The New York Times has been a pitiful excuse for a newspaper since Pinch Sulzberger took over. The newspaper of record is now nothing more than a bastion of liberal thinking, siding with terrorists over our military and doing everything they could over the last eight years to bring Bush down. Rather than reporting all the news that’s fit to print, they’ve been exposing their bias for the world to see, twisting news stories to fit their agenda.

However, in Obama’s war with Fox News, even the New York Times can see the obvious. There’s only one winner in this war, and it’s clearly Fox News.

The Obama administration, which would seem to have its hands full with a two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan, opened up a third front last week, this time with Fox News.

Until this point, the conflict had been mostly a one-sided affair, with Fox News hosts promoting tax day “tea parties” that focused protest on the new president, and more recently bringing down the presidential adviser Van Jones through rugged coverage that caught the administration, and other news organizations, off guard. During the health care debate, Fox News has put a megaphone to opponents, some of whom have advanced far-fetched theories about the impact of reform. And even farther out on the edge, the network’s most visible star of the moment, Glenn Beck, has said the president has “a deep-seated hatred for white people.”

Administration officials seemed to have decided that they had had enough.

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,” Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, said in an interview with The New York Times. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Ah, but pretending has traditionally been a valuable part of the presidential playbook. Smiling and wearing beige even under the most withering news media assault is not only good manners, but also has generally been good politics. While there is undoubtedly a visceral thrill in finally setting out after your antagonists, the history of administrations that have successfully taken on the media and won is shorter than this sentence.

… Even though almost all the critiques contained a kernel of truth, in each instance the folks who had the barrels of ink, and now pixels, seemed to come out ahead. So far, the only winner in this latest dispute seems to be Fox News. Ratings are up 20 percent this year, and the network basked for a week in the antagonism of a sitting president.

It could all be written off as a sideshow, but it may present a genuine problem for Mr. Obama, who took great pains during the campaign to depict himself as being above the fray of over-heated partisan squabbling. In his victory speech he promised, “I will listen to you, especially when we disagree.”

The Times, like many Americans, is slowly coming to realize that everything Obama said during his campaign was a lie. When he claimed to be above the partisan squabbling and the politics-as-usual atmosphere, he didn’t mean it. What he really meant was that he wanted to eliminate all opposition and criticism, and in that sense, we would be “united”.

Starting a “war” with Fox News is ridiculous. Obama has every other mainstream media outlet eating out of the palm of his hand (or perhaps an orifice). Most news organizations are now more propaganda arms of the government than they are a free press. But Fox News is the only outlet that has dared to not swallow the Obama Kool-Aid, that has the audacity to think for themselves and report both sides of the story, and it infuriates Obama. When they interview Americans who don’t like the stimulus package or his health care reform, it gets underneath his skin. He can’t take the criticism. He can’t stand that Fox News won’t do everything he wants them to. They should be bending over for him, like every other news network.

But all this war on Fox News does it shows what a pitiful excuse for a president he is. First, it just goes to show how thin-skinned he is. If he really can’t take any criticism, then that says more about him than it does about the network doing the criticizing. He could use them as a way to show himself as the bigger man, and use their opposition as a way to further debate, but instead he wants them shut down. Second, it shows how petty and insecure he is. If he was confident in the job that he was doing, and confident that he was a good leader, then why should he get so rattled? Why should he be lowering the prestige of the presidency over some idiotic squabble with a news network just because they disagree with him?

And anyways, doesn’t he have enough on his plate already? Really, he should have enough to keep him occupied without having to take on Fox News as well. I mean, really — two wars, a struggling economy, skyrocketing debt, problems with Iran and North Korea, health care reform… does he really need to add in a war with Fox News? Apparently, Obama isn’t aware of the concept of spreading oneself too thin.

This has done nothing but make Fox News even more popular, and make Obama look like an even bigger idiot than usual. Even the New York Times can see it, and that in and of itself is saying a lot.

Hat Tip: Newsbusters