Bozell Column: Obama vs. 'Hyperpartisans'

Is President Obama getting overexposed? This we know: a firm believer in all his fawning media clips, Obama thinks there is no political problem he cannot overcome with yet another nationally televised address. Not only has he scheduled an umpteenth appearance in prime time, he now insists on addressing the nation’s schoolchildren.

Why is this controversial? What is more American than having her president addressing the young? Reagan did it. So did Bush. The problem is Obama and his administration. There is – always is – a political agenda.

The mission was not to educate, it was to indoctrinate. The public learned the Department of Education sent out guidelines to principals urging that children "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president." Older students were urged to answer the question: "What is President Obama inspiring you to do? What is he challenging you to do?"

Our national media know Obama’s numbers are plummeting, and simply cannot accept this as the popular will. Anyone who dares to oppose Obama must be certifiably crazy, or racist, or even hoping for Obama to be murdered. NBC anchor Brian Williams spoke for the Obamaniacal media as he decried the current atmosphere as our "hyperpartisan era of instant and vocal outrage" – as if those words would not define the corrosive end of the Bush years.

"Hyperpartisan" is a word they use only when the liberals are in charge. When conservatives are in charge, the opposition somehow becomes a celebration of democracy.

MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, seen in the last administration heaping the most vicious, personal abuses on President Bush, now thinks that anyone who criticizes Obama must be an aspiring criminal. On September 1, his guest Dan Savage, a smutty sex columnist, suggested with a straight face that "the Michelle Bachmans" and "Glenn Becks of the world" are "trying to get the president killed."

Why Olbermann thinks this man is qualified for punditry is a mystery, since Savage’s most recent column addressed such weighty policy matters as whether it’s okay to "enjoy having sex with those stretched earlobe holes."

Did Olbermann protest that Savage was being too....savage? No, it was only unfair to a small fraction of conservatives: "I'm only going to moderate your remarks to this degree, that I think some of them who oppose this are not of that thinking that you just expressed," Olbermann said. "But unfortunately a lot of who you are talking about, you nailed them perfectly."

Olbermann is outdoing himself on the hypocrisy meter. This holier-than-thou speech comes from the man who said President Bush "needlessly killed 3,584 of our family and friends and neighbors," and "urinated on the Constiution," a man he yelled at to "Shut the hell up!" He attacked Bush for "panoramic and murderous deceit" and yelled "You’re a fascist! Get them to print you a T-shirt with fascist on it!...You, sir, have no place in a government of the people, by the people, for the people." He suggested Bush led "a government more dangerous to our liberty than is the enemy it claims to protect us from." Bush "imposed subjugation and called it freedom," and his policies "would constitute the beginning of the end of America."

And now he says conservatives are too nasty.

Olbermann is not alone in objecting to the American people saying anything of a critical nature about Obama. CNBC’s John Harwood suggested parents who criticized Obama’s school speech were stupid: "the biggest danger to kids in this whole thing is that a lot of the parents complaining aren't smart enough to raise them very effectively." (He suggested they’re racists, too.) CNN’s Roland Martin simply called anti-Obama parents "insane."

Lovely. They attacked tea-party protesters as "teabaggers" and town-hall questioners as "quarrelsome masses," the media now insist the school-speech critics are "insane."

It’s not insane to wonder why our schools should be directed by the government to discuss how the Dear Leader is inspiring the young, and how the Dear Leader can be helped. Can you imagine how Keith Olbermann would have covered this presidential speech to children if the honor-the-president lesson plan had been sent to principals by that "fascist" Bush administration?

The media are frustrated that the buckets of luster they have dumped all over Barack Obama are vanishing before their eyes. The polls are looking worse, and worse. The latest CNN poll asked whether the public approved or disapproved of how Obama was handling the federal budget deficit: 36 percent approved, and a whopping 63 percent disapproved.

The American people have seen the nine trillion dollars in estimated deficits in this decade – that is, if everything Obama promises comes to pass. The final numbers assuredly will be worse. That reality can’t be papered over with yet another nationally televised speech – to children or adults.