The wingnuts are at it again, projecting their paranoia onto Obama. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) was a recent mouthpiece for Fox's fear, bizarrely cautioning the administration: "don't create an enemies list." Alexander describes the besieged mentality of the Nixon presidency--which really did have such a list--and cautions Obama against following that path:
I have an uneasy feeling, only ten months into this new administration, that we're beginning to see symptoms of this same kind of animus [toward "anyone who seemed to disagree with administration policies"] developing in the Obama administration.
He draws several spurious comparisons between the two administrations before unleashing the whine:
Even the president, in his address to Congress on health care, threatened to "call out" members of congress who disagreed with him.
Obama's actual statement during that address on 9 September was quite different:
I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it's better politics to kill this plan than to improve it. (Applause.) I won't stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. If you misrepresent what's in this plan, we will call you out. (Applause.)
Rather than calling out mere disagreement, Obama stated that he would be criticizing misrepresentations. It seems that Alexander and other Fox personalities are concerned about being able to stick to the facts. Steve Benen calls Alexander's Obama-Nixon comparison "insane," writing that:
While I don't doubt this will make for weeks of breathless speculation on Fox News, and give a wide variety of pundits endless entertainment, that doesn't make it any less ridiculous.
As we've seen countless times, ridiculousness is no barrier to belief in wingnut world.
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