Victor Davis Hanson on X
By Victor Davis Hanson
The White House Press corps and the liberal media have gone ballistic over President Trump’s recent banning of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House press room.
Apparently Trump had finally had it with their decade-long trail of “fake news” (e.g., CNN on the Steele dossier: the intelligence community had “corroborated all the details.”; MS(NBC): “All the supporting details in Steele’s reports are checking out, even the really outrageous ones.”; and Politico (“Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”).
Or maybe it was Trump’s weariness that CNN and MS never learned from their serial untruth.
The former for years put on their news shows the admitted liar (“least most untruthful”) James Clapper; The latter likewise hired the twice-admitted-liar John Brennan (on his demonstrable spying on Senate computers, Brennan thundered under oath: “Nothing could be further from the truth. We wouldn’t do that.”)
So after witnessing the fake news’s spreading lies about the “walls are closing in on Trump” Mueller Investigation, ginning up the “mostly peaceful” 2020 riots, running with the Jussie Smollett farce, demonizing the Covington Kids, iconizing the assailant Trayvon Martin, and promulgating the “Hands up, Don’t Shoot” Ferguson fable, and on and on—I suppose Trump finally had enough.
In reaction and as expected, a sanctimonious Barack Obama now has jetted out from one of his three mansions and into the expulsion controversy.
And also as his wont, Obama almost immediately on spec opened himself up to the usual charges of rank hypocrisy and empty, performance-art virtue-signaling.
So Obama thundered, “I’m trying to think what would have happened if I had said, ‘You know what, Fox News? You’re out of here.’ It’s unimaginable.”
Actually, it’s not “unimaginable”, if Obama would just look into the mirror.
So wait a minute.
In 2009 the Obama Treasury Department tried to ban a Fox reporter from a press pool interview.
Earlier during the 2008 campaign, Obama kicked out New York Post and Washington Times reporters from his campaign plane.
But Obama was most notorious not for just excluding politically incorrect reporters but for surveilling and spying on them.
Even liberal watchdog foundations blasted Obama in 2012-13 for grabbing the private records of some twenty phone lines used at home and on the job by Associated Press reporters.
Most notoriously, it was finally revealed in 2013 that Obama’s State Department secretly had bird-dogged Fox Reporter James Rosen relentlessly— tracking his movements, obtaining a search warrant to examined two days’ worth of his private emails, and getting access to his private phone records.
If Obama is still “trying to think what would have happened” when he surveilled and spied on a Fox reporter relentlessly, he can stop—since nothing as usual happened to the always exempt Obama.
And Obama did not just at times eject reporters and surveille them.
He also threatened to prosecute eight reporters and their sources (more than any administration before or since, including Richard Nixon’s). But he backed down when the AP and Rosen scandals surfaced and cooled down his Inspector Javert alter ego.
The hammer/stiletto difference between a loud Trump and a smooth Obama?
Trump blows up publicly, rails, and earns furor from “shocked”, sober and judicious journalists” who covet their White House billets—while he also earns the damnation of the liberal legacy media for his antics.
But far more egregiously Obama used the powers of the administrative state, secretly and quietly, to surveille, follow, and spy on reporters and their sources, while threatening to prosecute and jail others—and he disguised his vindictiveness by his lofty tone and polished demeanor.
As he anticipated, Obama’s victims and the media itself largely kept still, afraid to concede that their messianic “constitutional lawyer” possessed an Orwellian mean streak and was a far greater danger to the First Amendment.
Or as the Left taught us, the fundamental threat to our Constitution is when “democracy dies in darkness.”
Postscript:
Obama also could not resist his “clingers” like demonization of Trump supporters, in the fashion of Hillary’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables”, and Biden’s “garbage”, “chumps”, “semi-fascists”, and “dregs”.
So he also blasted not just Trump for the expulsions, but returned to his accustomed stereotype putdown of Neanderthal-like Trump supporters who are supposedly under-developed (e.g., “what that means is that we’ve have not developed the kind of understanding of what democracy requires”):
“If you have a certain cohort, let’s call it 30 to 35 percent of the country right now, which thinks that’s okay, well, what that means is we have not developed the kind of understanding of what democracy requires, and we’ve got to shore that back up.”
I wonder how Obama would do that shoring up of a third of America? Surveilling, tracking, and spying on them?
Note finally, that even Hillary’s deplorables were only half of Trump’s half of the nation, “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables”) whereas Obama writes off a third of the entire country!
