By Nile Gardiner
Thomas Hobbes wrote that the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish and short.” Today’s White House definitely isn’t poor, lavishly
feeding off the wealth of the American taxpayer, and the current
presidency certainly isn’t short, with nearly four more years to run.
But it is undeniably nasty and brutish, as veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has found after questioning President Obama’s narrative on the sequester issue.
Woodward, one of two reporters who broke the Watergate story that led
to Richard Nixon’s downfall (immortalised in the 1976 Oscar winner All The President’s Men), has revealed to CNN's Wolf Blitzer that the White House warned him that he would “regret” his recent remarks on the sequester, made in a Washington Post column. (Read the exchange of emails between White House economic adviser Gene Sperling and Woodward posted by Politico here.)
Woodward is hardly a conservative, and has been at the heart of the
liberal media establishment for decades. He is, however, not afraid of
challenging the status quo, as he did with his 2010 book Obama’s Wars.
Woodward is not alone. Lanny Davis, another liberal columnist and
former special counsel to Bill Clinton, who has penned several pieces
critical of Obama’s policies, has also spoken out against similar White House tactics.
The threats being dished out to Woodward, Davis and others are
extremely disturbing in a free society, and are a reflection of an
imperial presidency that acts with impunity and is highly intolerant of
dissent. The heavy-arm tactics that Obama’s team have deployed for years
against conservatives are now being increasingly implemented as
well against liberals questioning the president’s record.
Leading US political analyst Michael Barone predicted all this in a piece for National Review Online back in October 2008, when he wrote about “The Coming Obama Thugocracy.”
It is an article that is strikingly accurate in its predictions. Here’s
what Barone had to say before Obama even entered the White House:
“I
need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors,” Barack
Obama told a crowd in Elko, Nev. “I want you to talk to them whether they are
independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and
get in their face.” Actually, Obama supporters are doing a lot more than getting
into people’s faces. They seem determined to shut people up. …
Once
upon a time, liberals prided themselves, with considerable reason, as the
staunchest defenders of free speech. Union organizers in the 1930s and 1940s
made the case that they should have access to employees to speak freely to
them, and union leaders like George Meany and Walter Reuther were ardent
defenders of the First Amendment.
Today’s
liberals seem to be taking their marching orders from other quarters.
Specifically, from the college and university campuses where administrators,
armed with speech codes, have for years been disciplining and subjecting to
sensitivity training any students who dare to utter thoughts that liberals find
offensive. The campuses that used to pride themselves as zones of free
expression are now the least free part of our society.
Obama
supporters who found the campuses congenial and Obama himself, who has chosen
to live all his adult life in university communities, seem to find it entirely
natural to suppress speech that they don’t like and seem utterly oblivious to
claims that this violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. In this
campaign, we have seen the coming of the Obama thugocracy, suppressing free
speech, and we may see its flourishing in the four or eight years ahead.
Will American liberals now stand up to the Obama White House and
condemn its blatant attempts to suppress criticism and free speech? I
doubt it. The Washington Post has provided relatively little coverage of the story, despite the fact that one its own star writers has been targeted. The New York Times
is, unsurprisingly, completely silent (with the exception of a small
mention in a single blog) on the issue. Ironically, most of the
reporting of the White House’s attempts to intimidate liberal critics
has come from the conservative press, led by the Drudge Report,
which has propelled the story to national prominence. Both
conservatives and liberals should be rallying to the defence of free
speech and freedom of the press, holding the Obama presidency to
account. All Americans should be concerned by government attempts to
stifle press criticism in the land of the free, tactics which undermine
the very foundations of liberty.
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