PERSPECTIVE: An ill-advised war against Fox News

There’s an expression down South. Goes something like this: Never wrestle in the mud with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it.

Fox News is President Barack Obama’s pig. (In the interest of fairness, MSNBC was George W. Bush’s.)

So why has Obama’s administration publicly declared war on a network watched by people who didn’t vote for him and never will — even if he walked on water, shoved his U.S. birth certificate down their throats and organized his own tea parties?

Perhaps the White House’s mudfest with Fox is to divert attention away from the fact that Obama’s presidential honeymoon is over and now much of the gloss has worn off his lacquer.

He’s nearly 300 days in office and now must be judged by how he governs.

Obama remains a political tour de force and has made inroads on improving the economy and reforming health care. But he also has embraced the same lack of transparency that his predecessor did. (He snubs critics in the media and travels mostly to blue states with an eye toward 2012).

On the up side, it’s a safe bet that Obama will never embarrass our nation the way George W. Bush routinely did. (“The Pet Goat” is not on Obama’s reading list, and a camera will never catch him sneaking up on the German chancellor and giving her an uninvited and creepy shoulder massage.)

“We’re going to treat them [Fox] the way we would treat an opponent,” White House Communications Director Anita Dunn recently told The New York Times. “As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Obama’s White House needs to declare war on the recession, unemployment, expensive health care and terrorism — not on a television network.

Foster is executive editor of the Bristol Herald Courier.