Axelrods Fox

At a time of tension between their organizations, White House senior adviser David Axelrod met with Fox News chairman and chief executive officer Roger Ailes two weeks ago, sources tell POLITICO.

The two met privately in Manhattan during the president’s visit to the United Nations.

The two discussed news coverage and the relationship between the organizations.

An FNC spokesperson tells POLITICO that Ailes and Axelrod had a “cordial conversation” over coffee while the president was in town.

"Cordial" as in a hammer covered in velvet?  Not that I'm sweating Ailes getting wobbly or anything - as badly as Fox is kicking CNN's ass (forget MSNBC's), with a great deal of assistance from Axelrod's client, he's not exactly "conversing" from a position of weakness - but, well, can we just dial up our imaginations and picture the press reaction of Karl Rove had requested a meeting for a "cordial conversation" with one or the other of these "news" outlets and offering up plaintive wailing like this?:

Though White House aides are hesitant to criticize the network on the record, their disdain for the programming – including Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck – is clearly evident. “They are the paid political programming for a party, and occasionally a couple of news stories break out in the midst of 23 hours and 45 minutes of political rantings and opinion,” said one senior administration official. “Everything about it is one-sided political opinion directed at a base. Period.”

Plug this into the alternative scenario above and guaranteed half the Left would have been gleefully viralling the infamous crybaby graphic (plus audios) and the other half would have been hysterically shrieking about the Bush Gestapo preparing to lay waste to the "heroes of journalism" that were so heroically leaking every imaginable American military and counterterrorism secret during Dubya's second term.

Most likely Red Barry sent his messenger boy to "cordially" lean on Ailes in reaction to Chris Wallace's frank commentary on the Obamunist cult's legendary intolerence for the smallest manifestation of media blasphemy.  That's a transcript I'd love to get my eyeballs on, just for the part at the end where Ailes smiles and "cordially" tells Axelrod to autonomically put his surname into practice.