NewsCorp Gets Tough on Obama

Holman Jenkins writes a weekly column each Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal. Last week, he ratcheted up the level of stridency in his criticism of the US president by exposing the folly of his positions on the GM mess.

Jenkins has typically been rather careful and indirect in his tone when dealing with politics. However, last week's column seemed to take his recent, more adversarial tone to a new height. Prior to this, he had probably reached his high-water mark by calling New York AG Andrew Cuomo a thug.

At the time, I suggested to colleagues that Jenkins' columns must now be vetted by Rupert Murdoch himself, because Jenkins' verbiage had escalated to the point that political recriminations surely would be considered by aggrieved parties.

Here are a few choice passages from Jenkins' column last week,

"It's good to be the king -- until you start tripping over your own robe.

So King Barack the Mild is finding as he tries to dictate the terms of what amounts to an out-of-court bankruptcy for Chrysler and GM. He wants Chrysler's secured lenders to give up their right to nearly full recovery in a bankruptcy in return for 15 cents on the dollar. They'd be crazy to do so, of course, except that these banks also happen to be beholden to the administration for TARP money.

Wasn't TARP supposed to be about restoring a healthy banking system? Isn't that a tad inconsistent with banks just voluntarily relinquishing valuable claims on borrowers? Don't ask.

His retainer, Steven Rattner, has delivered word that the king's pleasure is that these unsecured creditors give up 100% of their claims in return for GM stock.

It may also be the king's pleasure, he advised, to convert at some point the government's own $13 billion in bailout loans into GM stock.

There's just one problem: Why on earth would GM's creditors -- who include not just bondholders but the UAW's health-care trust -- want any part of this deal?

No wonder the king's mediation of 40 years of stalemated labor and business issues in the auto sector isn't going so well. There's a reason royal discretion has long been outmoded as a way to run an economy: Things just work better if a realm's subjects are left to resolve their own disputes and interests through the impersonal mechanism of the markets and the law.

King Barack has only been on his throne for three months. His policies already have devolved into savage incoherence.

But let's face it, the king is also somewhat lacking in the lion-heartedness department.

He's on record saying that the only sensible way to reduce fossil-fuel dependence is to put a price on it, as with cap and trade. Then why not have the courage of his convictions and do away with the proven ineffectualness and perversity of trying to regulate automotive fuel mileage directly?

King Barack could take a leaf from St. Jimmy the Simple, who faced a collapse of the railroad industry. He signed the Staggers deregulation law, returning power to the industry itself to decide what services to provide and which customers to chase. What had previously been an industrial basket case, halfway nationalized already, fixed itself almost overnight.

He might consult with the Sage of Omaha, who has become a fan of the rail business."

Hardly Jenkins' usual mild, irony-filled prose.

Add this to Bill O'Reilly's interrogation of Newsweek's publisher last night, in which he claimed that only Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, both Newscorp properties, are reporting honestly on the new administration, and you get a sense of something larger brewing in media-land.