Media Elite’s Secret Dinners at With White House Staff

Last Tuesday evening, Rahm Emanuel quietly slipped into an eighth-floor office at the Watergate.

Watergate…That may be an omen!

As white-jacketed waiters poured red and white wine and served a three-course salmon and risotto dinner, the White House chief of staff spent two hours chatting with some of Washington’s top journalists — excusing himself to take a call from President Obama and another from Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are hoping to keep our jobs and have to watch family and friends lose theirs and try to balance a budget and pay their bills.

For more than a year, David Bradley, the Atlantic’s soft-spoken owner, has hosted these off-the-record dinners at a specially built table in his glass-enclosed office overlooking the Potomac. And the guests, from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to Jordan’s King Abdullah II, are as A-list as they come.

That’s what it’s all about now anyway, why report the news?  We all just want to be celebrities and on the A-List (remind anyone of those needing to be popular in high school?)

“It’s just a joy for me,” Bradley says. “These are reflective, considered conversations, which is hard to do when you’re going after headlines for the next day’s publication.” While the guests seem quite open, says the businessman who bought Atlantic a decade ago, he is new enough to journalism “that I can’t tell the difference between genuine candor and deeply rehearsed candor.”

Emanuel says he enjoyed the chance to “put aside the adversarial. . . . I tried to be honest and frank and hope they felt that way. They want context, they want thinking. You’re not selling, you’re presenting.”

When has anyone in Obama’s administration presented…without a teleprompter that is?  Their entire shtick is a marketing campaign so of course they are selling.

Still, the catered gatherings also sound rather cozy, like some secret-handshake gathering of an entrenched elite. Are the top-level officials, strategists and foreign leaders there for serious questioning or risk-free spin sessions? And what exactly is the journalistic benefit if the visitors are protected by a shield of anonymity?

Among those in regular attendance are David Brooks and Maureen Dowdof the New York Times, Gene Robinson and Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post, NBC’s David Gregory, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, PBS’s Gwen Ifill, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum, former Time managing editor Walter Isaacson and staffers from Bradley’s Atlantic and National Journal, including Ron Brownstein, Andrew Sullivanand Jonathan Rauch.

Glad to see the “Elected Conservatives” of the Democrats, traitor Maureen and faux Brooks, were there to represent what it is we definitely are not.  I’m also happy to see that Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish was there, you know, the guy who started the whole Trig Trutherism?  Sick! If you lambaste a real conservative you get invited to these wonderfully expensive dinners, most likely brought to you by the taxpayer dollar.

Politicians have been sharing off-the-record meals and drinks with reporters roughly forever. During the transition, Obama attended a three-hour dinner with conservative “conservative” columnists at George Will’s Chevy Chase home.

George Will – another fake conservative!  It is so incredibly obvious how the establishment played a big part in this past election as well as many others.  The media is as much a part of the establishment as the politicians on Capitol Hill.  It’s sickening how intolerant they are of anyone who does not “fit-in.”  Like, I said in “The Establishment Hates Rocking the Boat,” look for those on the outside, not those who are part of the establishment or could be easily swayed into being part of it – those outsiders are the ones you want in the White House, they will change the way things are done and turn this country back around heading towards a Republic again, not an Oligarchy.

The Bradley dinners are different because of their regular nature — a floating group of 12 to 16 journalists, with specialists added depending on the subject matter — and the rarefied level of access. Others who have dined include General Electric chief executive Jeffrey Immelt, former Bush White House aide Karl Rove, Gen. David Petraeus, White House economic adviser Larry Summers, former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Bradley always begins the questioning and tries to maintain a civil tone, while the journalists tend to pursue their favorite subjects. At the dinner with Emanuel, who waved off the shortcake dessert, participants said that Brownstein asked about health-care reform, Goldberg pushed on Iran and Mayer pressed him about torture techniques in terror interrogations.

I love how the elite, who have no concept of what it means to be an average American, discuss these important topics as if it were a board game or some type of “would you rather” or “truth or dare game.” The elite, as they have always done, just sit around playing with other peoples’ lives – because they seem to always think they know what is best.  If we look back into history, how has that played out?

“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.” ~ Susan Sontag

The networks have given President Obama more coverage than George W. Bush and Bill Clinton combined in their first months — and more positive assessments to boot.

I wonder why!?  Could it be all the fancy dinners he invites them to?  Or maybe the following quote can enlighten some:

“Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.” ~ Hannah Arendt

In a study to be released today, the Center for Media and Public Affairs and Chapman University found the nightly newscasts devoting nearly 28 hours to Obama’s presidency in the first 50 days. (Bush, by contrast, got nearly eight hours.) Fifty-eight percent of the evaluations of Obama were positive on the ABC, CBS and NBC broadcasts, compared with 33 percent positive in the comparable period of Bush’s tenure and 44 percent positive for Clinton. (Evaluations by officials from the administration or either political party were not counted.)

On Fox News, by contrast, only 13 percent of the assessments of Obama were positive on the first half of Bret Baier’s “Special Report,” which most resembles a newscast. The president got far better treatment in the New York Times, where 73 percent of the assessments in front-page pieces were positive.

A striking contrast: Obama’s personal qualities drew more favorable coverage than his policies, with 32 percent of the sound bites positive on CBS, 31 percent positive on NBC and 8 percent positive on Fox.

This continues to disturb and disgust me.  His personal popularity is high but people don’t like his policies?  I don’t get it.  I don’t understand how someone so out of touch with regular folks, implementing policies that will devastate this nation and kill the economy, is still popular!?

“It’s time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, “We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.” This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power, is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves. (October 27, 1964)” Ronald Reagan

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