Jamie Weinstein

In its war with one of the great malefactors of our time, it looks like the Obama administration may have come to the understanding that the smart path to take is to simply admit defeat. Last night, Fox News Channel’s Greta Van Susteren aired an interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

'The idea that by not talking to people, we are somehow punishing them, is ridiculous'

President Obama defiantly declared during his presidential campaign that he was willing to meet with America’s most intractable enemies without preconditions. During his presidency, the Obama administration declared that while the president may be willing to meet with the world’s worst tyrants, he and his team had no intention of meeting with Fox News television hosts.

Yes, while America is engaged in two wars overseas, Obama decided to launch a third one at home. Some things can be tolerated. To the Obama administration, Fox News is evidently not one of them.

“We simply decided to stop abiding by the fiction, which is aided and abetted by the mainstream press, that Fox is a traditional news organization,” said deputy White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer. His comments come on the heels of the American public rapidly deciding to stop abiding by the fiction, which has also been aided by the mainstream press, that Barack Obama is some sort of political deity endowed with magical powers to transform the world.

President Obama himself launched an attack on Fox News when asked about the network in a recent interview, insinuating the news organization is little different than right-wing talk radio.

Let’s be honest. Fox News leans to the right. This is especially evident in its prime time opinion lineup, which runs the gamut from the paranoid Glenn Beck to the moderately conservative Bill O’Reilly to the politically indiscernible Greta Van Susteren. Even in what Fox considers its hard news shows, the anchors tend to have a conservative bias that comes out from time to time.

But how is this any different from any other network other than the fact that Fox leans right instead of left? Just take a look at MSNBC for Pete’s sake. Not only is the cable news network distinctly left wing, but during the 2008 campaign, MSNBC allowed their passionately partisan opinion hosts to anchor their supposedly straight news coverage – at least until complaints forced MSNBC to reconsider. Chris Matthews moderated not one, but two Republican primary debates!

Can you imagine Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly moderating a Democratic primary debate? It would never happen.

MSNBC’s supposedly straight news personalities display their left-wing bias and do so often. Is Fox News fair and balanced? It is certainly more fair and balanced than MSNBC, whose anchors were openly orgasmic over the prospect of Obama being elected president.

At the same time the Obama administration decided to launch a war on Fox News, it invited MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann over to the White House for tea and crumpets. Obama can invite whomever he wants to visit him at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but we don’t have to accept the false reality that Obama is in effect promoting, which is that Fox News is unfairly biased while MSNBC is some beacon of fairness whose prime time personalities will be welcomed in the White House with open arms.

This is not a very difficult issue to understand. Obama likes MSNBC because it is full of charter members of the Obama Fan Club. He doesn’t like Fox News because the network is often critical of him and his policies.

Specifically, the real angst that Obama has with Fox News is that it has done reporting that the other networks failed to do, and dredged up some troubling information about people in the Obama White House. Indeed, Fox News has exposed radicalism in the Obama administration.

It was Fox News that outed Obama’s Marxist “Green Czar” Van Jones, ultimately forcing the 9/11 truther to resign. More recently, Fox News aired a speech where White House Communications Director Anita Dunn told a group of high-school students that Mao Zedong was among her favorite philosophers. Mao, of course, was one of the worst tyrants of the 20^th Century, responsible for tens of millions of deaths.

Obama should seek a truce in his war against Fox News for his own sake. By fighting Fox, he is helping the network reach new heights of popularity. If Obama can glad-hand Hugo Chavez and his administration can meet with the mullahs that rule Iran, then Obama and other members of his administration should be able to sit down with Chris Wallace.

And as we saw last night, it appears that the Obama administration ultimately came to the right conclusion that it was time to wave the white flag.

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