If ever a cliche needed to be retired, it’s the one about “speaking truth to power.” And if the recent use of this self-congratulatory phase, by top White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, doesn’t put us out of its misery, nothing will.
Jarrett was being interviewed by CNN’s Campbell Brown about the White House’s criticism of Fox News. Brown, bless her, was asking tough questions that placed Jarrett on the defensive. In a last gasp effort to defend her position that Fox’s conservative opinion show hosts are more worthy of criticism than their left-liberal counterparts on MSNBC, Jarrett stated that the White House was “speaking truth to power.”
Can we be far from “newspeak”when the most powerful office in the world holds itself out as speaking truth to power when it criticizes a cable news network?
Either Jarrett is an air-head or the Obama administration is a serious threat to freedom. The answer is, some of both, I think.
JOHN adds: I agree that Jarrett’s claim is ridiculous, but I think it has a history. Isn’t it a time-honored tradition for socialist governments, both national and Marxist, to continue to campaign against the “powerful” on behalf of the dispossessed, long after they have assumed control and have shot, imprisoned or cowed the supposedly “powerful?” It seems to me that Jarrett, knowingly or not, was placing the administration in a Peronist or Castroite tradition. Nancy Pelosi does something similar when she purports to defend average citizens against the predations of the mighty insurance companies, which are actually, from the perspective of the federal government, like so many fatted calves.
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