As happens on the web on Fridays, posts begin to turn towards just how the weekend’s television news ‘magazines’ and round-tables will choose to digest the news, and how they will frame it, in concert with the national Sunday papers. The left doesn’t need JournoList, though that was a convenience while it lasted, to know how to spin the week’s news in favor of libs and progressives, because it’s the zeitgeist: it’s in the air that they breathe and the cues that they receive from the lips of booked surrogates.
Booked surrogates, you ask? What are they? Well, prior to this week, I wouldn’t have been able to answer that question, either, but the Hilary Rosen stay-at-home-moms debacle has cracked the door open to show Axelrod and the White House with their pants down and peanut butter everywhere. Michelle Malkin via Jim Geraghty:
1/26/10 Rosen visited Dagoberta Vega, White House broadcasting media official and director of surrogate booking.
In all, a Hilary Rosen has visited the White House 35 times, sometimes to meet with Obama, and sometimes to meet with top advisers in the White House. But after she outrageously claimed that MS-suffering, cancer-surviving mom of five Ann Romney had never worked a day in her life, Axelrod, Messina, Wasserman-Schultz, eventually even Obama and Mo-bama all denounced the statement. Most interesting was Axelrod’s appearance with John King at CNN:
John King started asking Axelrod uncomfortable questions about Rosen, who is in public relations and communications with former White House communications director and Mao fan Anita Dunn, and Axelrod pointed out to King that it would be improper for a news organization such as CNN’s to have as a paid regular guest anyone who had the sort of ties to the White House that King seemed to be imputing. It was really a very revelatory moment, because it demonstrated the First Rule of Lefty Media Collusion while at the same time relaying a not-very-veiled Chicago thug-style threat to King and his network. I have to say that I’ve never seen anything quite like it before. What Axelrod is saying, in effect, is that the White House and CNN are in a suicide pact, and that King had better not forget it. Axelrod’s veiled threat was so off the charts that King wasn’t able immediately to absorb it.
Da Techguy is one among many who are noting the absolute desperation of the White House to distance itself from what Rosen said, but he puts it better than they do:
The White House and the left is scared, VERY SCARED. Ann Althouse nails it:
It’s the turning point in the presidential race… strangely, and yet not surprisingly. The trajectory changes right here. Today.
then puts it in perspective:
As we’d talked about earlier: The Democrats don’t really believe anything. They’re just working on various voting blocs. They started this “war on women” theme, but it was a means to an end. Women were out there, so numerous, so richly exploitable. The campaign made its move. And then… the slip.
And as for the president’s line about families being off-limits, Glenn Reynolds puts it well:
Tell it to the people who covered Sarah Palin, some of whom have been invited to dinner with Obama.
On and this is going to be all over the Sunday shows this weekend INCLUDING Meet the Press.
They should be afraid. This White House’s trouble with time-lines gets worse and worse as their fables get bigger and bigger, but there’s now a corps of citizen journalists who can hold their feet to the fire, not just by means of O’Keefe-style stings, but also with respect to the video and audio archiving so effectively pioneered by Naked Emperor. As John Nolte noted at Breitbart, one sometimes doesn’t have to dig very far, and it turns out that Obama personally floated the ‘Romneys are so wealthy that they’re out of touch with struggling Americans whereas he and Michelle’ meme:
When asked about the Hilary King entries from the White House visitors logs, Jay Carney responded with the outrageous fiction that he personally knows 3 Hilary Rosens (all of that spelling, no doubt), and that any old Hilary Rosen might have visited for all he knows. In truth, I must know a half dozen people named Malik Zulu Shabazz.
I have much more to say about this, but I’m going to post now and update later.
UPDATE: Many thanks to Larwyn’s Linx and Captain Krunch at Free Republic for the links.
Partial follow-up here, but go read Joy’s excellent rumination on the Titanic, instead.
REUPDATE: Thanks to AR15, as well.
High Kommissar on April 13, 2012 at 11:48 am said:
Its a good thing Opie had all those dance lessons on how to spin on his long toes…from his girlfriend Rahm Emmanuel… because he spins 360 degrees constantly trying to figure out how to get outta the frying pan he jumps into constantly, and miss the fire that will consume him and his legacy..
Francis W. Porretto on April 13, 2012 at 12:15 pm said:
It’s critical to remember that the Democrats’ political strategy remains divide to conquer. The women’s vote, like the Negro vote, has been theirs for a long time, and they see increasing their percentage of the women’s vote as critical to retaining the White House. Therefore, we can expect the Democrats to mount a furious rearguard action, followed by a counterattack, in the immediate future. They must keep women voting as a bloc, and energized by fallacies such as Republicans’ completely fictitious “war on women.”
The election really could turn on the Rosen gaffe and how well the two sides handle the aftermath.
King Shamus on April 14, 2012 at 10:07 am said:
“This White House’s trouble with time-lines gets worse and worse as their fables get bigger and bigger, but there’s now a corps of citizen journalists who can hold their feet to the fire, not just by means of O’Keefe-style stings, but also with respect to the video and audio archiving…”
If you’re a conservative, its easy to get depressed at the state of the State.
But the truth is the Left’s ideology bubble is cracking.
All they have is the dinosaur media, which is slowly crapping the bedsheets.
Once their ideas and personalities have to stand without a big media crutch to hold them up, all bets are off.
bystander on April 15, 2012 at 12:08 am said:
Dan, that “Hilary King” at the end looks like a mix-up.
soraya on April 15, 2012 at 1:37 am said:
Evilness reeks from the face of this vampire-looking axel-thug. That the liberals don’t see it, is truly beyond comprehension and proves how utterly their hearts and brains have been invaded by these body-snatchers.