Kathleen Parker is writing about the Woodward-Obama administration kerfluffle:
To the world beyond the Beltway, it might not mean much that Bob Woodward of the famed Watergate
duo went public with his recent White House run-in. This would be an oversight.
It also may not mean much that the White House press corps got teed off when they weren’t allowed access to President Obama as he played golf with Tiger Woods. This, too, would be an oversight.
Though not comparable — one appeared to be a veiled threat aimed at one of the nation’s most respected journalists and the other a minor blip in the scheme of things — both are part of a pattern of behavior by the Obama administration that suggests not just thin skin but a disregard for the role of the press and a gradual slide toward a state media.
...
Woodward, almost 70, is Washington’s Reporter Emeritus. His facts stand up to scrutiny. His motivations withstand the test of objectivity. Sperling obviously assumed that Woodward wouldn’t take offense at the suggestion that he not only was wrong but was also endangering his valuable proximity to power.
He assumed, in other words, that Woodward would not do his job. This was an oversight.
This is no tempest in a teapot but rather the leak in the dike. Drip by drip, the Obama administration has demonstrated its intolerance for dissent and its contempt for any who stray from the White House script. Yes, all administrations are sensitive to criticism, and all push back when such criticism is deemed unfair or inaccurate. But no president since Richard Nixon has demonstrated such overt contempt for the messenger. And, thanks to technological advances in social media, Obama has been able to bypass traditional watchdogs as no other president has.
More to the point, the Obama White House is, to put it politely, fudging as it tries to place the onus of the sequester on Congress. And, as has become customary, officials are using the Woodward spat to distract attention. As Woodward put it: “This is the old trick . . . of making the press . . . the issue, rather than what the White House has done here.”
Killing the messenger is a time-honored method of controlling the message, but we have already spilled that blood. And the First Amendment’s protection of a free press, the purpose of which is to check power and constrain government’s ability to dictate the lives of private citizens, was no accident.
At what point will America set aside her obsession with pop culture, with reality shows, with the shallowness that is so much of television, with the brain fog inducing wastefulness that are video games and begin to pay attention to what is happening in this country?
I pray, for the sake of my children and their children to come, that it'll be soon.
It needs to be real soon.