The White House tried to ignore the NEA scandal, said Ed Morrissey in Hot Air, but Andrew Breitbart made that impossible. Breitbart's Big Hollywood website posted audio of a conference call in which Obama administration officials asked "grant recipients to plug Barack Obama’s domestic agenda." That finally got media outlets interested, and the White House had "to do the obligatory issuance of 'new guidelines' to avoid a repeat."
A repeat of what, angry readers might ask, said Kevin Drum in Mother Jones. Conservatives are "going ape" over the intrigue at the National Endowment for the Arts, but all that happened was that "a White House flack and an NEA flack arranged a conference call with a bunch of artists and encouraged them to create artwork in support of the president's National Day of Service." The Right will regret making a big deal of this "nothingburger" unless another shoe drops.
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