The Issue: President Obama’s relationship with the press as the White House is rocked by crises.
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“O’s Scandals Take Nation By Storm” by Michael Goodwin (May 15) was excellent.
President Obama’s response to scandals involving the IRS, Benghazi, The Associated Press and ObamaCare seems to be the same.
Obama denies any first-hand knowledge of what was being done.
Just what has the president been doing except hiding from everything in Washington?
Obama is using the Sgt. Schultz defense from “Hogan’s Heroes”: “I know nothing!”
Tom Lienhard
Westfield, NJ
Isn’t this a lovely irony?
The Obama administration, which after the raid on Osama bin Laden was a veritable fountain of leaked information, now suddenly hates leaks — so much so that it has turned on one of its biggest allies, the AP.
Or is it that Obama doesn’t hate leaks, per se, but leaks done by other people — ones he can’t spin in advance?
Bob Hunt
Hillsborough, NJ
What The Associated Press, a big supporter of Obama, has learned, is a famous quote by Winston Churchill: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile — hoping it will eat him last.” Guess they weren’t last.
Al DiLascia
Chicopee, Mass.
Despite AP Chairman Dean Singleton’s efforts to turn the AP into a propaganda machine to re-elect Obama in 2012, it’s only a year later and AP CEO Gary Pruitt is crying the blues about Obama’s Justice Department seizing two months of the news agency’s telephone records.
Why hasn’t the media asked Singleton to comment about his choice of president?
Does anyone trust Obama to get to the bottom of the IRS crackdown on organizations that had the audacity to believe in the US Constitution?
I guess Obama and the AP will get to the bottom of that as soon as they get to the bottom of Fast and Furious and Benghazi.
Joseph DuPont
Towanda, Pa.
The Obama cheerleaders at the AP had their phone records subpoenaed by the people they enabled to cover up Fast and Furious, Libya, etc. I wonder what it will cost to have those “Obama for President” tattoos removed.
John Lacey
Southold
Now that the AP has had its precious First Amendment rights trampled on by the Justice Department’s seizing their office and home phone records, maybe the media will have some empathy for the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners being attacked.
It was OK when it was just gun owners’ rights; the media didn’t care.
Now, when it’s their rights, they howl like stuck pigs and wrap themselves in the Constitution.
Welcome to the club, fellas. It’s not so funny now, is it? Maybe now the media will pay more attention to the corruption and lawlessness of this administration.
David Podesta
Brooklyn
Obama is no longer our fearless leader but Big Brother. In George Orwell’s novel, “1984,” citizens of Oceania are monitored by cameras, fed fabricated news stories by the government, forced to worship a mythical government leader called Big Brother and are indoctrinated to believe nonsense statements.
The word Orwellian is sometimes used to describe a particularly anti-libertarian government policy, but it is also sometimes used to describe the peculiar, nonsensical thought process behind Oceania’s social structure — a thought process in which ideas that are obviously self-contradictory are accepted as true based on the fact that an authority figure is asserting them.
Ignatius Giorgio
Brooklyn
We have Benghazi, the IRS and the AP phone subpoena all finally revealing the depths of the president’s commitment to his Chicago ways.
Should we be concerned that some “wag-the-dog” distraction is heading our way? Nothing like a good crisis to keep you otherwise occupied. Maybe the media will invent one for him.
Steven Lavelle
Bayside