Perhaps Andrew Breitbart and friends shouldn’t be surprised when they find the White House staffers making “specific asks” of allegedly independent artists on a conference call organized by the allegedly nonpartisan National Endowment of the Arts. Obama’s appointee to head the endowment, Rocco Landesman, said about 20 days after that conference call, “If the president had wanted a timid NEA, he would have made a different choice.”

Perhaps this is what Obama meant when he called Landesman a “game-changer.”

Landesman told the New York Times he resents insinuations that the arts are “elitist, left wing, maybe even a little gay.” Having his agency help White House staffers make requests of artists who can qualify for NEA grants is no way to dissuade the skeptics on those “left wing” suspicions.

UPDATE: Boy, nothing dissuades charges that the NEA is using artists for political propaganda like hearing from a list obtained by the Washington Times that one of the participants on the call was a representative of Humanitainment, the creator of film parodies Baracky, The Empire Strikes Barack, SuperBarack, and various parodies mocking John McCain and Sarah Palin.