The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
News of the Tautological
“Rainfall Limits Controlled Burns in Year With High Risks of Forest Fires”–headline, Press of Atlantic City (N.J.), March 8
Out on a Limb
“Buy Anything From a Guy With a Skull Tattoo on His Face? It Might Be Stolen”–headline, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 9
A ‘Journalist’ Instructs the White House in How to Do PR
A subheadline in the e-zine Newsweek promises “the inside story of how the White House botched its PR surrounding drones, infuriated Congress, and let Rand Paul become a liberal hero.” Hmm, so a journalist (“special correspondent” Daniel Klaidman) is going to explain why the administration’s PR effort failed. Will it be a first-person story? After all, PR consists largely in the effort to get favorable press coverage.
If the administration has failed in that effort, it’s not because writers like Klaidman aren’t eager to cast Barack Obama and his administration in the best possible light. Get a load of this passage:
The irony is that Obama and most of his top aides are personally in favor of more rather than less transparency. But in the end, they have repeatedly deferred to secrecy obsessed spooks and handwringing lawyers whose default position has been to keep things under wraps. “It’s clear that the president and the attorney general both want more transparency,” says Matthew Miller, a former senior Justice Department official. “But the bureaucracy has once again thrown sand in the gears and slowed that down.”
This recalls Bob Woodward’s and Ron Fournier’s elaborate rationalizations for why the abusive treatment they said they had received at the hands of the White House was no reflection on Obama.
As for the administration’s attitude toward transparency, consider this passage from a McClatchy story: “An interagency group devoted to open government convened by the White House meets regularly, but does not provide records on those meetings.” They must be keeping their secrecy secret from Obama, because he’s so devoted to transparency that he would never knowingly let something like this happen.
Klaidman continues: “The drones mess also reflects Obama’s tortured, Solomonic approach to dealing with difficult national security issues. In seeking to balance transparency and security, Obama has pursued a middle path that, in the end, has satisfied nobody.”
The judgment of Solomon was not a “middle path” that “satisfied nobody.” It was a fake compromise designed to reveal the truth. Klaidman tries to associate Obama with the wisdom of Solomon when in fact all he has shown is that the president is wishy-washy. If Obama has a PR problem, perhaps it is because journalists are so devoted to him that they can’t even write credible puff pieces.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
