Filmmaker Rob Reiner took to Twitter recently to accuse President Donald Trump of being a “childish sociopathic liar.”

That’s quite a statement.

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One might wonder what could have possibly inspired Reiner to push out such extreme rhetoric.

“Democracy is being tested. The rule of law and the press are under attack by a childish sociopathic liar. Congressional checks and balances have been obliterated. All it would take is one principled Republican, not on the way out, to stand up for the love of country,” read the “All in the Family” co-star’s full tweet.

He did not specify what action he wanted a “principled Republican” to take against the president.

Reiner has long been a vocal critic of Trump and a champion of the legacy of former President Barack Obama.

The trouble with these two facts is that they bring an ugly hypocrisy to the surface for the filmmaker.

While Reiner is so concerned about democracy and freedom of the press under Trump, Obama was considered by many to be one of the unfriendliest and closed-off presidents to the press.

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In 2014, the group Reporters Without Borders dropped America down a whopping 13 spots in its World Press Freedom Index. We went from 33rd place to 46th place. Why, you ask, was there such a drastic drop?

Obama may have been beloved by the mainstream media — but he loathed any press that challenged him. He would simply perform his tactics under the radar.

The Obama administration prosecuted more whistleblowers than every other administration combined. James Goodale, chief counsel for The New York Times, called Obama “worse than Nixon” in his treatment of whistleblowers.

The Associated Press was also infamously spied on under the Obama administration, while Freedom of Information Act requests often went nowhere. Libertarian website Reason had trouble under the former administration, too.

Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. called the former president the “most closed, control-freak administration” he had ever experienced.

If only there had been a principled man to come along and end Obama’s reign of terror on the freedom of the press …

If only there had been a principled man to come along and end Obama’s reign of terror on the freedom of the press ….

Reiner can try to rewrite history all he wants — and he’s certainly welcome to do that in filmmaking, to his creative heart’s content. But the facts on this are simply not on his side.

PopZette editor Zachary Leeman can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.

(photo credit, homepage image: Rob Reiner, CC BY 2.0, by Commonwealth Club)