UPDATE: Senator Lamar Alexander accuses the president of compiling an "enemies list."
I used to be way into politics. Not so much anymore. God has made me a Samuel, not a David. At any rate, I still follow politics and occasionally feel the need to vent. Tonight, I've gotta say the Obama administration is getting downright scary. We're starting to see a frightening/spooky pattern here of indoctrination and intimidation. Three examples come to mind:
I used to be way into politics. Not so much anymore. God has made me a Samuel, not a David. At any rate, I still follow politics and occasionally feel the need to vent. Tonight, I've gotta say the Obama administration is getting downright scary. We're starting to see a frightening/spooky pattern here of indoctrination and intimidation. Three examples come to mind:
1) First, Obama's school speech... Obama's team portrayed anyone who opposed his speech as a crazy redneck and/or racist. And for many, the fact that the speech ended up being relatively uncontroversial verified this claim. But the fact is, that no one knows what the speech originally said, because the administration didn't release a transcript until after all the ruckus. We also know that one of the original "discussion questions" asked our children, "How can you help President Obama?" (Again, this question was scrapped only after conservatives howled.) I was one of the ones saying that the President deserves the benefit of the doubt, and should be able to address school children if he so desires... But something about the way this was approached had an eerie, "Hitler youth" feel to it.
2) Second, at the height of the healthcare debate, the White House launched a website asking Americans to report "fishy" criticism of Obama's healthcare plan. This Big Brother-like tactic of Obama using the power of his office to compile a list of those who dared cross him, should scare every American. Ultimately, the website was yanked. Again, only after a big enough stink was made. A similar tactic was used by Omaba during the campaign when letters were sent to media outlets threatening litigation if they ran ads the Obama campaign viewed as unfair or inaccurate.
3) Third, and perhaps most frightening, is this past week's unprecedented attack by a presidential administration on a news network. In case you've missed it, administration officials are publicly attacking the integrity of the Fox News network, saying it is not news at all but essentially Republican propaganda, and encouraging other news organizations (CNN, MSNBC, etc.) not even to acknowledge Fox News as a peer in the industry. To take it a step further, the Obama administration is refusing to make any of its people available to Fox News for interviews, questioning or otherwise. The fact is that Fox News is far and away the most popular of the news networks, and that a Pew Research study during the 2oo8 presidential election found Fox News to have the most balanced coverage of all the news organizations. The truth, of course, is that Obama, chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, and others in the administration are using vicious, Chicago-style politics to shut down any source of information that does not portray President Obama and his agenda in a totally positive light.
Enjoy this president's public charisma and personality. But just know... Cross this president, and you're going to end up on a list somewhere.
