WOODWARD IS NOW ON THE OBAMA ENEMIES LIST

Legendary Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward called a senior White House official last week to tell him about an article he had written that was set to appear in last Friday's Post. In the article Woodward was going to call into question - again - Obama's account of how sequestration came about. 

The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. "The sequester is not something that I've proposed," Obama said. "It is something that Congress has proposed."

The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.
 
"There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger," Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It "was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure."

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book "The Price of Politics" shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

... A majority of Republicans did vote for the Budget Control Act that summer, which included the sequester. Key Republican staffers said they didn’t even initially know what a sequester was — because the concept stemmed from the budget wars of the 1980s, when they were not in government.

At the Feb. 13 Senate Finance Committee hearing on Lew's nomination to become Treasury secretary, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) asked Lew about the account in my book:

"Woodward credits you with originating the plan for sequestration. Was he right or wrong?" 

"It’s a little more complicated than that," Lew responded, "and even in his account, it was a little more complicated than that. We were in a negotiation where the failure would have meant the default of the government of the United States."
 
"Did you make the suggestion?" Burr asked.
 
"Well, what I did was said that with all other options closed, we needed to look for an option where we could agree on how to resolve our differences. And we went back to the 1984 plan that Senator [Phil] Gramm and Senator [Warren] Rudman worked on and said that that would be a basis for having a consequence that would be so unacceptable to everyone that we would be able to get action."

In other words, yes.

As Woodward later told Politico, the aide "yelled at me for about a half hour."

 


In addition to the revelation that a White House staffer threatened Woodward, the Politico article offers this mild but nevertheless significant criticism of Obama:

The Woodward reporting has caused the White House spin machine to sputter at a crucial time. The president was running around the country, campaign-style, warning that Republicans were at fault for the massive cuts set to hit Friday. What Obama never says: it was his own staff that proposed sequestration, and the tax hikes he now proposes – aimed at replacing half of the cuts — were never part of that very specific plan. [Obama moved the goalposts.]

The White House instead has, with great success, fudged the facts. The administration has convinced a majority of the country that Republicans are more to blame by emphasizing that Republicans voted for the plan. Which they did — after Obama conceived it.

In addition to his appearance on Wednesday's edition of Morning Joe, Woodward was also a guest of CNN's Wolf Blitzer:

WOLF BLITZER, CNN: You're used to this kind of stuff, but share with our viewers what's going on between you and the White House.

BOB WOODWARD: Well, they're not happy at all and some people kind of, you know, said, look, 'we don't see eye to eye on this.' They never really said, though, afterwards, they've said that this is factually wrong, and they -- and it was said to me in an e-mail by a top --

BLITZER: What was said?

WOODWARD: It was said very clearly, you will regret doing this.

BLITZER: Who sent that e-mail to you?

WOODWARD: Well, I'm not going to say.

BLITZER: Was it a senior person at the White House?

WOODWARD: A very senior person. And just as a matter -- I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, 'you're going to regret doing something that you believe in, and even though we don't look at it that way, you do look at it that way.' I think if Barack Obama knew that was part of the communication's strategy, let's hope it's not a strategy, that it's a tactic that somebody's employed, and said, 'Look, we don't go around trying to say to reporters, if you, in an honest way, present something we don't like, that, you know, you're going to regret this.' It's Mickey Mouse.

Woodward has been a hero to liberals for nearly 40 years since he and fellow WaPo legend Carl Bernstein helped take down the Nixon administration during the Watergate scandal.  But even Woodward's icon status is not enough to protect him from the savagery of the Obama Media Group, which has dutifully leaped to Obama's defense and targeted Woodward for treatment normally reserved for Republicans.

The reason for the mockery by the JournoList crowd is that Woodward is ruining the Obama strategy of demonizing the Republicans.  Obama wants all of the blame for sequestration to fall on the House GOP.  Having been taken by surprise that John Boehner and the House GOP have finally chosen to stand and fight rather than cave yet again to Obama, the media have been forced to run interference for Dear Leader in an unexpected way.  

While Obama has been pointing fingers at Republicans, they have been pointing out again and again that sequestration was originally proposed by Team Obama.  Woodward's book and subsequent articles and TV appearances provide the proof that the Republicans are correct.  And Woodward's liberal street cred is so unassailable that when he says the sequester was Obama's idea, people take it very seriously.

On Tuesday of last week, Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast admitted that sequester was Obama's plan but still managed to blame Republicans for it.

So fine, the White House proposed it. It did so only after months of Republicans publicly demanding huge spending cuts and refusing to consider any revenues and acting as if they were prepared to send the nation into default over spending. In other words, this was the administration's idea in much the way that it's a parent's "idea" to pay ransom to a person who has taken his child hostage. There was a gun to the White House's head, which was the possibility of the country going into default.

On Thursday, Chuck Todd of NBC echoed that sentiment:

CHUCK TODD: So, Republicans, they spent the day yesterday passing around this video of a Montana Democratic senator, Max Baucus, by the way who's up for reelection in 2014, who was saying this about the sequester.

SEN MAX BAUCUS (D-Montana): The President is a part of this, the sequester. The White House recommended it, frankly, back in August of 2011. And, so, now we're feeling the effects of it.

CHUCK TODD: Of all the dumb things Washington does, this "who started it" argument has proven to be one of the dumber ones, especially since we're so close to the actual cuts going into place.

It's easy to see how the sleight-of-hand works.  In his last statement Todd complains about how dumb it is for the politicians to argue over "who started it."  He says it as if he thinks maybe both sides are to blame. In reality, the context makes it clear that he thinks it's really only the Republicans who are dumb.  But undoubtedly if asked, Todd would claim that he wasn't taking sides.

The very next day, Todd provided this little soundbite:

Alright, the President has been using his outside game to sell his position on sequester, talking to local TV affiliates, and there's radio shows, surrounding himself with first responders. Meanwhile Republicans have been playing, well, an inside game, the inside the Beltway game, trying to build support for their position against the cuts and begging the media to say it's Obama that started the sequester, not them.

Woodward's article was published on Friday.  He appeared on TV over the weekend.  And this week suddenly he's a target.  Obama campaign adviser David Plouffe has insinuated that Woodward is a has-been.

Breitbart has a round-up of the various comments made by Obama's apologists about Woodward:

It began with Politico itself, which downplayed the entire incident, even as it acknowledged that Woodward's "play-by-play is basically spot on" with regard to reporting the sequestration. "White House officials are certainly within their rights to yell at any journalist, including Bob Woodward," said official Obama buddies Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei. Allen and VandeHei merely suggested that the battle with Woodward was "a major distraction at a pivotal moment for the president." They added, "Watching and now having interviewed Woodward, it is easy to see why White House officials get worked about him." Poor Obama, having to deal with such issues.

Next, the White House went to its favorite outlet, Buzzfeed, and their favorite BenSmithing reporter, Ben Smith, to leak the source of the Woodward "regret" email. It’s clear why they did it – Smith spun the entire incident for the White House. After announcing that the email came from Gene Sperling, director of the White House Economic Council, he proceeded to pretend that the threat email wasn't a threat email at all – actually, Woodward was making a rookie mistake by misinterpreting a kindly tip as a threat: "Officials often threaten reporters that they will 'regret' printing something that is untrue, but Woodward took the remark as a threat." Nothing to see here. Move along. Just to clarify, Smith later added via Twitter, "Am I crazy to read 'regret' here as 'regret being wrong'? This is something flacks yell at reporters a lot."

That meme was picked up by the White House's favorite palace guards, including Dave Weigel at Slate (he retweeted Smith, tweeted, "Theory: Woodward is trolling," then added via retweet that the whole situation was "boring"); BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski, who mockingly tweeted, "Every reporter who deals with flacks/campaign advisors/politicos/ on a daily basis finds that less than threatening"; Justin Green, who edits David Frum's blog at The Daily Beast, tweeted, "I rarely rarely report, and I've had flacks say worse. Not that rare"; Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic tweeted, "As a reporter, I don't think this was a threat"; Dylan Byers of Politico tweeted, "tweets, I'm no Woodward but broadcast/cable TV PR reps use that 'regret' tactic a lot"; Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo tweeted, "Who goes birther first, Scalia or Woodward?" The messaging was universal from the leftist Obama-supporting media: Woodward hadn't been threatened, and was an amateur or a crazy old coot to think he was being threatened. Matt Yglesias of Slate summed up the general Palace Guard Media take: "Woodward's managed to make me suspect Nixon got a raw deal."

If I had to guess, I would say that Sperling's hostility and the threats he made are proof that he was one of Woodward's original sources (keeping in mind that Woodward has steadfastly tried to protect the names of his sources for the book).  It would make sense that Sperling is feeling quite a bit of pressure from inside the White House if he was a source.  That kind of thing would make a man start issuing threats to the person he blames for his predicament.

Notice the common theme in the above tweets.  Rather than focusing on the spectacle of a White House staffer issuing threats of any kind to a legendary investigative journalist who had been given access to the White House precisely because of his impeccable reputation, the JournoList brat pack claims that Woodward is crying wolf and that the "threat" was really just a figure of speech and not really "threatening" at all.  That, of course, completely (and deliberately) misses the point.

It's bad enough that Team Obama has long waged a cold war against Fox News.  But when a liberal icon like Bob Woodward finds himself on the enemies list simply for accurately reporting the facts, the increasing paranoia of Obama and his minions becomes impossible to dismiss.  And Woodward isn't the only one.  Lanny Davis, another solid liberal and Clintonista, has now come forward to say that the White House threatened the Washington Times because of columns written by Davis.

Keep in mind that these same propaganda units of the Obama Media Group went so far as to promote the notion that Bill and Hillary Clinton were "racists" prior to the 2008 South Carolina Democrat primary.  So naturally even well-known liberals in the media are not immune from attacks if they dare speak truth to power with regards to the Dear Leader in the White House.

As Juan Williams, yet another liberal, stated recently:

"I always thought it was the Archie Bunkers of the world, the right-wingers of world, who were more resistant and more closed-minded about hearing the other side ... In fact, what I have learned is, in a very painful way — and I can open this shirt and show you the scars and the knife wounds — is that it is big media institutions who are identifiably more liberal to left-leaning who will shut you down, stab you and kill you, fire you, if they perceive that you are not telling the story in the way that they want it told." 

Meanwhile, the mockery of Woodward in the Obama Media Group continues today.  As you can see in the clip below, Obama's Kool-aid intoxicated defenders are deliberately missing the point. It's not about Woodward being "scared" of the "little White House aide."  Is anybody really saying that Woodward is in actual physical danger?  No, of course not.  This is about a White House that is panicking and issuing threats, verbally as well as in writing.  Who cares whether the threats are credible?  The fact is, threats are being made by this administration because it's credibility is being shredded and The Narrative is being disrupted!