What did you do during the war?

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Remember this from back in October 2009?:

Jake Tapper of ABC asked White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs this question:

It hasn’t escaped our notice that in the last few weeks the White House has decided to declare war on one of our sister organizations saying it’s not a news organization and tell the rest of the news media to not treat them like a news organization. Can you explain why it’s appropriate for the White House to say one of them is not a news organization and the rest of the media should not treat them like one?

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Jake Tapper today:

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The conservative government watchdog group Judicial Watch, using the Freedom of Information Act, has obtained a series of emails back and forth between White House officials and Treasury Department officials regarding the original exclusion of Fox News from an October 22, 2009 series of round-robin interviews with TARP Special Master Kenneth Feinberg.

Fox News’ Major Garrett ultimately interviewed Feinberg that day because the bureau chiefs of the four other networks – ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC – agreed to boycott the interviews, which were being coordinated through the cooperative “pool” arrangements, unless Fox News, part of the pool, was included.

At the time, Treasury officials claimed that there was no “plot” to exclude Fox News. In a January 2010 New Yorker magazine story, then-press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporter Ken Auletta: “This started over at Treasury, and when it got to the White House it was fixed.”

That does not seem to be an accurate claim, given the paper trail. Indeed, it seems that Treasury Department officials wanted to include Fox News and the White House didn’t want the cable outlet included.

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The White House launched a “war” against FOX News and then lied about it. Anyone who has been paying attention should not be shocked by the “war” or the lying. Obama has told far worse lies and launched real wars so this is all small potatoes in the scheme of things. The war on FOX was a flop anyway.

Many people believe that Obama retaliated against FOX because he is thin skinned and petty. That is certainly true, but only partially. Even if Obama had skin like a rhino and a forgiving nature his administration would still be doing everything possible to manipulate and control the press.

The reason for that is because the clothes have no emperor. Obama is and always was an empty suit. Unlike Bill or Hillary Clinton who can hold impromptu press conferences and speak intelligently on a wide variety of subjects, in order to maintain what is left of the illusion of competence Obama has to resort to reading speeches and holding Potemkin press conferences where he faces nothing but softballs.

The media were complicit in creating the illusion that got Obama elected. If they quit cooperating he’s in trouble. If they give him even ten percent of the scrutiny they give to Sarah Palin he’s finished.

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Dudebro dupes

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Riverdaughter has a pretty good post up that starts with a review of a blogtalkradio broadcast of Virtually Speaking with Susie Madrak and Matt Stoller:

But anyway, the good stuff ended right about there. Matt says he was conflicted in 2008 but all I remember from Matt Stoller at that time was that he resembled so many of the people who were *trying* (not too hard) to be neutral but really, really, REALLY wanted Obama to win like the voice over narrator of the anti-Nader Anonymous video. I suspect that Obama totally made Matt cry sometimes. Then Matt goes on to say the State Department is messed up, which reminds me of all of the “Hillaryland at the State Department” articles we see in the Washington Post and New York Times whenever the electorate starts having buyer’s remorse over Obama. Then he complained that she didn’t apologize over her Iraq War Vote. Yes, Matt, Hillary Clinton, the senator from fricking New York was the primary reason the Iraq War Resolution passed even though she specifically strongly urged Bush to let the UN weapons inspectors do their jobs and only go to war as a last resort. Then there was a gratuitous slap from Susie about PUMA, which I don’t think either of them really understood. While there were plenty of PUMAs who were all about Hillary and plenty of the rest of us who hoped desperately that the party would come to its senses before the convention, PUMA was actually a movement that came to life after 18,000,000 votes were trashed at the RBC meeting in May 2008.

Then RD moves on to discuss the “Clever Young Men of the Blogosphere” aka “Dudebro Nation.”

I wonder if these young, hipster Dudebros will ever figure out the extent to which they were manipulated into supporting Obama. Obama received a gazillion dollars from Wall Street and other special interests and that money was well spent on a marketing campaign that made Obama the “must-have” accessory for twenty and thirty-somethings.

These are people who choose their clothing, cars, entertainments, homes, hairstyles, and the food they eat based on what is fashionable and trendy.

These guys have been groomed to be consumers their whole lives, and Obama hired experts at mass manipulation who knew exactly what buttons to push. Young people in particular are susceptible to these techniques, but nobody is completely immune.

Obama’s handlers made winning over the netroots a key part of their strategy. They knew the LSM was in the bag for Obama because his big money backers (i.e his true constituency”)own the media.

But Left Blogistan had proven during the reign of George the Lesser that they were capable of acting as an alternate medium for disseminating news and information.

The Obama campaign hired some experts at crowd psychology and manipulation:

Crowd manipulation is the intentional use of techniques based on the principles of crowd psychology to engage, control, or influence the desires of a crowd in order to direct its behavior toward a specific action. This practice is common to politics and business and can facilitate the approval or disapproval or indifference to a person, policy, or product.

So the first thing they did was come up with a psychological profile of lefty bloggers. Bloggers tend to be male, white, tech-savvy, and above average in education and income. They’ve playing video games and using computers since before they were potty-trained.

But they aren’t nearly as smart and sophisticated as they think they are. Obama’s manipulators crafted an image of Obama as some political messiah who was going to change the world. Then they hijacked the cherished ideal of the blogosphere as a grassroots organizing tool and let the bloggers convince themselves they were part of a historic movement.

In reality it was all astroturf and everything including the font on campaign signs was tightly controlled from on high. Remember the 1984 and Obama Girl clips that went viral?

Supposedly they were created by Obama supporters acting completely independent of the Obama campaign. Take a look at them (they are posted at the top and bottom of this post.) They’re not your typical homemade YouTube video of some guy with a minicam recording his drunk buddies doing something stupid.

The videos were made by professionals. The guys who made Obama girl not only took the time and effort to produce it but they even paid Amber Lee Ettinger $1000 to perform in it. Who spends that much money just to post a video on YouTube?

We all remember the Great Purge of 2008 when the supporters of Hillary Clinton were literally driven away from blogs they had frequented for years. That was no accident or coincidence, it was a deliberate strategy. The manipulators needed a “them” and we were it.

How good were the manipulators? They not only achieved their goals but to this day the Dudebros don’t realize they were manipulated. Unfortunately for the nation the Obama campaign wasn’t selling Pet Rocks or Hula Hoops.

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