Picking the poison du jour at the White House…Analysis: Race issues beset Obama’s post-racial presidency. Post racial my arse…POTUS’s administration is all about smoke and mirrors.   Sherrodgate was the best that this administration could do.  Liberal journalists had hatched an idea to shut down Fox News which apparently causes POTUS great angst.

The very existence of Fox News, meanwhile, sends Journolisters into paroxysms of rage. When Howell Raines charged that the network had a conservative bias, the members of Journolist discussed whether the federal government should shut the channel down.

“I am genuinely scared” of Fox, wrote Guardian columnist Daniel Davies, because it “shows you that a genuinely shameless and unethical media organisation *cannot* be controlled by any form of peer pressure or self-regulation, and nor can it be successfully cold-shouldered or ostracised. In order to have even a semblance of control, you need a tough legal framework.” Davies, a Brit, frequently argued the United States needed stricter libel laws.

“I agree,” said Michael Scherer of Time Magazine. Roger “Ailes understands that his job is to build a tribal identity, not a news organization. You can’t hurt Fox by saying it gets it wrong, if Ailes just uses the criticism to deepen the tribal identity.”

Jonathan Zasloff, a law professor at UCLA, suggested that the federal government simply yank Fox off the air. “Do you really want the political parties/white house picking which media operations are news operations and which are a less respectable hybrid of news and political advocacy?”

But Zasloff stuck to his position. “I think that they are doing that anyway; they leak to whom they want to for political purposes,” he wrote. “If this means that some White House reporters don’t get a press pass for the press secretary’s daily briefing and that this means that they actually have to, you know, do some reporting and analysis instead of repeating press releases, then I’ll take that risk.”

Scherer seemed alarmed. “So we would have press briefings in which only media organizations that are deemed by the briefer to be acceptable are invited to attend?”

JD commented that this was the story of the day, yet Sherrodgate was the distraction that needed to happen in order to distract the American public from noticing the this story.

What better use of the race card can there be?   Let’s face it, today it will be another sordid Al Gore tale of another masseuse investigation.  Erstwhile Bobby Jindal and the state of Louisiana have been screaming and no one is listening.  Afghanistan is a double edged sword.

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