantic intensity, America. One network is not a substitute for the
adversarial relationship you’d enjoy between press and Administration if
you voted smart, and elected a President the media hates. |
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