I just watched a 6 minute clip of a Fox News interview posted on Andrew Sullivan's site where the reporter was harassing the White House spokesman about the request the White House issued for e-mails with questions about Health Care reform be forwarded to the White House where these questions can be answered with the facts about Health Care reform.
The Fox News spin is that this is an enemies list, and the reporter made a pointed effort in using the phrase enemies list several times throughout the interview, even after this idea had been refuted by the spokesman.
The question then moved to "are you keeping these records of e-mails" that you claim aren't an enemies list (leaving the doubt in the mind of the listener)? The spokesman then answered in the negative, adding "why would we?" This led the reporter to castigate the spokesman, noting that there's a law in place that prohibits the President from deleting records he received (planting seeds of nefariousness), apparently forgetting the millions of deleted/lost e-mails from the Bush administration, which, to my knowledge still haven't been recovered...
The whole interview was a transparent attack on the White House and a specious implication that the White House is assaulting our 1st Amendment/Civil Liberties rights. The same rights that didn't matter too much under the previous administration (remember the poo-pooing of the warrantless wiretaps?) are apparently being "assaulted" by a request to answer legitimate misconceptions about what is being proposed. Strangely, it would seem that the Fox News interview is more geared towards silencing the reformers from getting their message out with an attenuated claim on loss of 1st amendment rights, as opposed to what they are claiming.
I would put the interview on here, but I don't want to give Fox News any more bandwidth.
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