Media fawning

You gotta give the national news media credit: They're nothing if not predictable.

First it was the just plain weird way that a New York Times editorial labeled four liberal activist U.S. Supreme Court justices after they voted to uphold Constitution-shredding Obamacare.

Granted, it was an editorial — a vehicle for opinion — so the Times had every right to be ludicrous. But a lot of readers no doubt chortled or recoiled on spotting this particular formulation in the paper: "Chief Justice Roberts deserves substantial credit for joining the court's moderate-liberals in finding the mandate constitutional ... and for sparing the country a spasm of outrage."

Translation: Roberts spared The New York Times' editorial jokesters a spasm of outrage, since the rest of us keep telling pollsters over and over that we don't want Obamacare.

But what's with that "moderate-liberal" piffle? It's doubtful that anyone outside Berkeley would describe Stephen Breyer or Sonia Sotomayor that way. They're liberals — and evidently proud of it. It's okay to say so.

Then there was a more recent side-splitting gem from The Washington Post in a purported news article on President Barack Obama's handling of the economy. The story came out a day after the latest employment figures showed hardly any job creation in June and the rate of joblessness stuck at an abysmal 8.2 percent.

Get a load of this: "With voter impressions about the state of the economy hardening four months before Election Day, the slowdown is making it more difficult for President Obama to make the case that his economic policies have been entirely effective."

Huh?

Don't they mean he's struggling to make the case that his economic policies have been effective in the slightest? We've now had 41 straight months of 8 percent-plus unemployment — a record since the Great Depression.

The "stimulus" failed. Showering federal tax dollars on green energy and other schemes that we keep being told represent a "future" that never quite seems to arrive hasn't worked. Adding Obamacare certainly hasn't helped matters. And neither has the president's role in racking up $16 trillion in national debt.

Obama has a lot more to do between now and the election in November than try to impress upon voters some vain illusion that his policies have been "entirely effective."

Heck, we're not even sure that boastful wording would have been uttered by Obama himself, and he is not a leader given to modest pronouncements about his decidedly modest achievements. He once said his "legislative and foreign policy accomplishments" were on par with those of any president — "with the possible exceptions of Johnson, FDR and Lincoln."

Uh, yeah.

Thank goodness he need never be reduced to suggesting that his policies are "entirely effective."

He has more than enough fans in the media to do that for him.