Despite the President’s bold initial words, that’s what his administration is turning out to be. It shouldn’t be a surprise, given the assault on the First Amendment conducted by his campaign in an effort to silence uncomfortable questions before the candidate had to face them; it shouldn’t startle us at all that his response to being challenged by a media organization would be to try to shut that organization down. As Charles Krauthammer writes,
there’s a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they’re engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
There’s nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.
Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand “the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties.” They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other—and an otherwise imperious government.
The problem is, we have an amazingly thin-skinned administration, one that can’t seem to take criticism, or even significant differences of opinion, with any sort of grace; which is all of a piece, I think, with the fact that they also can’t seem to take a joke. As such, they don’t roll with the tough questions, they don’t rise to the challenge of being argued with, and they don’t laugh at themselves—or even just let it pass when someone else does. Instead, whenever anyone messes with them, their collective instinct is to get out the biggest hammer they can find and try to smash them.
(Well, whenever any of their American opponents messes with them, anyway . . . if it’s a foreign country like Iran or China or Russia, their instinct is rather different, to say the least.)
yeah, wow, even you must have been surprised when they tried to get the other networks to try and exclude Foxnews. Kudos to our still free press for saying "No way!"
To me, that was the most frightening thing I have seen politically in my lifetime.
That was a remarkable thing, and not in a good way. I suppose it shows they've learned the lesson of the Bush 43 administration (namely, don't surrender to the press), but there's a serious overcorrection going on here.
It's almost like being in a bad dream. You're looking around and feeling like everything is slow motion and not believing it's really happening. "This isn't the way it's supposed to be."
I think it's a very scary thing too.