On Wednesday, Dennis wrote about Nile Gardner’s article on the war between Fox News and the White House.
There’s no doubt about it – a battle has been waged and the Capitol Hill generals are of the likes of Rahm Emmanuel, Anita Dunn, and David Axelrod. Today, Charles Krauthammer (a.k.a ‘the Hammer’ at the Insider) takes on the subject, and as usual, explores and exposes every nuance of the most recent leftist media attack.
Earlier this week, the man in charge of overseeing the executive payrolls at organizations receiving stimulus money, Ken Feinberg, was offered up by the Treasury Department to interview on just about every news network except Fox. Fortunately, the other news channels refused such an offer without the inclusion of the White House’s step-child network, Fox. Krauthammer points out the important relevance of a seemingly trivial action:
This was an important defeat because there’s a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they’re engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
He goes on to point out that such actions taken by the White House do not violate any laws or constitutional guidelines, but rather an intangible political principle that must be held up.
There’s nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.
Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand “the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties.” They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other — and an otherwise imperious government.
Factions should compete, but also recognize the legitimacy of other factions and, indeed, their necessity for a vigorous self-regulating democracy. Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimize and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian.
What Dennis said in his last post is absolutely true, and the Hammer reaffirms this in his article – there is absolutely no doubt that the White House will lose this battle. The more effort the administration puts in to delegitimizing Fox News, the more they empower it. My question is: who is in charge of this assault? For a president that was hailed as being so incredibly smart and politically agile, this is by far one of the worst possible moves the White House could make, and Obama has not made a visible effort to end it.
