Obama Assault on Fox News Is 'Nixonian'

The Obama administration is over the line in its war on Fox News, seeking not only to criticize it, but to delegitimize and marginalize it, writes Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post. “There’s nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics,” he argues, but they do violate “Madisonian norms.” James Madison argued that a working republic needs competing factions and interests to guard against tyranny.

Factions need to compete, therefore, while recognizing one another’s legitimacy, he writes. “Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimaize and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian.” There are loads of liberal news sources—“the lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical.” And Fox needs no defense; its evening news is the finest on television. “Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I'm not on.” (More Charles Krauthammer stories.)