"By the People"

I just watched a couple of examples of blatant bias on the part of the drive-by media. And they came back to back with no segue in between. The first was a line, (in Brit speak a queue), of people trying to get a shot of the H1 N! ‘flu vaccine somewhere in the Mid-West. It was cold and it was wet and it was miserable. And, it was obvious that there wasn’t going to be enough “stuff” to go around.

The next clip was of Gitmo where in bright sunshine the inmates were getting their H1 NI vaccine.

Is it only me that sees a major disconnect here?

And let’s add another twist. Let’s say that President Bush were still President, (be still my heart) and the same two scenarios were playing out do you think the media coverage would be different? Wouldn’t little Chrissy Matthews be screaming about another Katrina? Except this time the perfidy would be the intent to kill all American babies and not just those of poor blacks in New Orleans.

Sometimes I wish I were an HBO subscriber but, more often than not, I’m glad. I choose to spend my money another way. Let me tell you why.

Obama campaigned hard in New Jersey and Virgina both in person and via media spots. In 2008, he carried both states handily but this time he lost both races heavily. So how did Obama spend Election Night?

He watched an HBO Special about his triumphal election campaign. And that’s not Blogspeak; that’s straight from Robert Gibbs. But wait, it get’s worse.

Also, according to Gibbs, Obama had cooperated in the making of the thing and had already seen it days before. Can you spell Narcissism? Or how about Nero playing the violin ……………?

It’s also illustrative to note that in that very video, Obama is heard to say how much he loves elections but only if I win. Also interesting is the fact that, in the only publiciized race he did not enter, the liberal won.

I can’t believe it’s been a year already since that dark and gloomy day when we learned of Obama’s election but I thought, in the manner of the late night talk shows on television, I’d come up with my Top Ten worst decisions the Prince of Peace has made. And here they are but you can do your own ranking.

Obama saying the Cambridge cops acted "stupidly" in arresting Henry Louis Gates.

As Obama took the side of an old friend against a police officer before he even knew the details, he threw gasoline on simmering racial tensions left over from his election. The White House’s hastily cobbled together an attempt at a solution – the famous “beer summit” – which is probably not what won him the Nobel Peace Prize.


Eight percent unemployment? No.

If the stimulus was a good idea, touting the stimulus too much was definitely not.

Obama’s advisers confidently predicted that unemployment would top out at 8 percent if Congress went along with his push for a $787 billion stimulus package. But unemployment hit 9.8 percent last month and 10 percent isn’t far behind.
The White House said that the economy was actually much worse than the advisers would have known at the time. Still, they broke a cardinal rule of politics – under-promise and over-deliver.


The Olympics bid

Copenhagen was not so wonderful to Barack Obama. More like the agony of defeat. The trip gave fodder to the White House’s critics to argue that the president remains too close to his Windy City political base, and all the big city machine seediness that implies. Not only that, Chicago’s bid was bounced on a first ballot – so much for the power of the global Brand Obama.


He's on Everywhere, All the Time

The downside of the flood the zone media strategy, Obama runs the risk of wearing thin on the American voter. “For a while it looked like he would be on everything from the Home and Garden Channel to Golf Digest,” said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean. “It dilutes the impact of his message and will begin to create voter fatigue from seeing him too much.”


McChrystal outguns Obama

These guys don’t get to be four-star generals without having a finely honed political sensibility, but you’d think the president would be an even better pol than a general.

First Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s go-big troop request was leaked to Bob Woodward – leaker unknown. Then McChrystal used a speech to a London think tank to “pre-but” the case for a smaller force in Afghanistan. By going public with his point of view, McChrystal handed Obama the untenable choice of defying his political base or defying his top general in the field.


No earmarks? Well, maybe just a few . . .billion

Obama campaigned hard against earmarks, but in March, he signed a $410 billion spending measure that was laden with more than $7 billion worth of the targeted spending provisions anyway. The president called the bill “imperfect” but didn’t veto the measure, and sent an early signal that he would bend – even on a core campaign priority.

“He had an opportunity to really be different,” said former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. “He could have dominated and controlled Washington. But instead, he went along with it.

Washington has not changed.”


No vetting the vetters

From Tom Daschle’s Town Cars, to Tim Geithner’s Turbo Tax to Bill Richardson’s federal grand jury troubles, Obama aides early in the year seemed incapable of turning up major problems before they hit the papers.


Gitmo, Year Two

Candidate Obama campaigned on closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, so it seemed to make sense when he set a deadline of January of 2010 to have the facility shuttered. By all accounts, it’s not going to happen. Obama and his team failed to take into account the extreme difficulty of deciding what do with the prisoners there – Congress won’t let them come to prisons here, U.S. allies don’t want them either.


Snubbing the Dalai Lama

The White House was at pains to say Obama didn’t snub the Dalai Lama in October when the Tibetan religious leader was in Washington – but it sure looked like he did. Obama’s decision not to meet with him in Washington – even though the White House promised another meeting at a date to be named later – gave ammunition to his critics that Obama was downplaying human rights to appease the Chinese.


Beating up on FOX News

Obama ran as a post-partisan candidate who rejected the old ways of Washington. But attacking the conservative network is just the sort of base building, red vs. blue move Obama seemed to denounce during the campaign. Even some Democrats were scratching their heads, saying it seemed beneath Obama to single out one network – a far cry from the inspirational, bridge-building figure the nation thought they were electing.


As I said, rank ‘em and add your own.

By the way the progam on HBO that Obama watched on Tuesday was entitled , “By the People” but there’s a little more to that sentence. Also there are the words, “For the People” but in the White House right now the watchword is “For Obama”. And nothing else matters.