The Conservative Case For Cars

The Obama administration's arguably unconstitutional and potentially illegal makeover/takeover of General Motors and Chrysler hit a legal road block on June 8, when Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg issued a stay preventing Team Obama's plan to sell Chrysler to the Italian automaker Fiat. This speed bump was a great opportunity for the media to pay attention to objections to the White House's reckless executive-branch manipulation of the auto business.

President Bush and his team were regularly savaged by the media elite if they so much as sniffed a hint of evasion over the rule of law and the bounds of constitutional authority in fighting terrorism. So why is President Obama's unprecedented intervention in the auto industry, including a TARP-fund bailout expressly ruled out by Congress, all but ignored?

Even with the Supreme Court order, the nightly news shows of CBS and NBC gave the decision just a few seconds of air time, the equivalent of a stifled yawn, and never went anywhere near describing the strange bankruptcy proceedings the Obama administration has cooked up to manipulate the industry to its liking.

Only ABC acknowledged the Chrysler deal was "encouraged and engineered" by the Obama folks, and noticed that lawyers for the pension funds of "Indiana police, teachers and taxpayers" were stopping the sale. But even ABC suggested that these state government employees were the bad guys, like vultures hoping that they'd make more money by taking Chrysler apart.

When Enron flat-lined in 2002, these same networks laid the blame all over the Bush administration while breaking out the violins for the people whose retirement funds were ruined. With the car companies and Obama, the song sheet is reversed. No one will go to the home of a retired Indiana cop and wonder why President Obama wants to deny him money for food and pills to sell off Chrysler to a bunch of Italians.

Then there's the GM deal. Here are some of the anti-Obama arguments from plaintiff lawyers and conservatives that are going ignored on the nightly news.

1. Nationalization. Obama proposes the government will own 60 percent of General Motors. Not only will the taxpayer be on the hook for tens of billions in capital keeping GM afloat, but the taxpayer will be doing this after Congress ruled out such an action. Conservatives insisted during the fall campaign that Obama would govern as a "socialist." The media reacted with disgust. How does this massive intervention not underline the S-word in heavy red ink?

2. Politicization. Once the Obama administration is running GM, shouldn't a skeptical journalist wonder if common business sense is going to lose to a political agenda? Who is GM going to satisfy -- the consumer or Obama? Already, Obama is pledging more GM cars will be made in America, and they'll make more fuel-efficient cars. They're handing large chunks of ownership to the United Auto Workers, which is surely a sleazy payoff for UAW campaign contributions.

Do we really want an auto company run like other government-run transportation concerns like Amtrak? Every decision -- from closing dealerships or plants, to selecting suppliers or which vehicles to build, to collective bargaining with the UAW -- will have to pass the Washington tests of political and environmental correctness.

3. Usurpation. The Obama Administration acted in complete disregard of the rule of law. The bailout was accomplished without congressional approval, and the money used was appropriated for failing banks, not carmakers. They trampled right over where the Constitution places limits on the president's ability to spend public money, stating "No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law."

When Dennis Hastert was the Republican speaker, he was so jealous of congressional prerogatives that he expressed outrage in 2006 at the FBI searching the office of corrupt Congressman William "Cold Cash" Jefferson, D-La., who was caught with $90,000 in FBI money in his freezer at home. Speaker Nancy Pelosi thinks the powers of Congress are whatever Barack Obama decides they are. "If and when the Administration thinks that there should be legislation [on the auto companies], then we will take that up," Pelosi said in May. "We have not heard, I have not personally heard from the executive branch that they need any legislative remedies."

This massive Obama end-around of Congress and the Constitution should at the very least be a matter of controversy and debate. Instead, the national media are ignoring or downplaying the complaints of Obama opponents, as if any whiff of controversy over Obama's increasingly ruthless management of the economy would wreck a recovery. Barack Obama thinks he is America's car czar, and the media are not a check or a balance. They are merely the czar's enthusiastic servants.

Now that the former US Supreme Court has shown the entire world that contracts mean zero in the USA it will not only be the demise of Chrysler and GM but could well dry up the bond market as secured creditors are no longer first in line especially if the company has a union.
Unions now trump contract law.

I thought for sure the USSC would stop this. How can you void a concept that has been part of this country for over a hundred years?

The fix seems to be in no matter what party you believe in and now the ruling class has no obstruction what so ever to full control of private industry and private property.

We have completely lost the country and this latest USSC decision should be the defining moment.

The Constitution of the United States, in its First Amendment guarantees the existence of a FREE PRESS. Today the word PRESS has been by usage changed to MEDIA.
How does this translate to 2009?
The Media is FREE to lie.
The Media is FREE to hide half the truth, the half they disagree with.
The Media is FREE to totally ignore news and events that would put their “annointed” in a bad light.
The Media is FREE to judge one’s “misdeeds” according to the political views of the accused.
The Media is Free to bitterly condemn the angry word of a person whose last name ends in (R), yet ignore the same word from a person whose name ends in (D).
The Media is FREE to applaud the violation of the Constitution that insures it’s very existence when that blatant violation furthers its own closely held belief.
I’m beginning to wonder if the STRONGEST threat to the existence of the United States of America is not the corruption of politics, but rather the corrupt sink hole that the American media has become.

Its becoming clear that MSM should be held accountable

Rush Limbaugh screens out calls about bias in the media, for the simple reason that if he didn't he would talk about nothing else.
In a way, I do the same thing - I stopped subscribing to the AIM Report after a year or two, back in the late 1970s because I was convinced. It became a twice-told tale. Once you are familiar with gravity, one more apple falling off the tree is of no great interest. The question has always been not if "the media" was biased to the left, but why? And what could be done about it. In the three decades since the Carter Administration I have thought long and hard about those issues, and come to some conclusions:

Fiction is just the story someone wants to tell. Certainly fiction has great potential for political implications - but unless you are willing to contemplate outright censorship there is little point in being exercised about political tendencies in fiction. So the proper concern to be addressed isn't "bias in the media," it is the political tendency of the reporting of the news.

And even with respect to the reporting of the news, nobody thinks that a newspaper, still less a broadcast report, can report everything that happens. So editing is inevitable. And since "Half the truth is often a great lie" (Franklin), there is wide scope for tendentiousness in what the editor reports, and what he ignores. So to say "freedom of speech, and of the press" is to say that any given reporter/publication can be tendentious. The actual scandal is not that there is tendentiousness in journalism, it is that anyone thinks that journalism is objective. And the biggest scandal of all is the associated press.
The Associated Press was founded in the middle of Nineteenth Century. It is a news wire service and, obviously, could not have existed until the telegraph came into use - several decades after the framing of the Constitution and the First Amendment. In the pre-AP era newspapers were mostly small weeklies whose publishers didn't have sources of news not in principle available to the general public. The opinion of the printer was mostly what the newspaper was about, so there was little or no presumption of objectivity about such a newspaper. When the AP came into existence as an aggressive monopoly (ruled in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1945), the dangers of its centralized propaganda power were obvious. In response to that challenge to its legitimacy, the AP argued that it consisted of a club of fiercely independent and competitive newspapers, and that as such the AP was objective.
But far from the independence of the newspapers taming any tendentiousness in the AP, the cost and concomitant need to maximize the value of the AP to the newspapers created an overwhelming unifying and homogenizing effect on the newspapers. The only way for the AP to be considered "objective" was for its reporters to be considered to be objective. And by extension, all reporters had to be considered to be objective. And the inevitable result was, and is, groupthink. And what kind of "thought" would all those reporters naturally rally around? Why, the importance of reporting, of course. Businesses may provide us food, shelter, and clothing, and police and military organizations may provide us safety. But reporters do the really important work of criticizing and second guessing everyone else!
And the political implication of that tendency among journalists is leftism. Leftist politicians merely go along and get along with journalists as their first, last, and only priority. It's not that the government controls "the media" (but only when Democrats are in the government), journalism and its interests controls the Democratic Party.
The Right to Know

My “convincing” came some 10 years before yours when I was told by my editor when doing a piece on DeGaul during the Kennedy administration “don’t forget to mention his (DeGaul’s) prostrate problem” ie indicate DeGaul was turning senile,thus kissing up to the Kennedy Administration. I’ve had dozens of experiences like this.
BTW The editor in question had recently married a Russian ballerina in Moscow.

You pose a question about coverage that I can’t figure out. What are they (MSM) gaining by being so in the tank for this bunch ? Somewhere along the line they’re getting rewarded. Its a reward of somekind, perhaps a family member is on the dole,or they have some other business which requires favorable connections with the administration.

Reporting on this administration has turned into some sort of a Goebbels game. Some of these people are dishing out better tales than Gibbs. As their report gets reviewed by their peer group and atabouys are handed out. Do they realize they may be working against the interests of the public they are supposed to be serving ? Its certainly not journalism.

Which is why I’m advocating not just identifying the venue but; Ann Compton of ABC radio news reported bla bla bla but spiked bla bla bla questioning that reporters objectivity. To encourage that venue’s other reporters to start being objective and act like journalists. While the venue may deserve the slam identifying the miscreants may slow em down quicker.

The Media is FREE to lie.

Amen. That hasn't changed. That's how it should be. I'd have it no other way. If they weren't free to lie, I might be fooled into trusting them because I might never know they're liars.

The First Amendment ensures our enemies have the freedom to reveal themselves. That's what I love about it.

I’m beginning to wonder if the STRONGEST threat to the existence of the United States of America is not the corruption of politics, but rather the corrupt sink hole that the American media has become.

The media's lies aren't the problem; they are the symptom. The cause is the People's apathy and ignorance. We're too fat, dumb and happy to recognize and/or give a damn about the lies. As long as they're saying what we like to hear, we're satisfied.

Willful ignorance can be freedom's worst enemy.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.