James Hoffa

In an interview with CBS News anchor Scott Pelley last week, Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein immediately brought up a highly sensitive subject that liberals in the media and highest levels of government refuse to acknowledge: entitlement spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are unsustainable at their current rate and need significant reform to ensure those programs exist in the future.

In response to the clip, MSNBC host Ed Schultz and Teamsters President James Hoffa were beside themselves on Tuesday night's Ed Show -- offended that Blankfein would voice such a "misinformed" view on national television. The only son of the notorious Jimmy Hoffa was ardently opposed to the idea that there is anything currently wrong with the system as is, to suggest otherwise is just "outrageous" he thundered. [ relevant video & transcript below ]

"I don't like Barack Obama anymore. You know why? Because he doesn't like me and around 50 percent of America."

So said Dennis Miller on Fox News's "O'Reilly Factor" Wednesday as a result of the President not speaking out against the disgraceful Labor Day comments by Teamsters president James Hoffa (video follows with transcript and commentary):

It's official -- I'm an Ed Schultz fan.

OK, well, "fan" isn't exactly the right word. Let's just say I'd be crushed if MSNBC canceled "The Ed Show." After all, nowhere else on cable does one find such a consistent stream of idiocy that never fails to amuse. Not even from Schultz's colleague Al Sharpton, though the man is certainly a contender. (video after page break)

"If Rush Limbaugh or you on your radio show said we have to take out Obama, you know darn well that tomorrow morning every editorial in America would be accusing you of inciting violence," NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell said to Fox News host Sean Hannity last night. Yet when  James Hoffa said the same thing about Tea Party conservatives, liberal journalists at MSNBC actually defended the Teamsters president.

"MSNBC is aiding and abetting on this character assassination campaign against some very good people," the Media Research Center founder argued on the September 7 "Media Mash" segment.

For the full segment's video, watch the embed below or listen to the MP3 audio here.

Is there no double-standard depths to which the liberal media won't sink when it comes to provocative political speech? No—judging by the pitiful performance of two MSMers on today's Morning Joe in defending James "Take 'Em Out" Hoffa.  

Newsweek editor Tina Brown brayed that we must not "sanitize" political speech or take the "juice" out of it--all the while condemning Michele Bachmann and Glenn Beck for some of their remarks.  And the preposterous Mike Barnicle somehow defended Hoffa on the basis of the "context" of his remarks. Say what?  Hoffa was introducing the President of the United States!  And don't miss Barnicle logic-defyingly defending the double-standard when it comes to Sarah Palin on the basis that everyone knows the MSM will attack her. Video after the jump.

Not surprisingly, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz was practically orgasmic with joy Tuesday over Teamsters president James Hoffa’s Labor Day declaration of war against the Tea Party.

After telling his “Ed Show” audience that Obama’s poll numbers have been declining because he hasn’t spoken to the American people like the union boss, Schultz actually asked Hoffa, “Do you think the Republicans are sons of b---hes?” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Yesterday, at organized labor's traditional Labor Day picnic at Cincinnati's Coney Island amusement park, Vice President Joe Biden gave the keynote address. His key lines, as reported by Carl Weiser at the Cincinnati Enquirer's Politics Extra blog (video is here at MRC-TV): "... this is a different kind of fight. This is a fight for the heart and soul of the labor movement. This is a fight for the existence of organized labor. You are the only ones who can stop the barbarians at the gate! That’s why they want you so bad.”

Biden's statement is in an important aspect more problematic than the more widely (but not sufficiently widely) noted "son of a b*tches" comment made by Teamsters President James Hoffa Jr. in Detroit yesterday at a Labor Day event President Obama keynoted. While Hoffa was threatening and hateful, he was at least in theory speaking only for Big Labor (though Obama has essentially adopted it by not condemning it). In Cincinnati, Biden, who was elected to serve all citizens of the country, personally characterized a large plurality of those he is supposed to be serving with a word which means "savage, primitive, uncivilized persons." Biden's "barbarians"comment has received very light establishment press coverage, as did what appears to have been a singularly unimpressive number of people who actually heard his speech:

After the mass shooting in Tucson of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a federal judge, and other bystanders, President Obama gave one of those unite-the-divide speeches that give journalists leg thrills. We need to “sharpen our instincts for empathy,” he said.

He lamented political finger-pointing: “It's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.” The initial speculation was that conservatives were responsible for the Tucson horror. Even after this proved to be false, the attacks were relentless, with a barrage of media reports on the alleged excesses and mean-spiritedness of the Tea Party and all things right of center.

National Review's Jonah Goldberg on Tuesday, appearing on Fox News's "Special Report," put James Hoffa's Labor Day attack on the Tea Party in proper perspective.

"We would not be in this mess, we would not have this controversy, if we did not have this bonfire of asininity that came out of the Tucson shootings where all of a sudden Sarah Palin’s Facebook Congressional map was somehow to blame for not only this madman but for all of the violence overtaking America" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

While ABC didn't find time for the James Hoffa outburst this morning, ABC reporter Jake Tapper repeatedly engaged White House press secretary Jay Carney on Tuesday on the question of whether Obama felt Hoffa was in the spirit of Obama's January speech in Tucson about the need for civility.

Carney repeatedly backed away from the opportunity to distance the president from Obama (other than lamely claiming he hadn't arrived yet). Carney claimed there's a "ritual in Washington" to press for disavowal, but Obama wasn't present. There's also a "ritual in Washington" where a president doesn't want to upset his liberal/leftist base, which is clearly being observed. Here's a look at the Tapper-Carney exchanges as transcribed by MRC's Scott Whitlock:

New York Times reporter Jackie Calmes spent Labor Day with President Obama in Detroit, who spoke at a heavily union rally featuring speakers from organized labor. One of them, Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa, used just the sort of militant rhetoric against the Tea Party that would certainly have been condemned by the Times if coming from Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, or any other conservative politician or activist. Yet Hoffa was completely absent from Calmes’s Tuesday story, “For Obama, a Familiar Labor Day Theme.”

What Hoffa said: "President Obama this is your army!...Everybody here has got to vote. If we go back and keep the eye on the prize, let's take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong."

Good Morning America on Tuesday skipped any mention of James Hoffa's call for war against the Tea Party and the union leader's exhortation to "take these son[s] of bitches out." The ABC program was the only network evening or morning show to ignore the heated rhetoric entirely.

All three evening newscasts on Monday and CBS's Early Show and NBC's Today offered brief references to Hoffa's comments in Detroit (although, in many parts of the country, the CBS broadcast was pre-empted for coverage of the U.S. Open). Bill Plante on the Early Show asserted that Hoffa "took aim at the Tea Party." Nightly News' Kate Snow added that the labor leader simply "turned up the political heat."

"I know you'd like to focus on language, that's not what the American people are focused on."

That's how Democratic Party chairwoman and Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz  dismissed "Fox & Friends" co-host Gretchen Carlson earlier today when she asked the DNC chief to repudiate Teamster president James P. Hoffa's "take these sons of bitches out" comment that was directed against the Tea Party at a Labor Day rally that President Obama attended yesterday.

By contrast, earlier this year, Wasserman Schultz insisted to "Meet the Press" host David Gregory that "we have to think about our word choices carefully" and that "we also have to realize that, someone who is unhinged, someone who is mentally unstable, we don't know the slightest thing could set them off."

Our friends at The Right Scoop have video that you can watch embedded below:

The Washington Post treated President Obama's Detroit Labor Day rally to page A3 coverage, with a 19-paragraph September 6 story by staffer David Nakamura.

Controversial Teamsters president James P. Hoffa -- son of the late Jimmy Hoffa -- was quoted, but not the infamous "take these sons of bitches out" line that has been reported elsewhere.

Indeed, Nakamura aimed to paint the partisanship of the labor union rally in a positive light by comparing Obama to "give 'em Hell" Harry Truman's come-from-behind 1948 campaign:

As NewsBusters previously reported, Teamsters president James Hoffa Jr. on Monday, at a Labor Day rally addressed by President Obama moments later, made some disgraceful comments about the Tea Party and his political rivals.

Later in the day, Hoffa was interviewed for six minutes by CNN's John King, and although the union leader's comments were played at the beginning of the segment and referred to in the onscreen chyron, King actually didn't ask his guest one single question about them (video follows with transcript and commentary):