Whether you’re a conservative or a liberal, watching the PBS Frontline program Obama’s Deal may leave you with some rather muddled feelings. If you’re an Obamaphile, you’ll jump to the president’s defense saying “Yeah, well, it’s Washington. There have to be some dirty deals made to get anything done“. If you’re a conservative, you’ll probably be left scratching your head, saying “Jeez. I had NO IDEA this guy was so COOL“. The program comes across as a low-key indictment of the methods president Obama utilized to drive home his health care “victory”. Which I find a little ironic. Not that I think they’re wrong in their highbrow, liberal elitist tsk-tsking observation that Obama is in fact “just another politician”, and for mostly political reasons has just done more to benefit the insurance companies than he has to benefit the American people. No, it’s the fact that – as much as I love the brilliantly produced show – to bother with this topic at all is a sort of meta-ironic commentary on the sad state of investigative reporting itself. I mean, where was their “investigative reporting” when this was all going down? It’s sort of like if we all knew that Nixon was a conniving manipulative bastard who would do anything to achieve his ends, so engineered and executed the Watergate burglaries with public transparency, and then Woodward & Bernstein came along and reported it on it. Sorry Frontline, I love you. But if this is your idea of news, I’ll stick with the Daily Show.