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Authors: David Limbaugh

The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic (9 page)

BOOK: The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic
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“DISSEMINATING PUSHBACK”
The administration has prided itself on using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter to get its message out. And in typical form, it has used these media as vehicles for attacking the Right.
Obama has said “more and more people, especially young people, are getting their information through different media. And, historically, part of what makes for healthy democracy, what is good politics, is when you’ve got citizens who are informed, who are engaged.” That’s true—but the White House seems to make an exception when citizens become informed about things it doesn’t want them to know.
The White House exploits social media not just to “cognitively infiltrate” its critics, as Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein called it,
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but to bully them, urging supporters to use the social networks to pressure Congress to roll over for Obama’s agenda. “Tweet at your Republican legislators and urge them to support a bipartisan compromise to the debt crisis,” pleaded a post on Obama’s Twitter feed. To up the pressure, Obama said he would “post the Twitter handles of GOP lawmakers in each state.” Similarly, Obama’s staff also uses his Facebook page as a campaign tool.
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The White House takes social media so seriously that it assigned a person—Jesse Lee—to be its “director of progressive media and online response,” a position dedicated to refuting criticism of Obama on social media. Lee came well-prepared for an aggressive, partisan job, having cut his teeth with the Democratic National Committee, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and under Rahm Emanuel’s direction at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Obviously, the administration’s targets are not limited to professional politicians or reporters, but include anyone who dares to challenge it, even private citizens on social media. During a one-month period in 2011, instead of promoting the national interest, Lee, on the taxpayer’s dime, used 15 percent of his tweets on Twitter to debate Obama’s partisan positions with conservative Kevin Eder.
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Commentator Ed Morrissey said he’d originally defended the right of the White House to respond to its critics on social media, though recognizing it would “make the Obama administration look petty and thin-skinned, and would diminish the seriousness and dignity of the Presidency.” But, he added, he hadn’t realized “just how far below their weight the White House would punch.”
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Nor can we overlook that this lowbrow propaganda campaign is at taxpayer expense.
The administration’s deployment of Lee as its social media point man was not part of some innocuous plan to connect with the public. Two months prior to Lee’s Twitter skirmish with Eder, the
Huffington Post
had reported that the White House “is now making moves to integrate an online rapid response team inside the White House communications office.” An internal memo from White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said that Lee had been working in the new media and “serving as the White House’s liaison with the progressive media and the online community,” but now he would “take on the second role full time working on outreach, strategy and response.”
Notice the glaring admission that the White House works with “the progressive media”—that is, the liberal media, favorable to its policy agenda. The new role the White House carved out for Lee signaled, according to the
Huffington Post
, that the White House was “adopting a more aggressive engagement in the online world in the months ahead.” Nor was the White House’s choice of Lee accidental. Lee had overseen the truculent White House blog that got in a flame war with Glenn Beck, in which Lee accused Beck of lying about the administration on his show. Apparently, Lee got high marks from the boss, because he was promoted to the Twitter position for “the purposes of disseminating pushback.”
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Some say the White House makes use of another reliable ally for attacking its critics—Media Matters, a fiercely partisan leftwing group that promotes boycotts of non-liberal media figures. In February 2012, the Daily Caller website published an expose revealing close coordination between the White House and Media Matters. The Daily Caller reported,
A group with the ability to shape news coverage is of incalculable value to the politicians it supports, so it’s no surprise that Media Matters has been in regular contact with political operatives in the Obama administration. According to visitor logs, on June 16, 2010, {MM founder David} Brock and then-Media Matters president Eric Burns traveled to the White House for a meeting with Valerie Jarrett, arguably the president’s closest adviser. Recently departed Obama communications director Anita Dunn returned to the White House for the meeting as well.
It’s not clear what the four spoke about—no one in the meeting returned repeated calls for comment—but the apparent coordination continued. “Anita Dunn became a regular presence at the office,” says someone who worked there. Then-president of Media Matters, Eric Burns, “lunched with her, met with her and chatted with her frequently on any number of matters.”
Media Matters also began a weekly strategy call with the White House, which continues, joined by the liberal Center for American Progress think tank. Jen Psaki, Obama’s deputy communications director, was a frequent participant before she left for the private sector in October 2011.
Every Tuesday evening, meanwhile, a representative from Media Matters attends the Common Purpose Project meeting at the Capitol Hilton on 16th Street in Washington, where dozens of progressive organizations formulate strategy, often with a representative from the Obama White House.
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It may surprise some that a president who promised us bipartisanship and who claims to promote political civility would team up so closely with an attack group whose staffers boast that they got news anchor Lou Dobbs fired from CNN. But the Obama administration recognizes a valuable ally when it sees one, and it is Media Matters’ take-no-prisoners approach to politics that makes it so effective. “We were pretty much writing their prime time,” a former Media Matters operative remarked about MSNBC. “But then virtually all the mainstream media was using our stuff.”
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As the Daily Caller noted, the group’s campaigns—campaigns that obviously endeared it to the White House—can be downright ruthless, with no compunction about attacking local reporters who don’t toe Obama’s line: “Reporters who weren’t cooperative might feel the sting of a Media Matters campaign against them. ‘If you hit a reporter, say a beat reporter at a regional newspaper,’ a Media Matters source said, ‘all of a sudden they’d get a thousand hostile emails. Sometimes they’d melt down. It had a real effect on reporters who weren’t used to that kind of scrutiny.’”
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ANTI-LIFE REPUBLICANS?
As described above, throughout his first term, Obama often delegates the harshest attacks on Republicans to his supporters while presenting himself as being above the fray. This strategy descended into self-parody in October 2011 when Obama cited Reverend Martin Luther King’s admonition that Americans should be slow to question each other’s love of country—the same day his deputy press secretary Josh Earnest demanded that Republicans “put country before party” and vote for Obama’s jobs bill.
When Obama said, “If (Martin Luther King) were alive today… he would want us to know we can argue fiercely about the proper size and role of government without questioning each other’s love for this country,”
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apparently he meant “without questioning
his
love of country,” not that of Republicans. And in typical form, the next day Obama followed up his call for civility with another jab at those Republicans whose plan, he said, boiled down to: “Dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance.”
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Even
Politico
, hardly a conservative publication, featured an op-ed by Keith Koffler arguing that while conservatives often accuse Obama of waging class warfare, his “reelection strategy is about more than the haves and have-nots. It appears he is seeking to stir up full-blown cultural warfare against a large and diverse segment of society known as Republicans.” Unable to run on his economic record, Obama “and his advisers seem to have decided instead to mount a deeply polarizing campaign based on ‘values’—suggesting his vision for America is correct even if the economy is not right yet.” And, Koffler noted, “in waging this battle, Obama is saying nasty and dangerous things. He is promoting his own principles—not just by touting their goodness, but by suggesting that Republicans hold to an offensive, even un-American philosophy. By painting his opposition as not just wrong but evil, Obama risks dividing the nation in a profound and unnecessary way.”
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Obama indeed was characterizing Republicans as full-blown evil. In his disingenuous remarks on the GOP’s debate in Orlando, he also described conservative audiences as “cheering at the prospect of somebody dying because they don’t have health insurance.” As Koffler wrote, “Allegations that Republicans want sick people to die and hate homosexuals are caricatures you might expect of an extreme House member or a raving partisan running for local office. That a president would say—or even believe—such things is deeply disturbing.”
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To be sure, no reasonable person, especially not a United States president, could actually believe audience members were hoping people would die—as opposed to registering their vocal opposition to Obama’s socialized medicine scheme.
Obama’s remarks established a bizarre theme—Republicans promoting mass death—that trickled down beyond his inner circle. USAID administrator Rajiv Shah testified to the House Appropriations State and Foreign Ops subcommittee that the Republican budget plan, which contained $61 billion in baseline budget cuts—as opposed to actual cuts—would necessitate scaling back a malaria control program and lead to the deaths of 30,000 children. It would also allegedly cause 24,000 deaths due to immunization shortages and another 16,000 deaths from a lack of skilled attendants to oversee childbirths.
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ALL-OUT CLASS WARFARE
From the beginning of his splash onto the national stage, Obama has been a class warrior seeking to stoke envy and pitting people in different income groups against each other. He continually demonized big businesses, corporations, and “the wealthy,” always hinting they had somehow gamed the system to achieve their success. In his view, of course, the free market system is inherently corrupt, and absent stringent federal regulations, it inevitably leads to unacceptable disparities in income and wealth.
Well into his third term, even Obama’s media friends had to concede how intentionally confrontational and divisive he was. In October 2011 the
Washington Post
reported, “There is a noticeably more aggressive, confrontational President Obama roaming the country these days, selling his jobs plan and attacking Republicans for standing in the way of progress by standing up only for the rich.”
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This self-professed uniter began to call out leading congressional Republicans by name. Obama accused House Speaker John Boehner of having “walked away from a balanced package.” Then, speaking from a bridge connecting the states of Boehner (Ohio) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), Obama singled out the two Republican leaders for blocking job creation. He mocked GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry as “a governor whose state is on fire, denying climate change.”
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Blasting House Majority Leader Eric Cantor for opposing his jobs bill, Obama demanded, “Does he not believe in rebuilding America’s roads and bridges? Does he not believe in tax breaks for small businesses or efforts to help our veterans?”
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Of course, Obama knew precisely why Cantor and the Republicans opposed his jobs bill: because it was no such thing. His bill called for some $447 billion in borrowed federal money that would neither create jobs nor stimulate the economy any more than his first failed stimulus bill of nearly twice that amount, but it would accelerate our path to national bankruptcy. Obama’s clear implication was that Republican opposition to his agenda was purely partisan, putting the GOP’s selfish interests above the nation’s, and especially those who are most in need.
As always, Obama wasn’t merely trying to divide the American people; he was also aiming to shore up support from his militant leftist base, which was upset with him for not being radical enough. As the
Post
reported, “The emergence of this more pugnacious Obama has heartened Democrats, especially the most liberal ones, who spent the past few months dejected by what they saw as the president’s unwillingness to engage his opponents in political combat.”
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ACT “LIKE GROWNUPS”
There is perhaps no better example of Obama’s petulant intolerance for opposition and his disdainful attitude toward his Republican opponents than his posturing during the budget battles of mid-2011. As those skirmishes heated up in April, Obama called a White House press conference. But instead of laying out his side’s position on the debate, he made it personal, as usual, demonizing his opponents, suggesting they weren’t opposing him on principle—responsible fiscal stewardship—but for purely partisan gain. “We don’t have time for games,” said a “visibly irritated” Obama. “The only question,” he continued, “is whether politics or ideology is going to get in the way of preventing a shutdown.”
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And after having sat out of the budget talks until then, he had the audacity to demand that congressional leaders act “like grownups,”
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end the impasse, and reach an agreement, as if his own refusal to agree to crucial, meaningful budget cuts weren’t the primary cause of the deadlock.
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At one point during the budget debates, Obama peevishly decided to take his ball home when House Republicans refused to yield to his dictatorial edicts, abruptly ending a tense budget meeting and walking out of the room. He also threatened Eric Cantor, “Eric, don’t call my bluff. I’m going to take this to the American people.” If anyone was bluffing, it was probably Obama, who must have been aware that at the time more voters opposed raising the debt ceiling (45 percent) than supported it (32 percent).
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At no time did Obama register similar disgust for the failure of the Democrat-controlled Senate to pass a budget for almost a thousand days. Like a tyrant who had usurped complete authority over the legislative branch, Obama condescendingly proclaimed, “If they can’t sort it out, then I want them back here tomorrow.”
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Accusing Obama and Democrats of creating the false appearance of budget cuts with “smoke and mirrors,” House Speaker John Boehner responded, “The president is certainly entitled to disagree with our budget, but what exactly is his alternative? If he wants to have an ‘adult conversation’ about solving our fiscal challenges, he needs to lead instead of sitting on the sidelines.”
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Notably, during this round of budget negotiations, after expressing his frustration that his congressional children couldn’t break their impasse, Obama vowed to personally get on the case, saying, “I want a meeting again tomorrow here at the White House … and if that doesn’t work, we’ll invite them again the day after that.” The very next day Obama spent a total of three minutes on the phone with House Speaker John Boehner and then jetted off to Philadelphia for a campaign event billed as a town hall meeting on “winning the future.” Following that meeting he flew to New York City for an event with Reverend Al Sharpton.
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Hedging its bets, the administration started lining up the pieces to place the blame on Republicans should a deal not be reached. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that Republican lawmakers would be responsible not just if the country defaulted on its debt obligations, but if through protracted negotiations, it came close to defaulting and spooked the markets. “Lawmakers,” said Geithner, “will say there’s leverage in it, we can advance it. But that would be deeply irresponsible and they will own the risk. It won’t happen in the end, but if they take it too close to the edge, they will own responsibility for that miscalculation.”
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BOOK: The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's War on the Republic
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