Presidential Incompetence -- The Least of Our Worries

by: david bozeman | published: 06 23, 2010

One of the casualties of the Gulf oil spill is truth -- other policies and proposals of the Obama Administration have garnered little or no coverage in the last two months. Charges of Democratic Party manipulation in the Pennsylvania primary will not likely merit a hearing in the court of public opinion, much less a formal investigation.

Recently, the Federal Trade Commission released a study of the American media, reportedly initiated by President Obama last year, and the findings should have raised the ire of everyone on the left who professed outrage at the Bush Administration's so-called assaults on the Constitution after 9/11. Predictably, we have heard nary a peep.

Apparently, the FTC is concerned with the decline of print journalism and the rise of the Internet: "History . . . shows that the readers of the news have never paid anywhere close to the full cost of providing the news. Rather, journalism has been subsidized to a large extent by, for example, the federal government, political parties or advertising." The study opines that "experimentation may not produce a robust and sustainable business model for commercial journalism."

If anything, the American public feels bombarded with TOO MUCH information to sift through on any given day -- and this is really what the FTC under Obama seeks to remedy. Proposals include the creation of a journalism division of Americorps, allowing taxpayers to allocate government funds to nonprofit media outlets of their choice, grants to universities to conduct investigative journalism, postal subsidies for newspapers and periodicals, and, since no list of 'solutions' is complete without a tax increase, a 5% charge on small electronics to pay for the public funding.

Imagine the liberal outcry if a Bush-commissioned study had advanced similar proposals to fill empty church pews. The hazards of blurring the line between a free press and the state are manifestly obvious, with objectivity among the first casualties. But it is not enough that the mainstream media is already a de facto propaganda wing of the Democratic Party, this administration is out to remake America in its own image, and that demands uniformity of thought.

Whether this study, like the Fairness Doctrine and Internet Regulation, gains traction in Congress is uncertain, particularly with the Gulf situation and the mid-terms just ahead. Nonetheless, freedom demands constant vigilance. A mere year and a half under Czar Obama has seen the near federalization of the automobile industry, incestuous links with Wall Street and the health care debacle. Now, the oil industry, responsible for fueling our homes and vehicles, will almost surely face tighter scrutiny, with future drilling halted, at least temporarily.

Pundits frequently draw parallels between now and Bush/Katrina, but side-by-side comparisons miss the larger point: Bush, for all his faults, never sought to fundamentally transform America's identity, he never butted heads as often as Obama with America's defining characteristics of individual initiative, free enterprise and limited government. Obama is as notorious by what he doesn't say as by what he does say. How often does he extol the notions of freedom and American exceptionalism? The crisis in current leadership is not merely incompetence but hubris, not just inaction but ideology. Habledash.com deftly notes that the word 'enough' does not exist in the liberal dictionary. How far will Obama and his minions go? As far as we let them.

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