Meanwhile, Nixon sucks a dry martini

It’s nice to see so many wingnuts lifting Helen Thomas — the recipient of so much of their loathing over the years — and bearing her aloft on their shoulders after she claimed that the Obama administration is more obsessed with media control than Richard Nixon.

Beyond the fact that she seemed most exercised over the Nico Pitney non-story, the merits of Thomas’ argument are of course laughably thin. Call me, for example, when the Obama White House employs people to forge press releases on stolen GOP letterhead, or when it orders wiretaps placed on prominent reporters who disclose the details of illegal invasions, or when it tries to institute prior-restraint over the press as a whole, or when White House aides openly discuss poisoning a nettlesome journalist.

But the manufactured outrage from conservative bloggers is especially ludicrous, given the previous administration’s own preference for simulated spontaneity, arguably the worst example of which was the infamous scripted press conference just prior to the Iraq War. More to the point, if these folks hadn’t spent years cheering Bush’s press psy-ops, advocating the imprisonment (or worse) of journalists who belatedly reported on the administration’s criminal fuckups, wailing tediously when imprisoned photographers were released after years of being held without charges, or regularly accusing press organizations like the AP of functioning as terrorist front groups, I’d be more inclined to take them seriously when they complain about a health care town hall whose choreography was typical of the genre.