ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos interviewed his former boss on “This Week” Sunday morning. The entire twenty minutes (video link to follow) appeared to be an opportunity for President Clinton to defame the current administration while pumping up his own legacy. Assisting this goal was Stephanopoulos who, regardless of what his former employer said, didn’t once challenge the accuracy of any of Clinton’s numerous misstatements of fact:

“Now, what Americans need to understand is that that means that every single day of the year our government goes into the market and borrows money from other countries to finance Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina and our tax cuts. We have never done this before. Never in the history of our republic have we ever financed a conflict, a military conflict by borrowing money from somebody else.”

This is patently false, and the fact that Stephanopoulos didn’t challenge it is extraordinary. After all, most of us learned in grammar school that America borrowed large sums of money from the French to finance our Revolution against the British. As such, our nation was born borrowing money from another country to fund a conflict.

Los Angeles Times' media critic Tim Rutten has long had a somewhat troubled relationship with reality (for just a few examples, see here, here, and here). He also has never been shy about letting his liberal political views get in the way of doing what he actually should be doing: Analyzing the media in a fair and objective way.

However, his liberal slams on conservative media reached a new low in his weekly column, "It's hard to feel bad for Geraldo" (Sat. Sept. 17, 2005) (reg. req'd), which begins as follows (emphasis mine):

"IT would be comforting to believe that Geraldo Rivera is inexplicable.

"Sadly, when we consider Rupert Murdoch's ceaseless schemes for global domination and the venal blood lust that pulses through Fox News, Geraldo is easy to explain — which makes him simply inexcusable.

"Seeing him descend bright-eyed and sweaty on wretched New Orleans, as he did in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, was like watching a vulture on crystal meth. The word that came to mind was not 'reporting,' but 'feeding.'"

"Ceaseless schemes for global domination"? "Venal blood lust"? Vultures on crystal meth? Is Rutten talking about a television network or a murderous, communist dictatorship?

And that was just the beginning of the article!

Los Angeles Times Editorial Promotes False Claim About Support for “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance

A September 18, 2005 editorial from the Los Angeles Times, entitled “Under whom?”  propagated the false claim that “most Americans” in 1953, the year before the term “Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, “probably thought the pledge was fine as it was,” without the term “Under God.” The article also went on to say that it was “lawmakers who injected God in 1954 as a McCarthyite sneer at godless communism.” From the editorial:

As was reported here yesterday, regardless of how accurately Rasmussen Reports predicted the 2004 election results, America’s media continue to ignore their polling data.  With special thanks to a NewsBusters reader named “Mass Liberal", it is evident that another report from Rasmussen just released this morning will likely get absolutely no air or print play, either. 

What will likely not get reported is Rasmussen’s finding that 50% of Americans favor the president’s proposal for reconstructing New Orleans, or that more African-Americans support this plan than white Americans:

“Fifty percent (50%) of Americans favor the main proposal from that speech--a federal commitment of $200 billion to help rebuild New Orleans. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are opposed and 23% are not sure.”

“Fifty-seven percent (57%) of black voters support the federal reconstruction spending while just 17% are opposed. Among white voters, 49% favor the spending and 29% are opposed. This is the first Bush Administration proposal hat has attracted more support from black Americans than from white Americans.”

I caught just the roundtable segment of "Meet the Press," so I could hear PBS's Gwen Ifill and the WashPost's Eugene Robinson pitch the idea that they're not saying Bush or FEMA are racists, just that the structures of society at present are racist, and (more oddly) that those expressing these views are quite reasonable. That's wrong.

Cynthia McKinney ranted on the House floor that in the hurricane aftermath, “As I saw the African-Americans, mostly African-American families ripped apart, I could only think about slavery, families ripped apart, herded into what looked like concentration camps.”  Bobby Rush compared New Orleans to a slave ship. But he was copying from Jesse Jackson. I was hoping Byron York of National Review would point this out. But he simply said it's hard to say FEMA was disastrous in New Orleans and quite suitable on the Mississippi coast. It was a failure across the area, not just in the black parts of New Orleans.

In what has become a daily ritual, another New York Times columnist thoroughly defamed and abused the president in an op-ed piece today. This morning, Frank Rich wrote:

“ONCE Toto parts the curtain, the Wizard of Oz can never be the wizard again. He is forever Professor Marvel, blowhard and snake-oil salesman. Hurricane Katrina, which is likely to endure in the American psyche as long as L. Frank Baum's mythic tornado, has similarly unmasked George W. Bush.”

Also of note, Rich demonstrated how Cindy Sheehan – remember her? – was just a pawn of the media while referencing how another of his cronies is now equating Katrina to Vietnam:

“It came only after the plan to heap all the blame on the indeed blameworthy local Democrats failed to lift Mr. Bush's own record-low poll numbers. It came only after America's highest-rated TV news anchor, Brian Williams, started talking about Katrina the way Walter Cronkite once did about Vietnam.”

What a difference a month makes: In August, it was Cindy Sheehan that represented Bush’s Vietnam as far as the were press concerned as reported by NewsBusters squad members here, here, and here. I guess anything that offers the media an opportunity to criticize the performance of the president is now akin to Vietnam.

Rich than predictably moved the discussion in a racial direction:

On the Inside Washington TV talk show aired on three Washington, DC stations over the weekend, NPR reporter Nina Totenberg, decked out in NewsBusters orange, suggested that President Bush’s Thursday night speech “would have been a great opportunity to say, 'look, I'm for tax cuts, but we need a Katrina tax, we need to really pay, to do this and to pay for it.’" Host Gordon Peterson repeated her point: "You want more taxes." Totenberg chuckled as she reiterated: "I want more taxes, yes." Two weeks ago, as recounted in this NewsBusters item with a video clip, Totenberg blamed tax cuts for the levee breakage: “For years, we have cut our taxes, cut our taxes and let the infrastructure throughout the country go and this is just the first of a number of other crumbling things that are going to happen to us.”

Fuller quotation of Totenberg follows.

Dick Meyer over at the Heyward Spin Machine (otherwise known as CBS News' blog, Public Eye) denounces "knee-jerk MSM-bashing."

"I know we’re a giant multi-national, evil-MSM behemoth. But we’re also a pretty small group."

You're a small group of PR flaks within the "evil-MSM behemoth." Maybe you should ask for a bigger budget. Tell them you have a Herculean task, taking on a huge part of the blogosphere.

Meyer also tries to instruct people on what comments to post.

"Still, we’d like a better conversation, more substantive, less knee-jerk MSM-bashing. Suggestions?"