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Every once in a while, even the mainstream media surprises you. That was never truer than today when noted liberal Meet the Press host David Gregory played the clips from Rick Santelli and Robert Gibbs that so angered me yesterday. At the conclusion of the Gibbs clips chastising Santelli for supposedly not having actually read the President’s housing plan, Gregory responded as follows:

MR. GREGORY:  Well, I have read the plan from top to bottom.

MS.  QUICK:  Yeah.

MR. GREGORY:  And the reality, Becky, is that Mr. Santelli’s criticism is shared by a lot of people who think that it, A, is fundamentally unfair to subsidize people who may have misrepresented their income, gotten in over their heads, they owe what they owe.  There’s also real questions about whether modifications work.  Fifty to 60 percent of modifications end up in a re-default.

MS.  QUICK:  Right.

MR. GREGORY:  That’s a fact.

MS.  QUICK:  It is.  And we, we spoke with Jim Lockhart this week.  He is the head of OFHEO, which oversees Fannie and Freddie.  He said that they’re hoping, they’re hoping that 40 percent of these people that they help out won’t fall into foreclosure anyway.  That’s just what they’re hoping at this point.  When Rick was talking, I mean, if you watch him on a daily basis, he does stuff like this all the time.  He yells about Wall Street getting a bailout.  He yells about 10-year Treasury prices on a regular basis.  But the reason this probably picked up steam is he touched on something, touched a nerve that lots and lots of people around the country are feeling.  They, they, they feel like the ants who are now being asked to take care of the grasshoppers.  Now, there were probably some ants that were out there working all summer, too, and you feel bad if they got stuck out in the rain, but there are people who are just angry about the idea that people lied on their mortgage applications and that they’re going to get bailed out.

MR. GREGORY:  You hear about subprime loans, Alt-A loans, which are known as liar’s loans.

The transcript doesn’t capture Gregory’s tone. He was genuinely disgusted by the fact that Gibbs had personally attacked Santelli by name. Thank you, David Gregory. In my estimation, that was the most Tim-Russert-like moment you’ve had since taking over MTP.

We are living in dangerous times.

Yesterday, CNBC reporter Rick Santelli made headlines by calling for a “Chicago Tea Party.” Personally, I loved it. Here is the full video:

Today, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs responded in a manner that simultaneously scares and sickens me:

Let’s dissect this for a moment. Gibbs’ first response is: “I’m not entirely sure where Mr. Santelli lives, or in what house he lives.” In writing, the question is rhetorical, irrelevant, and nonsensical. I don’t know where Mr. Santelli lives either, but I have a few guesses. I’m willing to guess that Mr. Santelli lives in a home that: (1) he can afford; and, (2) he earned through some combination of hard worker and use of his God-given talents. I’m also willing to guess that, unlike President Obama, Mr. Santelli did not purchase his home through a sweet-heart deal with a Chicago slumlord who has since been indicted on corruption charges. I’m also willing to guess that, unlike the Democrat Chairman of the Senate Housing Committee, Mr. Santelli did not get a sweetheart mortgage from now-defunct Countrywide.

But Mr. Gibbs’ words aren’t the point. They don’t capture the bass tones of his contempt. The unstated, tonal implication is that anything Mr. Santelli says about housing is a non-starter because he is rich and greedy and therefore in not entitled to any opinion.

From there, Mr. Gibbs continues on to accuse Mr. Santelli of not having read the President’s plan. He condescendingly holds up a copy of the plan and says: “It’s available on the White House web site, and I would encourage him to download it, hit print, and begin to read it.” Again, the printed words don’t capture the mocking tone of contempt. On the video, pay close attention to the way he says “read it.” (Funny, but I don’t remember Mr. Gibbs saying “read it” this time last week when they rushed the porkulus bill to the floor so quickly that it was physically impossible for any member of Congress to have read it.) The implication here is that Mr. Santelli is not only rich, evil, and selfish, but also stupid and illiterate. If Mr. Santelli knew how to read, he would obviously agree with President Obama’s plan–as all right-thinking people do.

The sum total of this exchange is that Gibbs cannot even begin to defend the plan on its merits. His only defense is to take the offensive and launch ad hominem attacks on anyone who dares to question the Administration. This is scary, and it is right out of Saul Alinsky, the intellectual Godfather (and, yes, the mob allusion is intentional) to former-community-organizer Barack Obama. Alinsky’s best-known work was Rules for Radicals. Rule Number 14 was as follows:

Pick the target, freeze it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

Two thumbs way, way up for Rick Santelli–my new favorite journalist.

Oh, and one more thought:

Today the White House announced that President Obama opposes any attempt to resurrect the so-called “fairness” doctrine.

The doctrine was a series of rules that the FCC used to impose on programming over the “public airwaves.” The idea was that because the public airwaves are a finite resource, licensees had a responsibility to provide balance, equal time, and a right of response when discussing matters of public importance. The doctrine was abolished by the Reagan Administration in about 1988. It is no coincidence that Rush Limbaugh’s program started the following year and has since revolutionized a.m. radio.

I know a thing or two about the First Amendment. In fact, I once published an award-winning law review article on the application of New York Times v. Sullivan in political campaigns. With that background, I am of the opinion that the fairness doctrine was, and is, unconstitutional. Government bureaucrats shouldn’t be deciding what is “balanced” and what is not. But even if they could be trusted to make such a determination, a speaker has no constitutional duty to be balanced (thankfully).

But even if the doctrine was constitutional and made sense 30 years ago, modern technology has eviscerated its underlying rationale. Information distribution is no longer limited to a relatively narrow electromagnetic spectrum. Thanks to cable tv, satellite tv and radio, and the internet, there are unlimited means of distributing information broadly and cheaply (like, for example, this blog). In this environment, there is no need for a supposedly neutral referee over information. Fairness and balance naturally arise from pluralistic sources in the marketplace of ideas.

Moreover, as everyone knows, liberals’ sudden interest in resurrecting the fairness doctrine has absolutely nothing to do with their commitment to fairness or balance. Rather, they are interested in retribution. Talk radio—the only medium to which they want to apply the doctrine—is a conservative island in the vast ocean of liberal media. Though they have tried time and again, liberals simply cannot compete in that medium. (Who wants to listen to a liberal carping three hours a day?) By bringing back the fairness doctrine, liberals hope to do through regulation what they failed to do in the marketplace; namely, get Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, et al., off the air.

President Obama is right to oppose the fairness doctrine. That is the truly liberal position (in the classical sense), even if it is not the position taken by most “progressives” today. The problem is, I don’t really know whether to believe him. After all, as we have seen, all of President Obama’s promises come with expiration dates. I wouldn’t be surprised if he eventually signs a fairness doctrine bill—perhaps going by a new name—if one is passed by Congress.

We all knew it was coming, but today President Obama signed the porkulus bill into law. I completely and totally disagree with this decision for the following reasons:

1. Keynesianism doesn’t work. If a government could magically produce money out of nowhere and then quickly and efficiently pump it back into the economy, then Keynesian policies might lead to economic growth. But it doesn’t work that way. The money has to come from somewhere. Either you tax it out of the productive economy (thereby offsetting any stimulative effect), borrow it from other countries (thereby creating a trade imbalance, raising interest rates, and drying up capital for the productive economy), print the money (thereby creating inflation), or some combination of all the previous parade of horribles.

2. The Porkulus Bill Isn’t Really Keynesian. Even if Keynesian policies did work, most of the porkulus bill doesn’t qualify as stimulative. Very little of the bill (11% according to the Wall Street Journal) is going to infrastructure or things that might be considered stimulative under a generous definition. The rest is good old-fashioned, big-government spending. Increasing the (non-defense) size of the federal government by 80% in one year will not stimulate the economy.

3. Generational Theft. Even if the bill was stimulative, it is appropriate to ask, “At what cost?” Every dime of the porkulus is being borrowed, and our children and grandchildren will be paying it off for generations to come. Why do we have the right to steal from their standard of living in order to raise our own?

4. Hidden Social Policy. Did you know that the porkulus bill effectively repeals the 1996 bi-partisan welfare reform act? Ever since the passage of the 1996 Act, both parties have been fighting over who deserves credit for it–President Clinton or the Republican Congress. As of today, with virtually no debate on the issue, welfare law has been restored to its status quo ante. Is that economic stimulus? Shouldn’t we have debated a change like that rather than slipping it into a 1,000+ page bill?

5. Procedural Irregularities. The bill bypassed the Committee process entirely. The Conference Committee never even let the Republican conferees into the room. Not a single member of Congress of either party read the bill before it was rushed to the floor. In fact, the bill was so long it was physically impossible to read it between the time it was made available to Members and the time of the vote. Why the rush? I believe it was Justice Brandies who said the sunlight is the best disinfectant. Why, then, was the porkulus kept in the dark?

Simply put, this isn’t “change”—it is a farce, a return to the failed liberalism of the past. And it won’t work.

This is an actual photo from a Border’s Bookstore.  See any problem?

Res ipsa loquitur.

A must-read article.  Key quote:  ”The federal government is bankrupt.  In a post-Enron world, if the federal government were a corporation such as General Motors, the President and senior Treasury officers would be in federal penitentiary.”

No point deductions for The One today (I feel a big one coming the next day or two)–just an update to yesterday’s post about Obama’s Caterpillar fib.

Jake Tapper, not content to have simply embarrassed the administration yesterday, decided to rub their nose in it today. Check out this transcript of Tapper and Gibbs discussing it. Who do you think gets the better of the argument? 

I think it’s time to start taking bets on when Gibbs gets replaced. I predict Gibbs gets Daschled by St. Patty’s Day.

This should come as no surprise.

Yesterday, President Obama claimed that the CEO of Caterpillar had promised to rescind some of the 22,000 layoffs the company announced last month if the porkulus bill is passed. He repeated the same claim today.

The problem is, it’s a lie.

Jake Tapper of ABC reports that the CEO was asked today whether the legislation would stop the layoffs, and responded: “I think realistically no. The truth is we’re going to have more layoffs before we start hiring again.”

Thank God for Jake Tapper. He’s one of the few mainstream media figures that is treating the new administration with appropriate journalistic skepticism (i.e., he hasn’t openly drunk the Koolaid). Check out this now-legendary exchange with Robert Gibbs from last week:

Two thumbs way, way up for Jake Tapper for keeping them honest.