Journolist Ring Wraiths

In response to The Fastball Special:

I don’t read comic books, but being a huge LOTR fan, I am partial to Victor Davis Hanson’s analogy of today’s Journolistas as J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ring Wraiths, “petty
lords who wanted a few shiny golden Obama rings — only to end up as
shrunken slaves to the One.”

In the same way that the operatives of the Nixon White House once
channeled the character of Richard Nixon, so too the Obama
administration reflects the manner in which Barack Obama has always
campaigned and viewed politics. His 2004 Senate run and two presidential
campaigns all shared the same modus operandi of unleashing surrogates
to tar opponents, bully critics, romance the mainstream media, and
caricature the shrinking number of journalistic kulaks — all while
deploring the politics of personal destruction.

The Woodward fiasco is different only in that a few liberals now feel
that, given that Obama need not face election again, they should be
allowed to salvage some journalistic integrity by mild cross-examination
and pathetic eleventh-hour confessions of past White House pressure.
Or, in the words of journalist Mark Halperin, writing of the Woodward
affair, “It’s a little embarrassing none of the rest of us was as
aggressive as he was.” Four years ago it was a little embarrassing; now
it is only predictable.

Cannot Obama be somewhat magnanimous and give our modern-day Nazgûl a
few face-saving measures after they have sold their souls on so many
occasions when it counted? Of course not; emaciated wraiths remain
wraiths. Dissent is equated with a sort of disloyalty among the
supposedly kindred minds of fellow culture warriors. By questioning
motives, they have earned justifiable rebuke — or worse.

You see, in the worldview of Barack Obama, he has only so much time to
protect the helpless and, for the first time in our history, transform
us into a fair and just America — a monumental task that can brook no
reactionary dissent, especially among those who certainly should know
better and had so long ago pledged their fealty.

Read the whole thing as Hanson takes us down (bad) Memory Lane to make the case that this administration has never had a healthy relationship with the media.