OUR PRESIDENT-IN-TRAINING – AT 10:46 A.M. ET: A reader notes that, despite one crisis after another, President Obama is still seen as untouchable by the national press. It's understandable. How can a man sold to us as godlike be blamed for any mistakes. Perfect men don't make mistakes. From the Washington Examiner:
And while Bush was held responsible for every last casualty that occurred anywhere while he held office, Obama is absolved from responsibility for the massacres, rapes and enslavement of innocents that have followed his numerous foreign policy blunders — given a pass as the victim of forces he did not enable and disasters he didn't create.
"Be very glad we don't have a Republican president," Walter Russell Mead told us in May of last year, warning that if such were so we would be enduring a "merciless media pounding" on the series of "failures, mistakes, and false starts" that have been our lot since Obama took office. Instead, we have a Democrat who is allowed by the press to fail quietly, discreetly, and off center stage. Thus, into a second year of beheadings and horror, we see headlines like "Attacks Don't Shake President's Faith in Patient Strategy" (Washington Post); "Speech Was a Plea for Patience and National Unity" (New York Times); and "Obama Addresses a Shifting Landscape," (Washington Post), suggesting support for a put-upon leader facing conditions he never expected to meet.
And...
When Bush ducked a shoe thrown at him by an Iraqi during a press conference in 2008, Eleanor Clift said that he might have deserved it for what he had done to that country by starting the war. By those standards, by letting the war start again after Bush ended it, what Obama deserves from Iraq (and from most of the rest of that suffering region) is a volley of combat boots. But none will be flung by the press of his country, in whose eyes he can do nothing wrong.
COMMENT: We should note that a small core of journalists is challening the president, but most of the mainstreamers act as if he were just inaugurated, still wearing his top hat, and needs time to settle into the job.
He'll be out of that job in a year and 14 days. I'm counting. Please start.
January 6, 2016 |