Enter
the Obama administration a “comeuppance” for “bureaucratic hostage
taking,” I daresay there’s plenty of
examples of furloughed employees
and airport closures and canceled
tuition assistance and forestalled
corruption trial work that will help
in that effort. And unlike the White
House tours story, coverage of these
stories would actually have some
measure of journalistic merit.
The argument for covering the
White House tours non-story in
this all-in, claws-out approach is
that it catches the Obama administration out in a gamble, that’s
now been ferreted out by Beltway
reporters. And really, that’s terrific. Bully for them. Gold stars all
around. You guys found yourselves
a real, live political stunt.
But I’ve got news for you guys!
The sequestration itself is a political stunt. The super committee was
a political stunt. The SimpsonBowles commission was a political
stunt. The round of debt-ceiling
hostage-taking that put us on the
path to the sequestration in the
first place was a political stunt.
Heck, the entire frenzy over deficit
“grand bargaining” at a time when
we are experiencing mortal peril in
the form of a massive unemployment crisis is a political stunt.
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
03.24.13
And the hilarious thing about the
cancellation of the White House
tours is that maybe the gamble
worked. I can’t say whether it was
an administration priority to engineer a sequestration-related
inconvenience that would demonstrate that the hopelessly cosseted
Washington media was incapable
of evincing any concern beyond the
purely parochial