Obama’s pattern of intolerance toward dissent
By: Timothy P. Carney
August 8, 2009
Dissent, it turns out, is no longer patriotic. President Barack Obama’s White House and his Democratic National Committee have unleashed an all-out assault on what they call “angry,” “manufactured” and “lobbyist-funded” lies about health care reform. Look closely and you realize that’s how they classify all dissent.
Obama, when speaking at Notre Dame University last spring amid anti-abortion protests, said, “When we open up our hearts and our minds to those who may not think precisely like we do or believe precisely what we believe, that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.”
But his record of dealing with actual dissent paints a different picture, one that suggests he has so much faith in his own good intentions and clever plans — and so little skepticism about the power of government to do good — that he sees all disagreement with his policies as condemnable.
“David Freddoso has made a career off dishonest, extreme hatemongering,” Obama’s presidential campaign wrote about my friend and now Examiner colleague David Freddoso last September in an effort to get a radio host to drop him.
The campaign e-mail called Freddoso a “card-carrying member of the right-wing smear machine” and said his anti-Obama book (for which I was the editor) contained “lies and smears about Barack Obama.”
The one “lie” the campaign claimed to find in the book turned out to be completely correct — that Obama “voted to raise your [taxes] if your taxable income is greater than $32,500 a year.” The Factcheck.org page the campaign cited actually proved Freddoso correct. The other “lies” they attacked were differences of interpretation.
The personal attack on Freddoso, filled with slurs and devoid of factual critiques, illuminates Obama’s current crusade against the “mobs,” “fishy e-mails” and “manufactured” dissent against his plan for massive regulations, subsidies and new government programs in the health care industry.
The White House does have a point here: Some of the protests these days are out of line. Shouting down Congress members at town halls is not practicing democracy, it’s bullying. Claiming, contrary to all evidence, that Obama is not an American citizen is not debate, but close-minded inanity — inanity possibly stemming from racism.
But Obama, through his White House, his campaign and his DNC, has lumped all dissenters in with the shouters and the birthers. There’s a political gain to this tactic, to be sure, but it certainly doesn’t reflect the open-mindedness and fairness Obama was supposed to bring.
Linda Douglass, communications director for Obama’s Office of Health Reform, said her job includes collecting “disinformation” about health care, and the White House asked Americans, “If you get an e-mail or see something on the Web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.”
What counts as “fishy”? Is it only the e-mails falsely claiming “reform” mandates euthanasia, or is Obama also counting as “disinformation” the videos displaying his past advocacy of a single-payer plan and arguments that the plan amounts to taxpayer funding of abortions?
Obama’s attack on Matt Drudge for posting those videos, the White House’s broad dismissal of town-hall protests as “mobs” of “manufactured” dissent and his DNC’s intentional conflation of health care protesters with birthers suggests that anything rejecting the White House’s conclusions on health care counts as “fishy,” or worse, and must be reported to authorities.
Obama’s White House and his DNC have repeatedly said “special interests” oppose reform because they “profit from the status quo.” (Obama doesn’t name anyone, because, awkwardly, the drugmakers and health insurers are lobbying for “reform” and buying television ads supporting the general idea.)
But has Obama ever acknowledged that most of the people who oppose his proposed reform do so because they believe it economically harmful, wasteful, unconstitutional, immoral or damaging to families?
The DNC suggests that all town-hall dissidents are “funded by K Street lobbyists.” This is an odd line of attack coming from the DNC, considering the DNC and its House and Senate campaign committees have already brought in more than $1 million from lobbyists and $629,000 from the drug industry.
One could fairly call Obama’s DNC a special-interest group funded by K Street lobbyists advancing policies for political gain that profit drugmakers and insurers — but that might be deemed “fishy.”
Timothy P. Carney is The Washington Examiner’s lobbying editor.
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