[National Review] A review of weekend news coverage and commentary shows that mainstream media have gone into full "Protect Obama" mode.Evidence released last week — including, but not limited to, House Intelligence Committee transcripts showing that multiple top-level Obama administration officials were lying to the public for three years about Russian collusion — indicates that former president Barack Obama wasn’t merely aware of what was going on; he was hip-deep in what increasingly appears to be one of the greatest political scandals in American history.
For other than the most sycophantic and credulous media personalities, Obama’s involvement isn’t much of a surprise. The August 5, 2016 email from Peter Strzok to Lisa Page stating, "the White House is running this," followed by the September 2016 Page text to Strzok stating, "POTUS wants to know everything we’re doing" suggested the obvious: An operation targeting a presidential campaign and then an incoming presidential administration isn’t a mere freelance effort cooked up by a few rogue FBI personnel in their spare time. An operation of that magnitude and import must be blessed from the very top.
Indeed, the January 5, 2017 White House meeting with President Obama, vice president Joe Biden, FBI director James Comey, deputy attorney general Sally Yates, director of national intelligence James Clapper, CIA director John Brennan, and national security adviser Susan Rice (which meeting was the subject of Rice’s mother-of-all C.Y.A. emails to herself on Inauguration Day) suggests that Obama wasn’t merely kept informed of the Russia collusion fraud, he was providing direction.
Notwithstanding the IRS targeting of politically disfavored citizens, Fast and Furious gunrunning, the VA debacle, Benghazi, surveillance of reporters, and other scandals, an adoring mainstream press consistently parrots Obama’s risible claim that his administration was scandal-free. But the Russia-collusion hoax dwarfs all the other Obama scandals and malfeasance combined.
Obama knows this. So do the media. They also know most of Obama’s "achievements" haven’t even survived Trump’s first term. The media-enabled fiction of a scandal-free administration is nearly all that remains of the Obama legacy. So it must be maintained. After all, he’s progressives’ Lightworker. He validates their pieties, conceits, and presumptions.
That’s why we’re about to experience media prevarication, deflection, omission, and misrepresentation on a scale never before witnessed in political news coverage — even eclipsing that of the last three years. Obama must be protected, facts be damned. And if they spin furiously enough, they might even be rewarded with a Pulitzer.