Is it possible that Obama's arrogance, personal pettiness, sanctimoniousness and egotism (for starters) could finally be his unraveling? Even the liberal media are starting to notice, but will it last?
Up to this point, they've dutifully played along with his Alinskyite tactics — converting the office of the presidency into a headquarters for community organizing at a federal level and a position to organize and fund a perpetual campaign against his political opponents instead of governing.
The liberal media share Obama's leftist policy goals and the ends-justify-the-means mentality that accompanies them and have thus far been eager not only to ignore Obama's thuggishness and deceit but also to proactively help him in accomplishing his goals and concealing his chicanery.
But perhaps his willingness to hurt the country to make political points, which until recently they'd overlooked, has finally gotten their attention — with his brazen lies about the sequester cuts and his release of dangerous criminal illegals onto the streets. I'll not be Pollyannaish in hoping for a sustained liberal-media blowback toward Obama, but these matters have at least caught their attention and inched ever so slightly forward from the back burner. That's something to build on.
Cocky from his re-election and from a string of triumphs in his negotiations with Republicans, Obama calculated he could continue to be as dictatorial and unreasonable as he had been and even ratchet it up a notch and get away with it. He knew he was lying when he said Republicans were currently causing the sequestration because they wouldn't agree to more tax increases. He was the one primarily responsible for the impasse because he had already gotten his tax increases and was still refusing to play ball on the spending and entitlements side — the only side that can make a difference in solving our debt crisis — as he always has.
The media didn't call him on that, as flagrantly dishonest as it was. Why should they have? They rarely had before, and they support his quest to punish the successful. Loyalty to the truth hasn't been enough to motivate them to behave like true journalists and just report the news fairly.
But we saw a hint of media dissatisfaction with Obama when reporter Chuck Todd criticized Obama for "ceding the moral high ground" concerning the corrupt influence of money in politics because his campaign arm, Organizing for Action, has been "selling access to the president."
Then veteran reporter Bob Woodward came forward to expose a second category of lies from Obama on the sequestration. Even if some in the liberal media turned on their former Watergate-famed icon, at least others called White House press secretary Jay Carney's hand over this.
It was now obvious that Obama was lying not just about the primary reasons for the gridlock over the sequester cuts but about who authored the idea in the first place. After Obama blatantly lied about this and sent out his minions to do the same, the administration had to grudgingly concede that it had been his idea. Even then, the administration tried to spin its way out of it by misrepresenting that Republicans had agreed to revenue hikes as part of the sequestration.
But amazingly, the spin doesn't seem to be getting much traction for Obama for a change. Perhaps it is because Obama went too far when, like a petulant child, he showed he was willing to hurt the nation to get his way on the sequestration and further damage Republicans.
He went way over the top, even for him, in his promises of gloom and doom concerning essential services he falsely claimed would be cut. Education Secretary Arne Duncan incorrectly claimed that schoolteachers were already being laid off, which even The Washington Post wouldn't let stand. Other liberal outlets came forward to contradict Obama's hysterical claim over pay cuts on Capitol Hill. Even "Saturday Night Live" lampooned Obama's absurd posturing on the sequester cuts.
Journalist Byron York reported that Obama now seems "resigned to the possibility that he cannot win the further tax increases he seeks, and that after enlisting his entire administration in a campaign to frighten Americans about sequestration, the cuts have become a reality that he has to acknowledge." Obama has now admitted that the cuts aren't going to be apocalyptic as he warned.
Obama has outdone himself with his administration's unilateral release of thousands of dangerous criminal illegal immigrants onto the streets of America in order to leverage his sequester arguments and then sending Carney out to grossly misrepresent the scope of this outrage.
I won't hold my breath for a wholesale transformation of the liberal media's attitude toward Obama, but I'm encouraged to see anything at all in that direction and that the political winds seem to be changing, even if slightly so far, against Obama.
David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His latest book, "The Great Destroyer," reached No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. Follow him on Twitter @davidlimbaugh and his website at www.davidlimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
