Reply #14: I'm with Gibbs!

[Cha]

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"At times I've found White House press secretary Robert Gibbs to be unnecessarily irascible, and maybe his lashing out at the constant grumbling of the "professional left" wasn't the best tactic. You want the base worked up -- but for you, not about you.

Nonetheless, his basic point was spot on: The complainers from the left are, in some combination, myopic, forgetful and deranged.

Gibbs is far from the only White House official with these frustrations, but he's the first to share them on the record and, therefore, the first to walk them back. He issued a statement longer than the original offending words acknowledging that he may have spoken "inartfully" -- which is Washington-speak for honestly -- and confessing to watching "too much cable."

That last part may be true. As to the rest of it -- Gibbs was right the first time.


"I hear these people saying he's like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested," Gibbs told The Hill's Sam Youngman, in an interview published Tuesday. "I mean, it's crazy."

This "professional left," he added, "will be satisfied when we have Canadian health care and we've eliminated the Pentagon. That's not reality."

Indeed, for all the derision from the left about the Bush administration not being "reality-based," many lefty bloggers and talking heads have failed to be reality-based in assessing the Obama administration.

Health-care reform, in this glass-half-empty world, is a disappointment because it lacks a public option. The president's failure to close Guantanamo or end the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is a betrayal. If only President Obama was willing to bang heads, name names, stand tough, he would have been able to get -- fill in the blank -- a bigger stimulus, tougher financial reform, new legislation to help unions organize.

Excuse me, but can these people not count to 60? Have they somehow failed to notice that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have not exactly been playing nice? That while the left laments Obama's minor deviations from party orthodoxy, the right has been portraying him, with some success, as an out-of-control socialist?

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http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/08/robert_gibbs_was_right_to_crit.html