We knew the card game, and now recognize the dealer.

It seems like ever since Chris “Tingle” Matthews declared, “My job is to make the Obama Presidency a success!”, the legacy media has been doing it’s best to ensure that result.  But, in a rare moment of candor and, you know, actual reporting, they seem to have pinpointed the real source of all the race card dealing and opponent vilification of late:

 

The White House officials are eager to avoid the perception that the president is directly engaging critics who appear to speak only for a vocal minority, and part of their strategy involves pushing material to liberal and progressive media outlets to steer the coverage in their direction, senior advisers said.

When critics lashed out at President Obama for scheduling a speech to public school students this month, accusing him of wanting to indoctrinate children to his politics, his advisers quickly scrubbed his planned comments for potentially problematic wording. They then reached out to progressive Web sites such as the Huffington Post, liberal bloggers and Democratic pundits to make their case to a friendly audience.

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[emphasis-ed.]
Behold, a trifecta of admissions casually tossed out as if they were common knowledge; and confirming suspicions held by this writer and others.  First, an admission that the Obama administration is directing the tone and content of the coverage to achieve the narrative they desire.  And, it seems that the CRAZEE H8TING WINGNUTZ were not far off the mark in voicing concern over the President’s address to the nations schoolchildren; otherwise why would the speech text need “scrubbing”.  Finally, they are pushing out the talking points through a network of nutroot bloggers, Democratic pundits, and friendly legacy media outlets; utilizing their go-between channels of “jouno-list”, CAP’s “Progressive Media”, MoveOn.org, “Common Purpose”, and of course, the daily conference call featuring Rahm Emmanuel, George Stephanopoulos, Paul Begala, and James Carville.

As I noted yesterday, the distributed talking points are faithfully parroted in many publications such as, McClatchy and the NY Times; the latter providing the double service of not only pushing the desired meme, as MoDo did here while breathlessly bemoaning today’s lack of civility, but also declaring faithfully the intent of the President and all his men to steer clear of the growing “race debate”.  I guess this is not part of the “conversation on race” that Obama wanted to have, in which case they shouldn’t have brought it up !

But this strategy is not working out the way it was intended, or as it usually has.  While the usual suspects profess their usual OUTRAGE!, some writers are starting to openly mock the strategy as well as the melodramatic crying and gnashing of teeth.  And this seems to only make the liberals even more angry, as Peter Wehner notes:

It’s fascinating to watch how furious liberals have become despite Obama’s being president and Democrats’ controlling the Senate and the House by wide margins. This period should be—they expected it to be—years of milk and honey for them. But events and reality have intervened. They see the Anointed One, Barack Obama—their “sort of God”—failing. He is not only a mere mortal but also a deeply flawed one.
…
Many liberals simply cannot process this new data, this horrible turn of events. What we are seeing is the equivalent of a computer crash. As a result, they are returning to what has become for some liberals an emotional and psychological norm: anger and fury, overheated and reckless charges, bitterness and pettiness. It is embodied in people like Frank Rich and Keith Olbermann and Joe Klein, but some version of this affliction extends to many others.

Maybe it is simply misdirected anger, but the always astute Victor David Hanson sees it as more like a frustration:

A better explanation than right-wing racism for the Left’s exasperation is that in the Bush wilderness years, the Left assumed permanent political marginalization, adopted an ends-justify-the-means strategy of street rhetoric against Bush, then found themselves unexpectedly as the establishment, and now are appalled that anyone might emulate their own past emotional outbursts.

[emphasis-ed.]
That same old hypocrisy of, “What’s good for me, is not for thee”; as always, some animals at the farm are more equal than others.  As I’ve said before, this canard is wearing thin.  People are starting to notice that criticism of the President’s agenda results in one being branded a racist, and reject it.  This definitely won’t help Michelle’s children…

So to the President and his administration I say, what’ll it be?  A straight up debate; a clean game?  Or will you keep dealing those race cards from the bottom of the deck?

UPDATE: The inimitable Ric Locke weighs in on the careless use of the race card.