Obama's "Two-minute Hate" now focused on AMA

Excellent column from Jim Geraghty: The Jim Cramer Treatment

We haven’t lived in President Obama’s America for long, but already we are witnessing a strange new phenomenon: Previously apolitical figures and organizations find themselves demonized, and then forgotten, with the speed, fury, and transience of a summer thunderstorm.

After criticizing Obama,

Suddenly, Jim Cramer became a much bigger figure. Suddenly, he became a regular butt of jokes on The Daily Show, and host Jon Stewart ripped into Cramer during their “interview.” Suddenly, the New York Times felt compelled to spotlight Cramer’s bad stock predictions and declare, “his personal brand has taken a beating in the last month.” Media Matters felt the need to establish a new site, “Financial Media Matters.”

. . . The host retains his same manic, relentless, over-the-top style; but for some reason, when he stopped criticizing the president, major media voices lost interest in ridiculing him.

Now it's the AMA who, after coming out with criticisms of Obama's health care takeover, has a bull's eye painted on its back:

The latest entity to be subjected to this Two-Minute Hate is the American Medical Association (AMA).

Americans generally like their doctors. Sixty-seven percent rate their physicians’ ethics and standards high or very high; the only professionals with a more favorable rating are nurses, grade-school teachers, pharmacists, and military officers. Most Americans don’t really think much about the AMA, and it seems likely that if the organization objected to a health-care reform proposal, patients would at least want to hear them out.

Though it's 100% reasonable that the AMA would take a stand on this -- "If the AMA isn’t supposed to weigh in on an issue such as this, why does it exist? If it won’t look out for the interests of its membership, who will?" -- any deviation on their part from the Obama plan is unacceptable, amounting to what Geraghty calls "apostasy."

And (go figure!) the Daily Kos, Media Matters, and the NYT have taken their cue*, denouncing the AMA, an entity that was previously almost entirely off their radar screens:

When the AMA endorsed gun control and climate change, few Democrats or liberals felt that a group of doctors was meddling outside its area of expertise — even though few of the AMA’s members are criminologists or environmental scientists. Now, when the group warns that a legislative proposal threatens to greatly worsen the current system for providing care — and thus affect the AMA’s central mission — it is suddenly unrepresentative of the nation’s doctors, a “relic,” a “typical Washington special interest,” and “in fact complicit in driving up health care costs.”

More details from Geraghty. It's shameless, naked Alinski-ism.

(How did I miss this Alinsky column by Geraghty from May 14? It's another must-read.) *Update: Oops. Didn't miss it; just forgot about it. Commented on it here.

*Update from RS McCain:

It's the uncanny coordination of the messaging that makes the Obama media such an engine of terror to its enemies. This harkens back to the JournoList revelation. Once you understand that there is an actual network Demnocratic political operatives, liberal policy advocates, progressive bloggers and major media journalists connected via a single communications link, suddenly the modus operandi is no longer mysterious.

[. . .]

Offline private communications that the public never sees are as important as the stuff headlined at Drudge.

Think about that. Think about it hard. Because you can't beat what you don't understand.

Read the rest.

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