White House Press Sec. Robert Gibbs attempted to characterize critics from the Left as a "professional left" bent on abolishing the US military and instituting a single payer health care system. It was a Fox worthy attempt to remake critics on the left into a cartoonish straw man/whipping boy.
Glenn Greenwald flays Gibbs for his absurd attempt to de-legitimatize critics of White House on the left.
Robert Gibbs attacks the fringe losers of the left
You may think that the reason you're dissatisfied with the Obama administration is because of substantive objections to their policies: that they've done so little about crisis-level unemployment, foreclosures and widespread economic misery. Or because of the White House's apparently endless devotion to Wall Street. Or because the President has escalated a miserable, pointless and unwinnable war that is entering its ninth year.
Or because he granted full-scale legal immunity to those who committed serious crimes in the last administration.
Gibbs attempts to dismiss valid criticisms, preferring to joust with straw-man targets he labeled as the "professional left".
But Robert Gibbs -- in one of the most petulant, self-pitying outbursts seen from a top political official in recent memory, half derived from a paranoid Richard Nixon rant and the other half from a Sean Hannity/Sarah Palin caricature of The Far Left -- is here to tell you that the real reason you're dissatisfied with the President is because you're a fringe, ideological, Leftist extremist ingrate who needs drug counseling:
The White House is simmering with anger at criticism from liberals who say President Obama is more concerned with deal-making than ideological purity.
During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.
"I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs said. "I mean, it's crazy."
The press secretary dismissed the "professional left" in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, "They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality."
Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: "They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president."
The Hill
(snip)
So, to recap: (1) The Professional Left are totally irrelevant losers who speak for absolutely nobody, and certainly nobody in Real America who matters; but (2) they're ruining everything for the White House!!! And: if you criticize the President, it's only because you're such a rabid extremist that you harbor a secret desire to eliminate the Pentagon -- that's how anti-American you are! You're such a Far Left extremist that Dennis Kucinich isn't far enough Left for you, you subversive, drug-using hippies! You're so far to the Left that you want to turn the U.S. into Canada. As David Frum put it today: "More proof of my longtime thesis, Repub pols fear the GOP base; Dem pols hate the Dem base."
If you're not insulted by Gibbs dismissal of the White House's critics (weather you agree with them or not) then you should be. Attacking the liberal base won't convince many Fox News viewers to switch their votes, so Gibbs is engaged in an exercise in futility.
Its worse than futile, its counterproductive. Gibbs thoughtless attack antagonizes the White House's natural allies on the Left, without placating their natural antagonists on the Right.
Its a lose/lose proposition.