Dennis Miller: Ahem ... All not so quiet on the cable front

By: Dennis Miller
OpEd Contributor
October 30, 2009

Who'd have thought that the heretofore ubermeek Obama administration would attempt the first surge of its tremulous tenure against my Fox News Network? As every demented B-lister in a leopard skin fez and a doorman's outfit from the Plaza Hotel steps up to the psychotic speaker's corner to tear the Great Satan (uh, that would be us) a new one, our guy has been loathe to return rhetorical fire for fear of stepping on any sandaled toes.

But Fox News? That's another story. That's a sitter at the net for the quasimystical LOTUS POTUS. With the mainstream (downstream?) media more in his pocket than a grizzled train conductor's pocket watch, he had to look far and wide for a news organization that had not signed a 5 W's abrogation/suicide pact with David Axelrod. And there stood Fox, still skeptical of public officials and under the stellar rein of Brit Hume, still skilled in the ways of good old-fashioned "Woodstein" shoe leather journalism.

As The New York Times scribes stand fawning behind the sawhorses placed beneath Ringo-bama's top-floor window hoping for some acknowledgment, a glimpse, a smile, a hanky, something, anything!!!!! to drift down from the Great One's penthouse, Fox continues to grind. As the Secret Service actually contemplates filing a restraining order against some of BO's more amped-up devotees in the liberal press, Shep, Chris Wallace and the boys loom, eyebrows raised higher than a Rastafarian at a Phish concert.

Listen, I don't believe President Obama to be anything other than a patriot. I don't think of him as evil, malevolent, Machiavellian or subversive. None of the above. And I most definitely don't think of him as (oh my God!) my black president. He's my president, pure and simple, so please fold the race card back into the deck if your intent at the end of this column was to post a comment trying to Oddjob my carotid artery out with that tired old ploy. What I do think is that the president is just plain wrong in his approach to Fox. I not only think he is wrong, but as we say in the comedian trade, I think he has a "premise problem."

In his rush to humble America in the eyes of the world, he strives to placate every mook coming down the midway with a bullied nation in their hip pocket and in turn supplant them in the villain column with a national news agency whose most egregious error would appear to be not swooning every time he opens his "wiser than thou" piehole to speak in encyclical.

What's wrong with this picture? The waiting room outside Dr. Obama's Snake Oil Emporium is populated by the likes of General McChrystal, the Dalai Lama and Fox News, meanwhile Kadaffi, Chavez and Aqua-velvajad are walking around backstage with All-Access laminates. Not since Lana Turner hooked up with Johnny Stompanato has a great star exhibited such poor taste in men.

Obama's play is to downsize as far as American chest-thumping goes. I happen to believe we have oodles to be proud of, he feels the nation would be better off as the lion that squeaked. But if in lieu of engaging our actual enemies, he believes he'd rather pick a fight with a straw man, he has definitely misidentified the Obi-Wan Kenobi of Fox News, Roger Ailes.

You see, a straw man is a straw man because he usually has no spine. Ailes has a spine made of a substance that they use to cut titanium. Ailes makes Rahm Emanuel look like an Amish Lamaze instructor and if they're gonna lock antlers with Ailes, they'd best wear a cup.

Gotta go now. Gibbs (that's Sgt. Shultz to you) is coming to the podium and I anticipate a little incoming. Just gonna have to dig my Fox-hole a smidge deeper tonight. "The horror ... the horror."

Comedian and commentator extraordinaire Dennis Miller appears regularly in the "Miller Time" segment of "The O'Reilly Factor "on Fox News, as well as his own daily talk radio show heard on more than 250 stations across the country.