AND IN WASHINGTON, THE GENIUSES ARE AT WORK – AT 11:02 P.M. ET:  Guess what news organization is now shining at the White House.  New York Times?  Not quite.  NBC?  Not really.  Washington Post?  Not a chance.

No, the hot new fave at Barack Hussein Obama's White House is...Al-Jazeera.  You know, my dears, it's the very latest thing.

From The Politico:

In the halls of American power, the Arab Spring has brought Al-Jazeera in from the cold.

Seven years after then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the broadcaster’s reporting “vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable” and President George W. Bush joked about bombing it, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised it as “real news” in her recent Senate testimony.

Not only that, her staffers, as well as those of the CIA and the Obama White House, were attending the Congressional Correspondents’ Dinner as Al-Jazeera’s guests.

“They are a really important media entity, and we have a really great relationship with them,” said Dana Shell Smith, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for international media engagement, who speaks Arabic and has frequently appeared on the channel. “This administration has empowered those of us who actually do the communicating to be in a close relationship with Al-Jazeera. They understand that the relationship can’t consist of complaining to each other about the differences we have.”

The differences also have shrunk as the big story in the Middle East has shifted from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the democratic movements sweeping the region. In the recent uprisings, U.S. interests tended to line up with Al-Jazeera’s, and President Barack Obama alluded to both the network’s influence and its pro-democracy bent in remarks caught on an open mic during a closed-door fundraiser last week.

COMMENT:  Al-Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, not exactly a democracy.  It is fundamentally a propaganda outlet, and some knowledgeable observers believe it's a front for the Muslim Brotherhood.  It is hardly pro-American.  As far as it being "pro democracy," we'll see.  I prefer to say that it has been in favor of the overthrow of some pretty bad regimes, but that's a relatively easy call.  What will Al-Jazeera say about the people who replace these regimes?

In Politico's story you'll see the name of Haley Barbour, governor of Mississippi and former lobbyist, who had a lobbying contract with Qatar.  Barbour's lobbying activities will certainly be a point of major contention should he come anywhere near the Republican nomination, and may very well disqualify him.

The respected American newsman Dave Marash took a job with Al-Jazeera in 2006, but quit in disgust in 2008 over what he alleged was intense anti-American bias at the news outlet.  I suspect that Marash came a lot closer to the truth than some of the new Al-Jazeera groupies in the air-headed Obama administration.

April 17, 2011