Newspaper Bashes Obama

The GOP propaganda ministry—The Oklahoman—was in full swing over the weekend, bashing President Barack Obama with hasty generalizations and contradictions in an editorial.

But it was the obvious omission that seems the most absurd. Here is a newspaper, which has consistently supported the no-fault ideology of big corporations, criticizing a president, who has bailed out Wall Street to save the country’s banking system.

The gist of the editorial, titled “Obama policies are target of voters’ dissatisfaction” (January 24, 2010) is that the recent election of a Massachusetts Republican to the U.S. Senate shows how much everyone is angry at Obama policies. According to the editorial:

. . . Massachusetts elected Brown to be the decisive vote against health care, to help rein in government spending, to cut taxes and to stop the kind of back-room dealing Obama promised to end during his ’08 hope-and-change campaign.

Unfortunately, the pattern during Obama’s first 12 months has been him finding fault with everyone except himself, with George W. Bush the most useful scapegoat.

Some things come to mind here. Scott Brown voted in favor of universal health care in Massachusetts as a state senator. The current government has spent billions of taxpayer dollars nurturing the ideology that has given us huge, monopoly corporations. The current recession is completely the fault of the previous administration. This historic recession will always be the fault of Bush's inept leadership, no matter how much The Oklahoman and other right-wing media outlets try to distort the issue.

The editorial also doesn’t really consider how weak the Democratic candidate was in the Massachusetts election.

Yes, there is a lot of populist anger today, and, yes, Obama needs to pay more attention to it. But its main target, from both conservatives and liberals, are the big corporations, and this includes media companies, that got us into this financial mess in the first place. Americans know they’re getting a bad break, but The Oklahoman editorial page would be the last place in the world that would sympathize. It supports huge corporations and free-market fundamentalists, not regular Oklahoma families trying to make it through these hard financial times.