2009 or 1984?

The White House has declared an ongoing war on Fox News, claiming they do not produce real news because they don’t suck up to them like the other news stations. If Fox News airs anything unflattering about Obama, it must be opinion news.

Have you ever read George Orwell’s 1984? It was the warning of a totalitarian government that slowly took over, without the people realizing. The job of the main character, Winston Smith, was to rewrite history so that no one could ever disprove what the government claimed history was. The Big Brother government controlled all news media so that their agenda was clear and there was no way for any opposition or telling of the truth.

Thank goodness we have real fair and balanced news:

Former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, gives a great analogy to this situation:

How would the Obama White House deal with Thomas Paine?He challenged the notion that the English King had unquestionable authority over the lives of his subjects. He challenged the notion that Americans were subjects at all, and for that, he made himself Public Enemy Number One of George the Third.

Fox News is doing something similar with the Obama White House today. In stark contrast to the other major media, Fox News (to which I am a contributor) is raising serious questions about the Obama agenda of endlessly expanding government through its economic stimulus, energy and health care policies.The Obama White House's war on Fox News is petty and political at the least, and an abuse of the presidency at the worst. And it's only part of a wider campaign to discredit and destroy the Obama's White House's perceived enemies, be they American businessmen and women or independent journalists.

Already, we've seen this administration put a gag order on an insurance company for warning its customers about the effects of Democratic health care reform, set up an email account for Americans to inform on their fellow citizens' criticisms of its policies, and declared open war on the Chamber of Commerce for its failure to remain mute in the face of the Obama administration's anti-business policies.

To have government officials on the payroll of the taxpayers engaged in the petty politics of institutional destruction, retribution and censorship is scandalous and shameful. To have the president and his senior advisors directing this activity is behavior unbecoming of the presidency.

In fact, it is behavior more in keeping with a monarch than a president.

The president and his advisors no doubt believe they are engaged in a tough but clever political strategy. Time spent attacking Fox, after all, is time not spent answering the American people's concerns about the economy and the costs of health reform. But while these tactics may have served them well in Chicago, they are a fundamental misreading of American history.

The lesson of Washington and Paine is that you can't stop a free people from talking, questioning and seeking the truth. Together, these two men declared American independence from the tyranny of unquestioned authority. They helped found a nation of individuals endowed with rights by their Creator, not granted rights by their king.

But the current White House doesn't seem to get this. If Obama were confronted with Paine today, it's not hard to imagine him sending out Rahm Emmanuel to call Paine a heretic or a pawn of the military industrial complex.

It's also not hard to imagine him failing as utterly as King George did.