As PBS contemplated the role John McCain's military heroism might play in the 2008 campaign just before 9 pm Eastern time, liberal PBS pundit Mark Shields noted that a military record hasn't been an electoral advantage since the end of the Cold War, but he swatted at President Bush, joking he'd fought "the Battle of Amarillo in the Texas Air National Guard," but he also characterized that time as how Bush "avoided military service."

Shields played the role of modern historian: "So we had four elections in a row where the candidate who avoided military service won over the candidate who had gone to the field of combat. Clinton defeated Bush. Clinton defeated Dole..."

Then came the Bush-bashing; "In 2000, George W. Bush, who fought the Battle of Amarillo in the Texas Air National Guard, beat Al Gore, who’d actually gone to Vietnam, and beat John Kerry, wearer of the Silver Star in Vietnam."

Shields apparently didn’t think it was "military service" to serve in the National Guard. He could say Bush avoided combat in Vietnam, but he didn’t avoid military service. Shields also misleads the PBS viewer into assuming that Al Gore was a combat veteran, instead of a journalist with Stars and Stripes who stayed away from the front lines.

Out in the snarkiest swamps of liberal talk radio is the Stephanie Miller show, which is very low on policy talk and very high on toilet humor and sex jokes. At the end of the show's first hour on Tuesday, Miller aired a clip of McCain's Friday unveiling of Sarah Palin:  "Here is Grampy McSame [McCain] introducing his trophy VP before he stepped back to check out her ass for twenty minutes."

As McCain spoke, the show's official impressionist, Jim Ward, began impersonating McCain: "My next trophy wife...The middle part of Alaska is ass...and she's got a terrific one, my friends." Miller lamely added: "She puts the ass in Al-ass-ka."

Miller read critical quotes from Paul Begala, Peggy Noonan, and Joe Conason, and said the choice was incredibly desperate. Then Ward piped up again in his McCain voice: "Desperation, and a desire to look at her ass for hours and hours, my friends."

Miller wrapped the segment: "We better have fun, Jim, because she may be out by the end of this show."

Like most liberal-media reviewers, Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales was forced by events to concede Sarah Palin wowed the crowd last night. It was "the night that John McCain’s brilliantly screwy choice for a running mate changed from laughingstock to national star." But Shales also lamented the "demagoguery" of mocking the liberal media, especially the idea that President Reagan was attacked by the media, when he enjoyed "a virtual love affair with the press." A long MRC rebuttal is here. To Shales:  

It's unfortunate considering the strong showing of Palin that the Republicans have again decided to run against "the media" as well as against the Democrats, and to portray themselves as poor, abused victims of media aggression. Giuliani, who has made a second career of courting the press, referred sneeringly to "the left-wing media."

When athletes trash-talk their opponents before a big game, their comments often go up in the opponents’ locker room for motivation. Something tells me Jonathan Alter’s trash-talking in Newsweek is in Sarah Barracuda’s locker. The piece was headlined "Why Sarah Palin is Likely to Belly-Flop." (It doesn’t have that title online, but that was the header yesterday on Newsweek's list of most-read stories.) Alter is looking forward to Palin being "grilled," as if she was going on with the mooseburgers:

The problem is that politics, like all professions, isn't as easy as it looks. Palin's odds of emerging unscathed are slim. In fact, she's been all but set up for failure, which is yet another reason McCain's choice may prove to be irresponsible.

The McCain camp will have to either let her wing it based on a few briefing memos (highly risky) or prevent her from taking questions from reporters (a confession that she's unprepared). Either way, she's likely to belly-flop at a time when McCain can least afford it.

I imagine Alter might be sweating as he rereads this after her crowd-thrilling Wednesday night speech. They gave her perfect tens for nailing the dive.

New York Times columnist David Brooks is supposed to be the house conservative of PBS’s NewsHour and convention coverage, but he dripped contempt for conservatives from Mitt Romney to Rush Limbaugh on Wednesday’s night live coverage. He decried Romney’s speech as extreme "He drifted so far right, I’m sort of, my mind is boggling." But he said the rhetoric wasn’t genuine, just a "strategic choice" in case McCain loses. When one panelist said the Sarah Palin speech would be "a huge hit among Rush Limbaugh Republicans," Brooks insisted Palin’s humor was light with a common touch, not "biting, belittling" Limbaugh humor. Earlier, he lamented the presidential choices didn’t include someone who hated tax cuts: "There might be a candidate who says ‘Actually, at this time in our country we can’t afford these massive tax cuts anyway,’ but that candidate is not running for president."

UPDATE: On the Charlie Rose show, Brooks grew even wilder, saying of Romney's speech: "I thought it was borderline insane," and proclaiming Palin was "not ideological in a Rush Limbaugh sense."

ABC’s Good Morning America interviewed 1984 vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro in the 7:30 half hour on Wednesday, asking her about how Palin will handle the pressure of her speech. Robin Roberts tried to get Ferraro, a Hillary supporter, to condemn a video of Palin in a Newsweek interview suggesting Hillary Clinton’s “perceived whining” is not a help to women candidates.

Ferraro did lament it briefly, but went on to warn the media: “A lot of those PUMA [Party Unity My A--] people and I will be watching very carefully to make sure that you treat her just like anybody else. Go to her, her qualifications, go to her experience. Go to whatever you want to. But make sure it's done on a basis where she's treated like a guy by the media. No sexism. Because we'll be looking.”

The Palin video is an interview from March by Newsweek's Karen Breslau. If I was picking clips from that session, it might be this exchange:  

Rod Lurie, the liberal creator of the President-Hillary-imagining ABC TV series "Commander in Chief," thinks the Sarah Palin pick makes him look prescient. "I think Geena [Davis] and I need to be paid royalties by the Republicans." In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he went on to slam Palin as unprepared:

Lurie was reached by phone as he was leaving the Democratic National Convention, en route to Toronto, where he will screen his new [Plamegate-cribbing] film "Nothing but the Truth." A Barack Obama supporter, Lurie criticized the real-life manifestation of his TV fiction.

"People who understand politics know anything is possible," he said. "Picking a woman is an absolute strategic idea from McCain's point of view. He's not talking about governing right now. The idea of this woman actually facing down [Vladimir] Putin and negotiating with [Dmitry] Medvedev is idiotic."

This wouldn't be the first time Lurie abandoned his female-President dreams, even if he still thinks Hillary is wildly qualified, unlike Palin. He wrote about his support for Obama on The Huffington Post in February:

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz broke two stories on Wednesday morning. Barack Obama held a secret meeting with Fox News Channel three months ago, and he will appear on The O'Reilly Factor on Thursday night, the night John McCain accepts the Republican nomination. (And people worried McCain would ruin Obama's big night by leaking Palin!)

The second bigger, newer story was McCain strategist Steve Schmidt accusing the news media of being on "a mission to destroy" Sarah Palin by displaying a level of viciousness and scurrilousness" in pursuing the personal lives of the Palin family.

In an extraordinary and emotional interview, Steve Schmidt said his campaign feels "under siege" by wave after wave of news inquiries that have questioned whether Palin is really the mother of a 4-month-old baby, whether her amniotic fluid had been tested and whether she would submit to a DNA test to establish the child's parentage.

The gloves came off and the punching of Republican vice-presidential pick Sarah Palin began early in the night on PBS. Just after the Pledge of Allegiance, the analyst team of Mark Shields and David Brooks got into a squabble over Sarah Palin's pregnant daughter Bristol. Shields insisted a callous Gov. Palin chose national ambition over "love and consideration for her daughter...By accepting John McCain’s offer she guaranteed that her daughter would be known globally as the best known 17-year-old unwed teenager in the world, and that decision many people question."

Brooks suggested we don't know enough to judge the Palin family values, and even suggested that the children of vice presidents have had problems, and that the media that usually lays off the children are covering this story in a "big massive way."

Shields began by suggesting that people in both parties can agree that making an issue out of candidates' children is "really out of bounds." He then turned around and made the mother's allegedly unseemly ambition an issue:

Pardon a little housekeeping, but this line is too good to ignore. In the midst of an hour of exhilarated salutes to Barack Obama's convention speech on Thursday night's Charlie Rose show on PBS, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham successfully scaled to the top of Mount Suckup by claiming Obama is so eloquent, he "can't write an ineloquent check."

He had to do two things. He had to be tough and he had to be detailed. We know he is eloquent. He can't write an ineloquent check, this man, but he was both detailed and tough. Interestingly, he referred to John McCain either by name or as the Senator 20 times, two-oh. I might have missed one. We have had concerns, a lot of people have looked at this clinically, saying well, this is Obambi, this is a man who is too effete, who's too lofty to really connect with the kinds of voters that Jodi [Kantor of the New York Times] was just talking about. I would imagine that this speech puts a lot of those concerns to rest.

As Clay Waters underlined over at our Times Watch project, The New York Times website featured a blog post from former reporter Timothy Egan publicly expressing worry over McCain's selection of Gov. Sarah Palin, who would support "removing abortion protections" from the law: "Militantly anti-choice and evangelical, the 44-year-old gave birth to her last child five months ago." To liberals, that birth – to a child with Down syndrome, a diagnosis that in today’s America tragically and routinely leads to abortion – is not a sign of compassion, and a dedication of one’s whole life to raising a disabled child. It is a negative, a sign of frightening religious fervor and conservative extremism.

There was more than just an ideological imbalance in the overall coverage. There was a sense that a real woman doesn’t deny other women the right to abort their babies. Abortion professionals were boiling over with rage. Planned Parenthood boss Cecile Richards sent supporters an E-mail headlined "Truly stunning: a woman who doesn’t trust other women." She insisted the army of abortion advocates should "tell every woman you meet that McCain and Palin are the most anti-choice, anti-women pair imaginable."

Republicans may have largely suspended their convention on Monday, but the radical-left protesters outside the convention didn’t feel the need to be sensitive and postpone their march. They did, however, threaten to get lost. (Let’s hope they weren’t carrying signs about Bush-Cheney incompetence.) Who came to the rescue? A reporter from the Minneapolis Star Tribune, as the paper itself lightly noted as a moment for "public service journalism." Police weren’t worried about the main group, but worried about a small faction wearing black masks.

The larger group of protesters was peaceful, although they were challenged -- as so many have been over the years -- by the downtown St. Paul street grid. As the head of the march reached Cedar and 10th, marchers were supposed to turn right. Apparently confused rather than intent on civil disobedience, they slowly started through the intersection. That's when a Star Tribune reporter, Randy Furst, approached organizers and asked if they knew they were headed in the wrong direction. Randy saved the day, the march turned right onto 10th and the police relaxed. Once again, public service journalism worked its magic.

PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler is pleased as punch in his "Ombudsman's Mailbag" to note that PBS was the only place on broadcast TV for people to enjoy three hours of prime time devoted to the Democratic convention. But even though many PBS fans naturally loved that, some remained in a highly agitated left-wing state that too many white males were ruining the stew. It's one thing to complain about the need for more minorities, but some of these letters to Getler were simply...bigoted:

There it was, again. A herd of bulls and Gwen giving feedback relevant to the speech of Senator Hillary Clinton. Feedback??? Nope. As usual, when men take center stage subsequent to a brilliant speech by a woman, what the viewing audience observes is stark criticism. There they were, utilizing the infamous one-sided brain response of all males. There they were, trying to hold more than one thought (sometimes referred to as multi-tasking) and failing miserably. WHY???

Robert Kaiser, an associate editor of The Washington Post (and the former managing editor, the vice president of the Post editorial lineup), demonstrated just how much some deep thinkers at the top of the Post think like Code Pink and MoveOn.org in a Sunday Book World review of Andrew Bacevich’s book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.

Kaiser's rave review touted Bacevich as a "self-described conservative," but that description stretches credulity when an author is the darling of the radical-left media, as Bacevich is right now. Kaiser’s review very neatly describes how much Bacevich’s argument sounds just like standard left-wing media boilerplate.

1. The American people are a herd of shopping sheep. Their patriotism is shallow and enables reckless wars. Kaiser summarized:

Parade, the nationally distributed Sunday newspaper supplement, handed its in-between-conventions political coverage to liberal Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter. The editors actually kept the editorializing down in a story on how both campaigns are exciting voters and reaching independents. But you could still see the traditional labeling imbalance when describing the campaigns:

John McCain "had little support with the conservative base that has dominated the Republican Party for nearly half a century." What? I don't think any conservative alive for half a century would agree with that. Thirty years maybe, but not 50.

Get a load of how Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton: "But change hungry-voters made up their own minds and flocked to Obama, who won 11 straight contests in February...Throughout the campaign season, supporters of both Democrats sent a clear message: We decide, not the insiders."

It would have been much more accurate for Alter to describe how Obama won over the "liberal base that had dominated the Democratic Party for nearly half a century."

The article was headlined "Why The 2008 Election Is Bringing Power to the People!"

When the Republicans mocked Barack Obama's decision to speak in an outdoor stadium with Greek columns as an opportunity for Obama to descend to speak to "mere mortals," Washington Post essayist and apparent psychic Philip Kennicott didn't see mockery of hubris. His mind-reading exposed white Republican racists resenting a black man appropriating Greek culture, with its "white temples, white statues, white marble."

While neoclassicism was the default architectural style across the United States, it became particularly associated with the aristocratic architecture of the antebellum South. Obama wasn't just borrowing ancient precedents, he was unconsciously recalling -- and appropriating -- the look of Tara and dozens of other (real) plantation houses.

Is race involved in the criticism of Obama's "temple"? Perhaps.

The Washington Post's Palin/Biden contrast is also reliably stark. This Saturday's headline: "McCain Picks Alaska Governor; Palin First Woman on GOP Ticket: Democrats Insist Running Mate Lacks Experience."

Last Saturday's headline was all what Democrats preferred: "Obama Calls His Pick, Biden, Both a Statesman and Fighter." (No subhead for what Republicans said.)

The captions under the pictures? For Palin: "Sen. John McCain said Sarah Palin, a conservative with strong antiabortion views, could best help him 'shake up Washington.'"

For Biden: "Barack and Michelle Obama, along with Jill and Joseph Biden, on the steps of the old statehouse in Springfield."

Labels in the front-page copy? Once again, for Palin: "The self-described 'hockey mom' brings a blue-collar conservatism and strong antiabortion views to the ticket and appeals to a party base somewhat suspicious of McCain."

But not for Biden: He "brought an infusion of experience and aggressiveness to the Democratic ticket....Biden, 65, a sharp-witted and energetic foreign policy expert who has held two of the most critical Senate chairmanships, bounded out onto the stage just after 2 p.m. Central time."

Blogging on the site WowOWow: Women on the Web, Whoopi Goldberg, moderator of ABC's The View, declared that poor Hillary Rodham Clinton suffered many "femophobic" slings and arrows, and apparently, no one in the media elite ever discussed this. Looking forward on Thursday to Obama's oration and loving the Clinton speeches, Whoopi declared:

I thought Bill was extraordinary and Hillary was extraordinary. I have to say, I tip my hat to Hillary Clinton because one of the things that didn’t happen during the campaigns –because no one really stopped and said out loud, "Is this a little femophobic?" (That’s what I call it when people go after you because of your gender.)

Liberal attitudes emerged on the PBS convention set in the runup to Obama's acceptance speech on Thursday night. When right-leaning pundit David Brooks suggested after Al Gore's remarks that it was too bad Gore ruined his chance to be president in 2000 by listening too much to consultants, Mark Shields snippily suggested Gore really won: "Al Gore is a remarkable figure. I'm not sure why he blew his chance. He did get half a million more votes, of course, in a popular election than the man who eventually became president by the Supreme Court decision."

A while later, the PBS historians panel discussed convention history, and Peniel Joseph suggested the Hillary delegates had decided to come to the Messiah: "What we saw last night was Hillary Clinton herself putting Obama over the top and many of these delegates who vowed never to vote for Obama publicly came to Jesus, so to speak, and said they were going to vote for Obama now."

Facts are stubborn things, but not as stubborn as ABC in describing our current economy as in "recession." The day before the government revised second quarter economic growth up to 3.3 percent, Good Morning America's food segment on Wednesday morning carried the graphic "Recession Recipes" as co-host Robin Roberts and weatherman Sam Champion chewed on chuck with chef Sara Moulton. (The R word was never used by the noshing news staff, just on screen.)

Scott Whitlock noted ABC's insistent "Recession Rescue" coverage earlier in our non-recession.

ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC all interviewed Obama campaign manager David Plouffe on Thursday morning. The name rhymes with fluff, and fluff consumed most of the interview questions, which focused on convention atmospherics and polls, and not on policy issues. CBS host Harry Smith summarized the trend by saying "Let’s talk about the cosmetics." ABC and CBS competed to see who could be more promotional. Both compared it to a "Super Bowl atmosphere." Smith strangely asked: "Are the Republicans controlling this conversation, the conversation with the American people this week?" NBC’s Matt Lauer, by contrast, threw three comparative hardballs at Plouffe about how the Republicans were mocking the Invesco Field speech and its "Temple of Obama" setting. He said the Republicans say "This is a place where we pay tribute to football stars and rock stars and maybe it shows, once again, this campaign is less about substance and more about the cult of personality." CNN’s John Roberts conducted a brief interview, and corrected Plouffe when he implied more people thought Obama would be a better commander-in-chief.