Washington Whispers

Obama Administration Taking on Fox, Healthcare Industry

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October 27, 2009 RSS Feed Print
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By Kenneth T. Walsh, Washington Whispers

The White House's battle with Fox News is only part of a new pattern of hitting back harder than ever at President Obama's adversaries in an effort to isolate the Republican Party and its allies. White House Communications Director Anita Dunn started the Fox fuss when she said: "We're going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent. As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don't need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave." What happened: The president and his aides finally got fed up with Fox news coverage and with three Fox commentators, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly. Obama's acolytes are now also attacking the health-insurance industry more aggressively, with a White House official telling Whispers that the industry has been spreading "highly misleading" information. Obama officials say they are reviewing whether to rescind the insurance industry's long-standing exemption from federal antitrust laws.

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Tags:
Fox News,
Barack Obama,
health insurance

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Sorry, should have read "were NOT gullible enough"

LucasFoxx of WA 12:08PM October 28, 2009

Obama is right to learn from the mistakes of people like John Kerry; who waited too long to take up the fight against the swift boaters because he believed the American people were gullible enough to fall for outrageous claims that could easily be debunked. If a group, particularly one that claims to be a news organization, is allowed to repeat lies without rebuttal, eventually some people will accept them as true. The average, outside the beltway, person should not have to constantly do their own fact checking of national news sources.

It shouldn't be this difficult to get accurate news.

As for the Ant-Trust legislation, the CBO just issued a report that concludes that H.R. 3596, the Health Insurance Industry Antitrust Enforcement Act of 2009, would have little actual effect due to state laws that already prohibit most of the practices in the exemption. It's still worth passing.

LucasFoxx of WA 12:06PM October 28, 2009

The way to handle criticism is by producing positive results. If your ideas are sound it doesn't matter what anybody says, you will be proven correct. Herein lies the fundamental problem for Obama, and why instead of turning to the positive results, he attacks his critics in the hopes that this will mask the lack of results. But, it only makes him look worse because in addition to not showing the results he shows negative traits. Instead of one thing wrong, now there are two. And it calls into question that if the small & petty actions were not such a part of his administration and policies, perhaps he would be accomlishing more. It all feeds a negative downward spiral, and will meke him increasingly more ineffective.

Harry GA of GA 12:01AM October 28, 2009

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