Bozell Column: David Gregory's Props and Pomposity

The D.C. police investigation of NBC hotshot David Gregory for waving around an empty ammo magazine on “Meet the Press” easily proves two things. First, D.C.’s “ammunition control” laws are ridiculous. But more importantly, once again, we find the arrogance of the national press knows no boundaries.

Let us stipulate that this kind of law is just plain stupid. Empty ammo magazines are less threatening than mosquitoes. The point is, however, that liberals like David Gregory do subscribe to this kind of idiotic law -- for everyone else.

Was Gregory so ignorant that he didn’t know he was breaking a D.C. law? Nope. We learned NBC contacted the D.C. police and asked for permission to wave the props, and the cops said no. Then Gregory did it anyway. So not only did he believe he was above the law, he broke it so he could produce maximum buzz for his Sunday show.

Naturally, other media elites leaped to his defense. Newsweek’s Howard Kurtz acknowledged Gregory’s opportunism, but chided the police for being sticklers: “Was the moderator of Meet the Press caught on tape, armed and dangerous, liberating a few Slurpees from a 7-Eleven? No...Was it a stunt? Yep, and an eye-catching one....But a police probe over what I assume was an empty ammo clip is a total waste of time.”

Kurtz even made a little video for his site the Daily Download where he took a stand against reality: “Nobody’s saying that he’s above the law!”  Earth to Howard: when you call even a cursory police investigation a “total waste of time,” you’re saying Gregory’s above the law.

Somehow, Kurtz was “stunned at the vitriol” against Gregory for feeling he could violate the law because he waving a liberal point in the face of the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre.

This is kind of arrogant confrontation with conservatives was Gregory’s chosen path to media power. He threw epic fits of egotism at the Bush White House at the late, great Tony Snow. In 2006, after Gregory demanded that Bush’s “failure” in Iraq should be “put before the voters,” Snow outraged him by saying “I think you’ve admirably expressed the Democratic point of view.”

Gregory mounted his high horse and struck a Napoleonic pose: “Don't try to dismiss me as making a Democratic argument, Tony, when I'm speaking fact! You can do that to the Democrats; don't do it to me!"

At least Kurtz noticed that when Gregory sat down with President Obama a week after his smackdown with LaPierre, it suddenly became a no-news snoozefest. Gregory brought no showy props to the White House to embarrass Obama. Instead, he asked the president whether he had enough courage to fight for liberals against gun rights: “You know how hard this is. Do you have the stomach for the political fight for new gun control laws?”

On Benghazi, Gregory could only ask with a very un-Russert-like vagueness, “After the attack in Benghazi, is there a need for more accountability so that this doesn’t happen again? And do you know who was behind the attack at this point?” Gregory also asked Obama if he threw his friend Susan Rice “under the bus,” without acknowledging Rice’s campaign of lies on five Sunday shows, including his own.

Back on September 16, the same Gregory that yelled in the White House briefing room about Bush’s “failures” of vision in Iraq couldn’t quite locate any failures in questioning Rice: “Was there a failure here that this administration is responsible for, whether it`s an intelligence failure, a failure to see this coming, or a failure to adequately protect U.S. embassies and installations from a spontaneous kind of reaction like this?” (Rice said “I don’t think so.”)

Now back to Obama: the laugh track should have kicked in when Obama mentioned the movie “Lincoln,” and Gregory nauseatingly asked, “Is this your Lincoln moment?” Obama’s always encouraged Lincoln parallels, no matter how ridiculous, but he laughably insisted “Well no, look. I never compared myself to Lincoln.”

Even NBC knew it was foisting a liberal double standard on its viewers. Here is NBC’s Peter Alexander describing Gregory on the “NBC Nightly News” on December 23: “Facing a barrage of tough questions for the first time since the deadly massacre in Newtown, on ‘Meet the Press,’ the NRA’s CEO Wayne LaPierre forcefully defended his call for armed officers in every school.”

Seven days later, on the same newscast, NBC’s Kristen Welker noticed Gregory helpfully offered Obama the floor for “weighing in” against Republicans: “Weighing in from the White House, the president, who appeared on ‘Meet the Press,’ pushed Republicans to give on taxes.”

This is the reason why liberal journalists shouldn’t be so shocked at the “vitriol” against Gregory and his fellow Obama courtiers in the press. Everything they do – legal and illegal, ethical and unethical – looks designed to embarrass and defeat conservatives.