Fox News' Bret Baier Chats with Barry

Hat tip to Investor's Business Daily

Leadership: After his interview with Fox News, it's obvious why President Obama hasn't held a real press conference in eight months: He has no intention of explaining the legislative lunacy he has loosed on America.

Some may call Bret Baier impolite, or "disrespectful of the office," as some put it, for the way the Fox anchor kept interrupting Obama during the interview Wednesday evening. But we'd call him thoroughly professional.

For the first time we can recall, someone actually tried to get some straight answers from the man who is trying to ram through a radical "reform" of a medical system that nearly nine of 10 Americans think is fine the way it is.

Too bad Baier didn't have more time, because the few minutes he got elicited little more than talking points from a politician so slippery he makes another Democrat known for his slickness sound inarticulate by comparison.

As it was, Baier had to butt in repeatedly in a futile effort to get simple answers to basic questions that centered mostly on the fairness of the process being used by Congress to take over a sixth of the economy without so much as a direct vote.

Why all the trickery to pass a bill that's so good? Baier asked in behalf of what he said were the 14,000 viewers who sent him questions. "I don't spend a lot of time worrying about what the procedural rules are in the House or Senate," the president sniffed.

Then there was the president's brush-off when Baier asked about the contents of the bill that only Thursday saw the light of day. Are all the special deals still in there — the Cornhusker Kickbacks, the Louisiana Purchases, etc?

"By the time the vote has taken place, not only I will know what's in it, you'll know what's in it, ... " the president assured — sort of. But for the record, he said he's all for giving Louisiana millions of dollars because the state had gone through a "national emergency" — just like Hawaii when an earthquake hit.

We're still checking on that Hawaii reference. But even if there's been no such quake, we doubt the media would make much of the gaffe. This isn't George W. Bush, after all.

Which brings us back to the main point here: The media performance so far in the Obama presidency, and especially in covering health care, has been shameful.

Here we are on the verge of passing the most important piece of domestic legislation of our time and no one seems to know what's in it, how much it'll cost and what it'll really do. Seems to us that the man who's pushing it hardest would be a good one to ask.

But as Bret Baier found, good luck with that.

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