In the Friday edition of his MSNBC.com blog, left-liberal pundit Eric Alterman posted a comment from a friend of his who shares his, shall we say, skepticism toward the idea of an overall liberal media bias. (Alterman is, of course, the author of What Liberal Media? and several other books.) 

The relevant portion of the comment follows. Judge for yourself the extent to which the friend is kidding.   

...It is time to march virtually every high-priced reporter in Washington D.C. out across the Key Bridge and deep into the Virginia hills, where they will be incarcerated in a re-education camp until they begin making sense in their profession again.  (I specifically exempt Jack Farrell from Denver and the entire Knight-Ridder D.C. bureau.  They all can stay.)  I was going to exempt Jonathan Alter until I heard him complaining that the Democrats were wrong in resisting the ballot initiatives sponsored in California by Governor Anabolic J. Goosestep.  The ultimate "good government" initiative, Jon, you lovable doof, is to break the power of the Republican party everywhere until it comes to its senses and disenthralls itself from its Jesus On A Taco Shell element.  Sorry, Jon.  Pick up a shovel and start marching.  There are swamps to be reclaimed.

For those who missed it, on MSNBC’s “The Situation” last night, host Tucker Carlson interviewed author Peter Schweizer, whose new book “Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy,” has raised a lot of eyebrows. Some of the highlights (video link to follow): 

• Environmentalist Barbra Streisand spends $22,000 per year watering her lawn and gardens while she lectures Americans that they need to cut back on their consumption of such things as gasoline by getting rid of their SUVs
• Anti-Wall Streeter Michael Moore, who has claimed on many occasions to not own any stock because Wall Street money is dirty money, actually owns tens of thousands of shares in many different companies, and has even owned stock in off-shore oil companies…even Halliburton
• Michael Moore and Al Franken, who regularly chastise Republicans for being racist and not hiring enough African-Americans, actually have hired very few African-Americans to work for them
• Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass), who has fought all of his life for higher taxes, in particular estate taxes, has done a fabulous job of avoiding them. In fact, the Kennedy family has been able to transfer between $300 million and $500 million from generation to generation while only paying $134,000 in taxes, or less than 1 percent

Video Link

John Cusack is a fabulous actor. I’ve been a huge fan since “Sixteen Candles,” which, depressingly, is 21 years old. Yet, the opinions he expressed yesterday at the Huffington Post blog are going to make it very difficult for his work to be viewed objectively in the future:

“Bush 2. How depressing, corrupt, unlawful and tragically absurd the administration's world view actually is...how low the moral bar has been lowered...and (though I know I'm capable of intellectually lazy notions of collective guilt) how complicit our silence as citizens is...Nixon, a true fiend, looks like a paragon of virtue next to the criminally incompetent robber barons now raiding the present and future.”

The Associated Press, in coordination with IPSOS, conducted a poll from November 7 through November 9, 2005.  The poll questions revolved around President Bush and the direction that the United States was headed. The poll results were reported by Will Lester in the AP article, “Poll:  Most Americans Doubt Bush’s Honesty”.

According to the IPSOS report on the poll, 1000 adults were interviewed. Only 837 were identified as registered voters – 78% according the percentages cited in the report.  Out of the 1000 adults, only 40% were identified as Republicans – either strongly or moderately Republican.  Those identified as Democrats constituted 51% of the total adults interviewed.  Independents and those “not sure” made up 9% of those polled.  This puts President Bush and his administration at a 60% disadvantage from the beginning.  So much for a true picture of opinions as President Bush garnered 51% of the popular vote in November 2004.

On MSNBC's Hardball on Friday night, host Chris Matthews sought to convince viewers that the Bush administration intentionally tried to make the American public believe Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks before the Iraq War "to win support for the war."

In his opening introduction, Matthews plugged the upcoming segment as "a look at the rhetoric the Bush administration used to perpetuate the idea of a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks," as if this motive were fact. In a setup piece for the segment, MSNBC correspondent David Shuster contended that before the war, President Bush "started claiming that Iraq and the group responsible for 9/11 were one and the same," and backed up this assertion using a soundbite from Bush that was selectively edited to distort an answer Bush made to a reporter’s question.

Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift has a new article out, and she once again doesn’t have anything good to say about President Bush. In fact, she now believes that his presidency is in such a state of disarray that Bush needs to “change direction, the way President Bill Clinton did after losing both the House and Senate in 1994.” Clift seems to forget that this change of direction didn’t help the Democrats win back the Congress in 1996, which put Clinton in a position where he was forced to accede to most of the Republican demands in 1997 which included tax cuts that he fought against for two years.

Regardless, in Clift's view:

Oh the beauteous words we use to describe freedom! And she is indeed worth it, or at least used to be. The bitch of it is, in order for the words to carry any weight, you must back them up with action, lest you look like a wretched lip-server. And action is where we have—of late—fallen terribly, terribly short.

There was a day when traitors were hanged, not honored. There was a day when a treacherous hand was removed, not salved. There was a day when a coward hung his head in shame instead of strutting arrogantly before crowds and contingencies.