Reading Daniel Choi’s story is a pretty strong reminder of the insanity and injustice of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. It means both that people who are honest about their sexuality are discharged for no reason other then their honesty and sexual orientation and that people who choose the don’t tell route have to keep a career-threatening secret. It’s a mental health disaster.
And it’s landed on Obama’s plate. So far, all indications say that he thinks he’s taken on as much as he wants to. While he campaigned against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, he seems to have backpedaled a bit. My suspicion is that if he can make the incident go away quietly, he will. Lt. Choi and others will be discharged as discretely as possible. On the other hand, if it becomes a prominent story and Obama has to take a stand one way or another, I believe he’ll do the right thing. He’ll scrap the policy.
Let’s help Obama do the right thing.
Yes, because the media will definitely attack Obama on a policy decision. And pigs will fly.
Obama will say that there is no problem, and the media will never talk about it again.
Oh, and everyone will conveniently forget that it was the DEMOCRATS who started Don’t Ask Don’t Tell…
Oh, I haven’t forgotten (although I wasn’t a Democrat then and I suppose still am not technically now). And I think that’s the point of this exercise. Make sure he can’t gloss over it and they can’t ignore it.
I know, but that Onion article about Obama’s double-murder could be true, and still nobody would pay attention. The media is much too busy kissing his ass to care about any real issues.
Interesting insights. I can’t imagine that the reportage on Fox News and Townhall.com, for example, are favorable to Obama’s policies, though I suppose the only way to be certain would be to actually watch or read them. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages have been critical of the President’s economic policy, although that doesn’t seem to have seeped through to the other sections of the paper.
Other outlets I read – The Cato Journal, Reason, The Independent Review – do frequently criticize Obama policy ideas that include the growth of government. (Each of those publications, if memory serves, has a stated Libertarian editorial approach.)
Semantics, yes, but I’ve always liked to differentiate between a reporter and a journalist. A reporter covers what just happened, while a journalist digs a bit deeper into what might happen later and why. I suspect that when people criticize how media treats policy issues, they’re really criticizing contemporary journalism, not reportage.
This is to say nothing for the contention that President Obama simply has support staff that knows how to favorably influence press coverage, which I think is mostly true. And because of its slightly different purpose, journalism, not reporting, is quite susceptible to this kind of public-relations.
