Remember Obama boasting of record oil production, omitting that it’s actually declined on federal lands he oversees and is way, way up on private lands free of Obama’s grasp? More borscht.

Obama is a pathological liar and a Chicago Democrat, which is repetitive. But still true. Like the little go-fer who served Obama in the White House and the other House and is now mayor of the nation’s most populous Dodge City. Both of them favor new gun controls and both from a city where nearly two citizens per day are blown away.

Obama’s problem is that he can’t have the boys give the same treatment to his critics in D.C. as back home. You saw what New Jersey’s ex-Republican Chris Christie got for his autumn suck-up: Billions in aid. Christie’s best Dem opponent decided not to challenge the incumbent.

And last weekend at Obama’s annual White House banquet for governors, Christie, who doesn’t have buff arms, got plopped right next to Michelle Obama, an honor in some circles.

So, what can Obama do? He can leave a troublemaker off the next State Dinner invite list. Oooh. Wow. That’ll sting in the congressional gym. He can order history’s newest worst secretary of defense to re-direct some project to another state or congressional district. That’s the Washington Way.

Like its weather, the Chicago Way is more in-your-face, direct. Health inspectors, sometimes several at a time, develop a habit of stopping by a business at inconvenient times, muttering the magic word “rats.” City permits may get inexplicably delayed.

An establishment owned by an annoying political disobedient finds its garbage cans strangely overlooked by city crews week after week. Maybe the owner’s nice car with the city sticker gets keyed within days of the last paint repair job. When clients park near a dissident’s law offices, they get parking tickets. Or towed. How can they prove the meter hadn’t run out when appearing before a judge who’s another loyal cog in the Democrat Machine?

But here’s a twist. Now that ex-reporter David Axelrod, Obama’s newly-ex-strategist, has joined the Washington media, along with Obama’s ex-media mouthpiece Robert Gibbs, do you think that pair of sycophants will get their fair share of angry White House complaints over their commentaries?

We regret to say, No.

This troubling revolving-door relationship between propaganda mouthpieces for various administrations who suddenly gain purchase as legitimate reporters or journalists for major national “news” outlets is as troubling as it is surreal:  are we to believe statist hacks who made their bones controlling “narratives” for serial womanizers, victims of giant water rabbit attacks, and now imperial, thin-skinned narcissists with half an “historic” side, will do anything other than give cover to the very agenda that they’ve worked in support of their entire lives?  Does the mere fact of their having been hired by “legitimate” new agencies make these political creatures of a sudden “legitimate” reporters capable of objectivity or neutrality?

Does anyone believe that’s so?

And does anyone believe the spin against this type of argument, which largely relies on some or other formulation of “well, everyone, being by nature subjective, is given to various degrees of unconscious bias, and these political transplants are no different” — particularly when such argument rather obviously and deliberately fails to address that the bias that is so concerning is not at all unconscious but very intentional, and that those newly-minted “journalists” critics are given to scrutinize aren’t accidental mouthpieces for a given manipulated political agenda, but rather have spent the years leading up to their change of careers being its drivers?

We are a country in thrall of the cult of celebrity.  Seasoned sports reporters and broadcasters are increasingly being replaced by largely inarticulate former athletes who rely on hamfisted platitudes, sports cliches, and forced on-set comradery to deliver time-killing commentary, often in very bad suits.  Similarly, our political journalists are increasingly drawn from the ranks of prior propagandists and professional liars — with very little complaint by a public who finds comfort in familiar faces, regardless of the disingenuous nature of their latest professional pose.

We forgive them because they are famous.

Hardly seems the right way to run a representative republic that requires for its proper functioning an informed populace.

But then, for the adepts of Gramsci and Alinsky, et al, this is a feature, not a bug. And it is those adepts who have made their way into positions of institutional power, and who then self-select for ideological reinforcement when hiring (while usually keeping around a few tokens, many of whom quickly learn the lay of the land and lurch left, lest they lose the gig for being too combative against the primary narrative thrust:  see, eg., Joe Scarborough).

Journalism has become all about access, and access is tied to name recognition and fidelity to the official government narrative. Speaking Truth to Power as an ideal loses much of its luster when your ability to do so is threatened by a denial.  So even those journalists who wish to do their jobs (and there are fewer of them than we need) oftentimes understand that, pragmatically, to keep their livelihood, they have to behave in a certain pre-inscribed way.

— Unless of course a Republican is in office. In which case all bets are off.