As I noted in a Facebook update earlier, imagine for a second, if you will, if President Bush orchestrated a presser question with a blogger from Red State or Free Republic. Do you think the response would be different? Not that there’s much of a response to this at all. But there should be. The President took another question from The Huffington Post today.

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This is an openly partisan (in the President’s favor, of course) news outlet being treated as a mainstream source. This puts The Huffington Post just a few questions behind Fox News in the total-questions-asked-at-Presidential-pressers column. If that doesn’t strike you as ridiculous, I give up. If it doesn’t irritate you, you aren’t ripe for being irritated. And if you’re so far gone at this point, so engrossed in the Cult of Personality that you don’t take issue with this, the towel has been thrown.

OK, maybe I overplayed my hand a bit there. But it’s aggravating to watch these scripted news orgies where anyone who does dare to force a point is silenced. And to watch the media fawn over the idea that a President would not only take a question from a blogger but from a blogger who got that question from an Iranian reader — oh, my! what a technological achievement! — is enough to make me want to cover my keyboard in vomit.

Nico Pitney, the blogger who asked the second question ahead of Reuters, CBS, ABC, CNN, Fox News and everyone else with a microphone and camera, is not to be vilified here, he’s doing a solid service to his readers. I’ve read some of HuffPo’s Iran election coverage myself and it’s been decent. The target of my aggression in this case is a press corps that doesn’t want to hold a popular President up to the same standards they used for his predecessor. Say that one five times fast.

“Nico, I know you and all across the Internet, we’ve been seeing a lot of reports coming out of Iran,” Obama said, addressing Pitney. “I know there may actually be questions from people in Iran who are communicating through the Internet. Do you have a question?”

Why, of course he did. I mean, you did ask him to have one prepared, didn’t you?

“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 the — of what the demonstrators there are working towards?”

Here’s Obama’s answer to the question…

There’s an ulterior motive at play here. Democrats, since the days of Bill Clinton, have been haunted by Conservative blogs. They’ve tried, over and over again, to denigrate them and make those authors who write negative items about them out to be dimwits ‘in pajamas’. They’ve had to face the wrath of many a daunting headline on the Drudge Report and they’ve just about had enough. So how do you make the folks who support your agenda, and attack those who have long been attacking you, look more reasonable or professional than their Conservative counterparts? You call on them ahead of Reuters.

Whereas the Bush administration could never have dreamed of calling on a blogger from Hot Air, Obama gets away with this scot-free. Does Politico get a question every now and then? Sure. But they’re not a partisan group hell bent on erasing Republican views from the arena of ideas. And what kills me here is the mainstream outlets are too busy bowing to the President, mentioning how ‘cool’ and ‘intelligent’ he is (leg thrill-inspiring, even), to question anything as petty as this.

I’m just sitting here scratching my head wondering who’s next. How long until Robert Gibbs calls on a blogger from DailyKos.com? I’m wondering when the press corp will start calling our President out for not living up to his word. The divide between the lovers and the haters may be growing but I’m wondering when those folks without an ax to grind will jump off the float and critique the parade a bit. I give it three months until we see an approval rating under 50% and the media realizes there might just be an audience (in the case of the Big Three, a dwindling audience) with an appetite for some criticism.

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