Newsbusters (via Hot Air) has the details. Short version: the realization that our current President is actually a pretty bad communicator of what I will charitably call his faction’s “ideas” is starting to sink in among our Beltway would-be overlords. Particularly among the circadian media. It then follows that, should a member of said media happen to want to get President Obama re-elected, it would be necessary to do some of the heavy lifting him- or herself. Alas, there isn’t a block and tackle in existence that can lift Obama’s domestic policy out of the Swamp of Fail, so if you’re a self-appointed agitprop specialist for this administration you’re left with talking up the President’s foreign policy, which at least has the virtue of not having anything to do with Obamacare.
But, wait! How can any of these people talk up Obama’s foreign policy ‘successes’ without also talking up George W Bush’s, given that the former is pretty much (badly) imitating the latter? That’s a silly question: they open up their mouths and start talking. You don’t think that they really meant all that old talk about how awful Bush’s foreign policy was, do you? No, that was just pap for the room-temperature IQ Left – pap designed to get the media’s Democratic Beltway buddies some sweet, sweet House and Senate chairmanships. But now things are serious. Just ask Tom Friedman.
THOMAS FRIEDMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: I’d give Obama high marks for fulfilling Bush’s foreign policy. I think he’s been very good at executing Bush’s foreign policy, particularly the war on terrorism. Been very focused. He’s I think brought power to bear in a very smart way. He’s gotten the people he needed getting. In terms of his own foreign policy, I’d agree with Mort. I think it’s TK. I think the issues that he’s taking on himself whether it was Arab-Israel diplomacy, or building a different relationship with China, still to be determined. I think the key thing here is leverage.
JOHN MCLAUGHLIN, HOST: You don’t think the fact that he is carrying forward the Bush-Cheney policy that that diminishes what Obama is doing?
FRIEDMAN: Oh, no.
This being the same Friedman who said that the Bush administration got its Russia policy “backwards” and called for Obama not to abandon his plan for a publicly-announced, time-table-based “phased withdrawal” – which, by the way, is Beltway-speak for bailing from the war*, and not equivalent to “as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” Because Tom Friedman does not quite understand – to be fair, many people over sixty-five have this problem, including huge swathes of our political/media class – that it’s very, very easy these days to look things up. Including the inconvenient ramblings of several years back.
Still, got to love the brazen way that these folks just press on, huh? – Harsh on the goofballs that actually bought into that narrative about how George Bush was some sort of Doofustopheles, of course; then again, if I don’t spend much time worrying about what happens to my can of Coke after I’ve tossed the empty into the recycling bin I suppose that I can’t really expect the Democratic party to care overmuch about the tender feelings of the antiwar Left. It’s pretty much the same situation there, after all.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*That link also refers to Obama’s campaign sound byte about how he’d satisfy America’s need for true energy security. I would be offended more at the way that this did not and will not happen if I had for a moment ever been stupid enough to believe such a transparently pandering lie.