[This is an updated version of my earlier post from today]

Yesterday, NPR White House correspondent Ari Shapiro tweeted this:

Today Josh Marshal published a piece called “She Has to Go”, which is all about Lois Lerner, the IRS official in charge of the unit overseeing tax exempt groups, who is expected to plead The Fifth in today’s hearings. Marshall says:

Whether or not she should be fired for whatever she did in the scandal itself, deciding to take the fifth means she needs to be removed from her position.

This same morning, Ezra Klein published “Yes, Heads Should Roll at the IRS” which effectively says the same thing.

Three identical pieces would have been overkill, certainly, so Jonathan Capehart took a different assignment from the meeting at the White House. The result is a beatdown of Ta-Nehisi Coates and other black critics of Obama’s deplorable Morehouse speech, critics, with whom, Capehart insists, poor Obama, just “can’t win.”

Meetings like this have really become a very standard feature of the Obama presidency, and I really only draw people’s attention to this stuff to confirm my overall thesis about the abject servility of these people. I mean, the only thing really newsworthy about these little message-management chats at the White House is the brazenness. I find myself wondering why they happen at all.

I get that in times of scandal or crisis, the president can’t rely, as he normally does, on the average liberal journo’s unerring ability to instinctively provide what he requires, at least not the specifics. But I do wonder why these periodic distributions of talking points require physical meetings at the White House, considering the extent to which social networks make them into very minor scandals. Why not a conference call? An email exchange? Are these methods that insecure?

It almost seems as if the spectacle of the meeting taking place is as important as the message management that comes out of it. For real journalists, Klein, Marshall and Capehart must surely be looked upon with contempt. But for the conformists and status seekers that dominate liberal media, they look like the lucky cool kids, getting the talking points straight from the World’s Most Powerful Man himself — or at least a high-status proxy — and are fodder for fantasies about one day being included in these little tête-à-têtes themselves. These meetings helpfully signify with great precision what they all should be writing and tweeting about, in sync with Klein, Marshall and Capehart, if they ever want that day to come.

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UPDATE

Not that it really adds much to the central Dog Bites Man story, but Politico has confirmed that the aforementioned meeting was with Dear Leader himself and that later in the week the prez met with top-tier lapdogs including Thomas Friedman, David Ignatius and Joe Klein to discuss national security.

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