By Brent Bozell
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
The unfolding story of the Obama administration
monitoring not just telephone records but Internet usage has drawn media
coverage with adjectives like "astonishing." No doubt about it, even
the pro-Obama press acknowledges it is a scandal. Still, it is laughable that
the media would label him a "dictator" or discuss the "I
word."
That's not what greeted George W. Bush at the end of
2005. Just eight years ago, journalists openly discussed tyranny and the
possibility of impeachment.
On Newsweek's website on December 19, 2005, Jonathan
Alter went ballistic: "We're seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11
gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like
Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. ... If the Democrats regain control of
Congress, there may even be articles of impeachment introduced. Similar abuse
of power was part of the impeachment charge brought against Richard Nixon in
1974."
On CNN the next day, crusty commentator Jack Cafferty
echoed: "If you listen carefully, you can hear the word 'impeachment.' Two
congressional Democrats are using it, and they're not the only ones."
On CBS on Dec. 21, morning show host Russ Mitchell asked
law professor Jonathan Turley about Bush. "Do you see this leading to
impeachment proceedings against the President?" Turley agreed. "Well,
Russ, what I can tell you is that I do believe this is a federal crime and it
would constitute an impeachable offense."
Months later, on April 23, 2006, ABC's Sam Donaldson
declared it a sacred duty to disobey the Bush administration when a leaker
exposed secret CIA prisons for terrorist suspects. "Remember the great
American saying, 'Disobedience to tyranny is obedience to God,'" he
lectured. "In this case, it was something that clearly, I think, most
Americans would agree is not what we want to do, secret prisons. ... Exposing
something like that does not hurt us. It helps us."
On July 17, 2006, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift denounced Bush
the tyrant on "The McLaughlin Group." She said Russia's Vladimir
Putin is "the only one of those leaders who goes in there with a
commanding popularity among his own people, because he is perceived to be an
effective dictator. What we have in this country is a dictator who's
ineffective." When someone protested, she backtracked to Bush being an
"authoritarian president who's ineffective."
Despite all this, major media polls in 2006 showed most
Americans favored investigating terrorist threats over preventing intrusions on
their privacy. The same is true today, especially after the Boston Marathon
bombing.
The people may be consistent. Journalists are not.
Eleanor Clift has scrapped the "dictator" talk
now. On "The McLaughlin Group" on June 7, she decried how
"There's a lot of alarmist rhetoric on both the left and the right. But,
in fact, this has been going on for the last several years. It began in the
Bush administration." He was a "dictator" then, but now
everything is perfectly sound.
Jonathan Alter was just as partisan. He told WBUR on June
10 that Obama sees very scary intelligence briefings every day, and "his
first job is to protect the United States, and that's his oath. But as we saw
in his speech last week, he's very conscious of balancing national security
with civil liberties. He might not have done it right in this particular
program, but at least he's making the effort to strike that balance, which the
Republicans generally do not."
On CNN, impeachment now comes up only as a preposterous
notion. On May 29, Piers Morgan was trying to press libertarian author Wayne
Allyn Root on the weird notion of impeaching Obama over the IRS scandal:
"However, to get talking approximate impeachment, you've really got to
nail President Obama's fingerprints to any of these things, and I don't see any
of that. I don't see that there is any chain that leads to Obama."
It's so outrageous that Republicans will surely suffer,
we are now told on CNN. On June 2, Candy Crowley pushed the "Republican
overreach" line on her Sunday show "State of the Union." Crowley
asserted, "In 1998, they lost because they overplayed their impeachment
hand."
The same happened on CBS. On May 30, "CBS This
Morning" host Charlie Rose asked pollster Frank Luntz: "Do you think
they're overplaying it, the Republicans?" Luntz replied, "No, at this
point I`m actually impressed. One or two have used the I-word, impeachment,
which no American would support for something like this."
This Obama scandal is yet the latest example of a
dramatic pro-Obama bias. Journalists screamed "dictator" over Bush
programs, and then when Obama continued them without interruption, he was just
wisely keeping the country safe. As the Obama scandals continue to multiply,
it's the media's credibility that should take the hardest hit.
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