White House "chills" on free speech

  Two weeks ago, the Office of the Special Counsel publicly recommended that White House counselor Kellyanne Conway be fired for repeatedly violating the Hatch Act, prompting many people to Google what the Hatch Act is (it’s a law that bars federal employees from engaging in political activity in the course of their work) and President Trump to give an interview to Fox News where he stated that, “[I]t looks to me like they’re trying to take away her right of free speech, and that’s not just fair.” (Last week, the president tweeted his support for a proposed constitutional amendment to outlaw burning the American flag — an act the Supreme Court has repeatedly held to be a protected form of political expression — thus ending his streak as a First Amendment advocate.)

Gene Policinski: At long last, the stuff of journalism

  The resignation of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. White House internal disputes that stall policy decisions. Even a mini-crisis involving North Korea.

  At long last: the stuff of journalism.

  After seeming eons of the squishiness of reporting on campaign claims and counter-claims, email investigations that went nowhere, and distractions including faux-home TV shopping pitches, late-night tweets and daytime insults, a free press is now in full-operating mode in the role that the nation’s founders intended: as a watchdog on government.

Gene Policinski: Wrong. Good idea – if it works both ways. Missed the point

  In order: Wrong. Good idea — if it works both ways. Missed the point. And, wrong.

  Trump administration senior advisers Stephen Bannon and Kellyanne Conway each vented — again — against “the media” in the midst of a turbulent week. Their comments are worth parsing.

  Bannon, not long departed from the perpetually vocal, ultra-conservative Breitbart News online site, said on Jan. 25 that “the media should … keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.” In that rare news interview, he also called the news media “the opposition.”

  And then there’s Conway, complaining to “Fox News Sunday” on Jan. 29 that “Not one network person has been let go. Not one silly political analyst and pundit who talked smack all day long about Donald Trump has been let go….”

Richard Cohen: Trump’s whisperer-in-chief is treading on dangerous ground

  The chief strategist in the White House, a man who rallied a growing white nationalist movement behind Donald Trump, is now telling the news media to “keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”

  We should all be outraged – and more than a little unnerved.

  We all know that conservative politicians have been trying to delegitimize the mainstream press for decades. And, indeed, conservatives have created a constellation of alternative media more to their liking – Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, to name the most obvious.

  But with Trump, we’re witnessing something different, something more insidious. Something that seems pathological.