Barack Obama's Subversion of Democracy

Here's the banner headline at yesterday morning's PuffHo, "DOJ Calls Fox News Reporter James Rosen 'Co-Conspirator' In Leak Case; Journalists Outraged." And, "The DOJ's Targeting Of Fox News Reporter Risks Criminalizing Journalism."

Hmm, I thought, "Maybe some of the left-wing outfits are starting to take this seriously." Then I scrolled over to the Washington Post's big breaking story on Obama's DOJ targeting and noticed E.J. Dionne's pathetic little piece bemoaning the horrible --- HORRIBLE! --- collapse of democratic government in the West! See, "Political dysfunction spells trouble for democracies."

I was almost laughing, except people like Dionne still garner a lot of attention. So I got a kick out of James Taranto slamming the JournoList-ing idiots bemoaning the alleged "demise" of democratic government, "A Crisis of Authority." To be specific, it's a crisis of left-wing statist authority, which can only be propped up with a deepening circle of lies:

"After a week of scandal obsession during which the nation's capital and the media virtually ignored the problems most voters care about--jobs, incomes, growth, opportunity, education--it's worth asking if there is something especially flawed about our democracy," declares the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne.

He goes through a partisan litany of complaints--"a radicalization of conservative politics, over-the-top mistrust of President Obama on the right, high-tech gerrymandering in the House and a Senate snarled by non-constitutional super-majority requirements"--but makes no mention of the abuses of power by the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department. He does hint at Benghazi, in his concluding paragraph, but only to pooh-pooh it:

Since World War II, bouts of economic growth have allowed democracies to buy their way out of trouble. One can hope this will happen again--and soon. In the meantime, politicians might contemplate their obligations to stewardship of the democratic ideal. They could begin by pondering what an unemployed 28-year-old makes of a ruling elite that expends so much energy feuding over how bureaucrats rewrote a set of talking points.

But if the purpose of that rewriting was, as it appears to have been, to deceive voters and bolster the president's re-election prospects, then it was a subversion of democracy.

RTWT.

Plus, Glenn Greenwald also went to town on this, "Obama DOJ formally accuses journalist in leak case of committing crimes":

Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ - that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for "soliciting" the disclosure of classified information - is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.

More at that link.

There's a lot I disagree with, for example, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are cyber-terrorists, not journalists.  But as always, Greenwald's good for lighting a fire on the hypocritical JournoList circle jerks.