He’s Baa-ack…

from National Review

There may be some prece­dent for a mod­ern White House’s attempt­ing to use the machin­ery of the pres­i­dency to destroy a critic in this fash­ion, but Barack Obama did not run as the Sec­ond Com­ing of Richard Nixon.

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Nixon’s Plumbers went after infor­ma­tion and planted rumors about peo­ple using dis­hon­est and ille­gal means.  In a bliz­zard of irony that would daz­zle the writer O’Henry the Obama machine went after a real plumber,  Joe Wurzel­bacher,  in an effort to, er, plumb (sorry) the depths of Wurzelbacher’s pri­vate life, just like Nixon’s Plumbers invaded the offices of Daniel Ells­berg’s psy­chi­a­trist try­ing to get some dirt on him.

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The White House is going after Rush Lim­baugh, a pri­vate cit­i­zen, because of what he says.  This must not happen.

Back in the day there was an effort afoot to get pub­lic school teach­ers to sign loy­alty oaths.  The effort against this was led by the ACLU and I joined them because of that effort (I unjoined when they started send­ing oper­a­tives to high school foot­ball games to see if the place kicker crossed him­self before attempt­ing a field goal, but that’s another story).  The whole thing was not-so-subtle intim­i­da­tion to force peo­ple to get their minds, or at least their words, right.

I don’t see a lot of dif­fer­ence between those loy­alty oaths and Obama’s Rat-Out-Your-Neighbor web site.

Do you?

While there have been some humor­ous moments to this episode of Get Lim­baugh, like Chris Matthews talk­ing about killing Lim­baugh by using some kind of spe­cial spy-assassination device (yeah-right!  Like Matthews could prop­erly oper­ate a Cracker jack prize), or CNN and MSNBC at times being described as “News Orga­ni­za­tions,” but the under­ly­ing issue is a seri­ous one.

And besides… Barack.  James.  Paul.   And all the rest of the gang.   Isn’t there some­body else?  Some­body who maybe isn’t an Amer­i­can behav­ing in a con­sti­tu­tion­ally pro­tected man­ner that you might tar­get your arrows at?

Living, Political Maneuvers Chris Matthews, CNN, enemies list, Joe Wurzelbacher, MSNBC, Plumbers, Richard Nixon, Rush Limbaugh, Second Coming, White House