Th emedia try and pretend that both parties are equally insane, and look like fools
Folks have been using the term "Obama Derangement Syndrome" to describe the bizarre ways people on the Right have reacted to his presidency. The imagined policies. The terrible fears. The incredible racism.
But now, in a quest to not admit the Republicans are taking policies just to spite Obama, many in the media are also pretending that Obama is this crazed bogeyman.
He's doing everything the wacky Centrists demand, and still they act like he isn't.
The Establishment’s Obama Derangement Syndrome | TPM Editors Blog
Others have done an excellent job explaining why so many pundits and news analysts are constitutionally unable to describe the impasse over sequestration as anything other than a bipartisan failure — while also revealing, perhaps unintentionally, that President Obama is advocating the very compromise they claim to believe is necessary.
But mark down Feb. 27, 2013, as the day this self-deception morphed into something more like the establishment’s very own Obama derangement syndrome.
Here’s Bob Woodward — again! — on MSNBC Wednsday morning arguing that Obama’s decision not seize imperial powers but instead to follow the letter of the sequestration law amounts to a “kind of madness.”
“Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying ‘Oh, by the way, I can’t do this because of some budget document?’”
The obscure type of budget document Woodward’s referring to is called a duly enacted law — passed by Congress, signed by the President — and the only ways around it are for Congress to change it (Obama’s trip to Virginia on Tuesday was all about pushing Congress to do that) or for Obama to break it. Sequestration is bad policy, but not remotely unconstitutional, and if Obama decided to ignore it and just spend money as if the law didn’t exist the howls of outrage we’d hear from Woodward and others would be entirely justified.
David Ignatius doesn’t go quite as far as calling Obama’s decision to obey the law insane, but his Wednesday Washington Post column typifies the “Obama’s right on the merits, but this is somehow all his fault too” genre. In an overstretched metaphor he compares the U.S. political system to a drunk driver and Obama to a sober passenger who’s too meek to comandeer the wheel.
“I’m no fan of the way President Obama has handled the fiscal crisis,” Ignatius declares. “As I’ve written often, he needs to provide the presidential leadership that guides Congress and the country toward fiscal stability. In my analogy, he should take the steering wheel firmly in hand and drive the car toward the destination where most maps show we need to be heading: namely, a balanced program of cuts in Social Security and Medicare and modest increases in revenue.”
