So insinuates Michele Norris, subbing for Gwen Ifill on PBS's "Washington Week".
The gist of Michele Norris' statement was thus: Senator Obama the candidate stated his rejection of lobbyist influence in government, now (she smirks), he is spending significant time lobbying congress for the stimulus plan in the guise of bipartisanship.
Isn't the POTUS supposed to lobby on issues of national interest? How exactly are his actions equivalent to those who lobby on behalf of corporations or industries? When AIG lobbyists help their overlords to rip 10's of billions of dollars from the public coffers to help pay for bonus's and bad business decisions, we're supposed to infer that Obama is doing the same?
Gotta love the false equivalency that creeps into damn near every news story we see on the boob tube and in the print media. I suppose Michele might have thought she was being cute, but it would sure be nice to see the events of our times being reported with a little bit of responsibility, a sense of proportion, with accuracy instead of the constructions of weird "balancing" acts that seem to appear reflexively in the works of many so-called reporters nowadays.
We hold our breath while writing our own stories...
I'll leave you to listen and watch if you will Washington Week if you want a direct quote. My apologies for not being able to give you a precise timing link, it's somewhere in the first few minutes of the broadcast I think -- I can't re-watch the video myself because PBS uses a video plug-in that doesn't play well with Macs -- I blame GW ;)