Barack Obama is rapidly losing his halo

Telegraph
"Mr Obama has superficially liberal credentials, but it turns out his administration has launched more leak prosecutions than all previous administrations combined. Add to this his distinctly authoritarian record on drones, and this becomes about more than hacks with noses out of joint. It starts to look pretty fundamental. Dana Milbank, The Washington Post columnist, makes the same point, only more emotively calling the Rosen affair “as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.” You might dismiss all this as media back-biting or petulance, but even if that’s the case, it matters because when Obama is losing liberal allies like the NYT editorial board and Washington Post columnists then – to borrow that apocryphal phrase of LBJ about Walter Cronkite’s support for Vietnam – he’s in serious danger of losing the war."