Lying Badly: Axelrod Tips CNN’s Suicide Pact with White House
As happens on the web on Fridays, posts begin to turn towards just how the weekend’s television news ‘magazines’ and round-tables will choose to digest the news, and how they will frame it, in concert with the national Sunday papers. The left doesn’t need JournoList, though that was a convenience while it lasted, to know how to spin the week’s news in favor of libs and progressives, because it’s the zeitgeist: it’s in the air that they breathe and the cues that they receive from the lips of booked surrogates.
Booked surrogates, you ask? What are they? Well, prior to this week, I wouldn’t have been able to answer that question, either, but the Hilary Rosen stay-at-home-moms debacle has cracked the door open to show Axelrod and the White House with their pants down and peanut butter everywhere. Michelle Malkin via Jim Geraghty:
1/26/10 Rosen visited Dagoberta Vega, White House broadcasting media official and director of surrogate booking.
In all, a Hilary Rosen has visited the White House 35 times, sometimes to meet with Obama, and sometimes to meet with top advisers in the White House. But after she outrageously claimed that MS-suffering, cancer-surviving mom of five Ann Romney had never worked a day in her life, Axelrod, Messina, Wasserman-Schultz, eventually even Obama and Mo-bama all denounced the statement. Most interesting was Axelrod’s appearance with John King at CNN:
John King started asking Axelrod uncomfortable questions about Rosen, who is in public relations and communications with former White House communications director and Mao fan Anita Dunn, and Axelrod pointed out to King that it would be improper for a news organization such as CNN’s to have as a paid regular guest anyone who had the sort of ties to the White House that King seemed to be imputing. It was really a very revelatory moment, because it demonstrated the First Rule of Lefty Media Collusion while at the same time relaying a not-very-veiled Chicago thug-style threat to King and his network. I have to say that I’ve never seen anything quite like it before. What Axelrod is saying, in effect, is that the White House and CNN are in a suicide pact, and that King had better not forget it. Axelrod’s veiled threat was so off the charts that King wasn’t able immediately to absorb it.
Da Techguy is one among many who are noting the absolute desperation of the White House to distance itself from what Rosen said, but he puts it better than they do:
The White House and the left is scared, VERY SCARED. Ann Althouse nails it:
It’s the turning point in the presidential race… strangely, and yet not surprisingly. The trajectory changes right here. Today.
then puts it in perspective:
As we’d talked about earlier: The Democrats don’t really believe anything. They’re just working on various voting blocs. They started this “war on women” theme, but it was a means to an end. Women were out there, so numerous, so richly exploitable. The campaign made its move. And then… the slip.
And as for the president’s line about families being off-limits, Glenn Reynolds puts it well:
Tell it to the people who covered Sarah Palin, some of whom have been invited to dinner with Obama.
On and this is going to be all over the Sunday shows this weekend INCLUDING Meet the Press.
They should be afraid. This White House’s trouble with time-lines gets worse and worse as their fables get bigger and bigger, but there’s now a corps of citizen journalists who can hold their feet to the fire, not just by means of O’Keefe-style stings, but also with respect to the video and audio archiving so effectively pioneered by Naked Emperor. As John Nolte noted at Breitbart, one sometimes doesn’t have to dig very far, and it turns out that Obama personally floated the ‘Romneys are so wealthy that they’re out of touch with struggling Americans whereas he and Michelle’ meme:
When asked about the Hilary King entries from the White House visitors logs, Jay Carney responded with the outrageous fiction that he personally knows 3 Hilary Rosens (all of that spelling, no doubt), and that any old Hilary Rosen might have visited for all he knows. In truth, I must know a half dozen people named Malik Zulu Shabazz.
***Hang in there to 5:05 where it gets good. Man, Axelrod sure stutters when he gets in a corner.
(via Lying Badly: Axelrod Tips CNN’s Suicide Pact with White House)
