Wild-Swinging Obama Blames Media for...Failing To Bash Republicans As Stubborn Extremists?

May 27th, 2014 8:08 PM

Out on the fundraising trail with liberal donors in Chicago last week, President Obama spread a ridiculous tale. He told the donors that he and the Democrats are the compromise-seeking moderates, while the Republican are fringy ideologues who stubbornly cause all the gridlock. Obama blamed the media for making this sound like two-way stubbornness.

It's hard to decide which part is more ridiculous: that Obama’s a moderate, or that the press isn’t trashing the Republicans as gridock-causing extremists? How many times have we heard the media warn of Tea Party extremists driving the Grand Old Party off a cliff? But this was the president's fundraising pitch on Thursday: 

 “You’ll hear if you watch the nightly news or you read the newspapers that, well, there’s gridlock, Congress is broken, approval ratings for Congress are terrible.  And there’s a tendency to say, a plague on both your houses.  But the truth of the matter is that the problem in Congress is very specific.  We have a group of folks in the Republican Party who have taken over who are so ideologically rigid.”

And “So the problem…is not that the Democrats are overly ideological — because the truth of the matter is, is that the Democrats in Congress have consistently been willing to compromise and reach out to the other side.  There are no radical proposals coming out from the left.”


Inside the White House, they think Obamacare was almost a Republican idea. It was apparently so Republican the administration could force it down America’s throat in 2010 without a Republican voting for it, and then claim without shame that Obama was much more willing than they were to compromise.

When you’re a radical leftist like Obama, you also believe that running up five trillion-dollar deficits in a row – a historic “achievement” in excessive federal spending – was a “moderate” path, a route full of willingness to compromise with conservatives.

While he blames his buddies in the press  for “false equivalence” between the political parties, the real falsehood in Obama’s speech is somehow believing that his “time-tested” policies are creating a terrific economy. He claimed “What’s broken right now is a Republican Party that repeatedly says no to proven, time-tested strategies to grow the economy, create more jobs, ensure fairness, open up opportunity to all people.”

Our media elite deeply share in Obama’s odd leftist conceits. See Jonathan Alter’s book on Obama’s reelection called “The Center Holds.” All the Obama-loving journalists on MSNBC and elsewhere have insisted for years now that Obama is a misunderstood anything-but-socialist and today’s Republican Party has been dramatically moved to the far right, so extreme that Ronald Reagan wouldn’t fit in.

At The Washington Post, leftist blogger Greg Sargent marveled at Obama’s stack of baloney as the most direct indictment of the GOP as “what some of us have been calling ‘post-policy,’” which began as a Rachel Maddow insult. Leftists have so much swagger that they can call conservatives fervently ideological and “post-policy” in the same incoherent thought puddle.

Obama takes this untruthful swagger everywhere he goes. On May 19 in Potomac, Maryland, he boasted to his Democratic donors, “if you look at where we stand on issues, the public is on our side on almost all of them.” Unless you count Obamacare, which has never been popular. Or voter-ID laws. Or Obama’s handling of the economy. Or Obama’s handling of Russia. Or Obama’s handling of the VA.

In other words, the media’s problem today is not “false equivalence.” The media’s problem is simply spreading Obama’s falsehoods about his alleged moderation, his alleged achievements, and his alleged popularity.