Hold the presses! The far-left blog Daily Kos is insisting that liberal reporter Bob Woodard, in doing his job as a journalist, has gone “full Breitbart” with his coverage of sequestration. Just a few short years ago, the Kossacks loved when reporters "spoke truth to power" in confronting Republicans in the White House. But now that Woodward has gone on record saying that he received threatening emails from senior Obama administration officials, well, that's a far different story.
On the February 27 broadcast of The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Woodward said:
WOLF BLITZER, CNN: You're used to this kind of stuff, but share with our viewers what's going on between you and the White House.
BOB WOODWARD: Well, they're not happy at all and some people kind of, you know, said, look, 'we don't see eye to eye on this.' They never really said, though, afterwards, they've said that this is factually wrong, and they -- and it was said to me in an e-mail by a top --
BLITZER: What was said?
WOODWARD: It was said very clearly, you will regret doing this.
BLITZER: Who sent that e-mail to you?
WOODWARD: Well, I'm not going to say.
BLITZER: Was it a senior person at the White House?
WOODWARD: A very senior person. And just as a matter -- I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, 'you're going to regret doing something that you believe in, and even though we don't look at it that way, you do look at it that way.' I think if Barack Obama knew that was part of the communication's strategy, let's hope it's not a strategy, that it's a tactic that somebody's employed, and said, 'Look, we don't go around trying to say to reporters, if you, in an honest way, present something we don't like, that, you know, you're going to regret this.' It's Mickey Mouse.
However, since Woodward has said that sequestration was Obama’s idea, left-wingers on Daily Kos have relegated him to a hack, and stated that Carl Bernstein was probably the brains behind their investigation into Watergate during the Nixon administration:
I'm forced to wonder if maybe Carl Bernstein had been the brains of that particular operation, and Woodward just some random hack on the paper who had been assigned to work with him. Given what I've seen of this guy in my lifetime, the idea that his role in breaking Watergate was some kind of real-life Being There begins to seem increasingly plausible. Seriously, look up Bernstein's resume since Watergate and compare it with Woodward's - it's not even close. One is a journalistic ninja, and the other is the guy who wrote four incredibly charitable contemporary books about the Bush regime with its full cooperation and permission before being involved in the Plame affair.
Well, I guess he's not done with...doing whatever the hell it is he does. Because now, as noted on the Front Page, Woodward has publicly interpreted an innocuous email conversation with a White House official as containing ominous threats and intimidation meant to silence journalism. The FP piece does well enough showing the fact that the claim is complete bullshit, but coming as it does so close on the heels of Woodward's unfavorable comparison of Obama with (you guessed it) George W. Bush just makes it that much more egregious and disgraceful. He conjured this nonsense out of thin air while defending a murdering, torturing, psychotic dictator who spent every single day stomping his foot in the face of this country.
One little cord of discontent, and the left begins to eat their own. Investors Business Daily posted yesterday that Candy Crowley and David Gregory are skeptical about the impact of the cuts.
[Candy] Crowley was incredulous at what Obama's transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, was saying about sequester-caused air travel nightmares.
Even with the budget cuts, she said, the FAA will have "$500 million more than 2008, (when) the planes were running just fine," adding, "surely there must be things inside the FAA budget where you can get rid of 4%."
NBC's David Gregory was surprisingly skeptical, too, asking LaHood if he actually believed "Americans think that government can't tighten up a bit."
Are they now enemies of the state because they haven’t blamed Republicans?
But the most absurd notion is that Woodward is a conservative, and that he’s now part of Breitbart’s army of citizen journalists seeking to uncover the truth. Then again, uncovering the truth shouldn’t be something solely associated with conservative media outlets. It’s just the ramblings of a frustrated left-winger who’s mad that one of their own isn’t following lockstep behind the legions of boot-lickers for this administration.
This is especially true given how Lanny Davis, an Obama supporter, said today that the White House threatened his media credentials because they didn’t like some of his columns:
Washington Times columnist and Democratic insider Lanny Davis tells WMAL-AM that his editor, John Solomon, "received a phone call from a senior Obama White House official who didn't like some of my columns, even though I'm a supporter of Obama. I couldn't imagine why this call was made." Davis says the Obama aide told Solomon, "that if he continued to run my columns, he would lose, or his reporters would lose their White House credentials."
"He didn't take it seriously, because he didn't think that could ever happen. He thought it was bluster," Davis told WMAL. "I called three senior people at the White House, and I said, 'I want this person to be told this can never happen again, and it's inappropriate.' I got a call back from someone who was in the White House saying it will never happen again.
So, when Jay Carney blasts the press and says do some “old-fashioned reporting,” I think we all know what he really means by that.
