Bingo. It worked with W because he never fought back...
And I heard that little piss-pants talking the other day about how important a free, adversarial press was, as in Trump bad. Yeah, free and adversarial would be great, but what we actuality get is non-stop BJ’s for statist tyrants, and continuous derangenent about anybody sane, or even any (R). Look how much they hated him and he was like 10% to the right of FDR. He didn’t seem to think the lack of adversariality was a problem under Ebola, nor the steps Ebola took to stamp our what little honest journalism dared occur, but NOW it’s a problem. What a putz.