NEOAVATARA

The Media/Obama Love Affair is apparently over...sigh...

Ah, it must have been glorious while it lasted, huh Mr. President?

You know what we saw today in the White House Press Briefing Room?  The end of the honeymoon.  Oh, and what a glorious time it was for the press…a time when the young President, with the beautiful family, could do no wrong, and love and cherry blossoms were in the air…

Well, it pretty much ended in a big, hollow thud on Tuesday.

To Mr. Obama’s credit, he came out strong in the press conference, finally condemning the Iranian regime for attacking protesters…of course, it was 10 days too late, but still, give him what little credit he deserves.  He specifically mentioned Neda, the young woman who was killed with video taping, who has since become a virtual martyr for the cause.  Still, it took her death on YouTube to get Obama to make a strong stand against the regime.

But the press (gasp!) was still not satisfied.

Clearly, it started with Iran.  The opening statement was strong…but the press surprisingly didn’t buy it.  The obviously question, finally from Fox News’ Major Garrett: “What took you so long?”   The president responded by saying, in part, “we’ve been entirely consistent, Major, in terms of how we’ve approached this.”  Garrett followed by asking if the Iranian delegation was still invited to July Fourth celebrations at the White House.  Obama conspicuously avoided giving a straight answer. (The White House changed their answer the next day…).

Um, yeah.  First, NO MEDDLING.  Now, MEDDLING.  Sure.  But it got even worse.  Here’s an exchange between Mr. Obama and NBC’s Chuck Todd:

Todd: Mr. President, I want to follow up on Iran. You have avoided, twice, spelling out consequences. You’ve hinted that there would be from the international community, if they continue to violate — and you said “violate these norms.” You seemed to hint that there — there are human rights violations taking place.

MR. OBAMA: I’m not hinting. I think that when a young woman gets shot on the street when she gets out of her car, that’s a problem.

Todd: Then why won’t you spell out the consequences that the Iranian people…

MR. OBAMA: Because I think that we don’t know yet how this thing is going to play out. I know everybody here is on a 24-hour news cycle. I’m not. OK?

Ouch.  And that from NBC…yikes.

Then, in what was a planned question, Obama flubbed again.  Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post (which, incidentally, has done an excellent job filtering news from Iran) asked this question from an internet poster from Iran:

Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad? And if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn’t that a betrayal of — of what the demonstrators there are working to achieve?

Great question!  Except, Obama did his classic avoidance routine.  He stated he didn’t have inspectors on the ground during the election, and he couldn’t verify if it was rigged or not.  Then he said it was the Iranian people’s decision if the government was legitimate or not.  Great, except the question was how Mr. Obama would view that legitimacy.  Talk about avoiding the question.  So in the end…we still don’t know.  I am sure that the Iranian poster was happy that the President at least got the chance to avoid his question.

Jake Tapper from ABC then noted that Mr. Obama had not answered a previous question on health care from David Jackson of USA Today (after two minutes of speaking, mind you) on whether he would sign a bill without a public option.   Obama was not pleased.  I bet this is a tougher question on health care than Obama will get on his ABC News special…

Reporters then grilled him on his smoking habit…Obama was not happy.  Mr. Obama would later knock a reporter’s attempt to tie his smoking habit to yesterday’s tobacco legislation because, he argued, the bill is focused on children.   “I think it’s fair, Margaret, to just say that you just think it’s neat to ask me about my smoking as opposed to it being relevant to my new law,” he said.  He followed that up by stating that he never smoked in front of his children.  Note that he does smoke in front of the rest of America, including our children.

This was a mess of a press conference for Obama.  Forget the debacle of stuff he did mention…he didn’t even use the following words:  Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Pakistan, Soldiers, War.  I guess those things aren’t that important to Barack Obama.

Sure, there was still ridiculous questions still given by reporters who are still in the daze of love for the President.  But for the first time, reporters from most of the mainstream media outlets asked legitimate questions, which Obama just could not handle.

Welcome back to the real world, Mr. President.