2008 Presidential

Code Pink's Media Benjamin managed to break into another presidential event on Thursday, namely Barack Obama's speech at the National Defense University. The topic was "U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy," meaning that the administration's aversion to the T-word seems to be diminishing as the damaging scandal-related news continues to pour in.

Readers will see that Benjamin was relatively civil towards Obama. In fact, Kathleen Hennessey and Christi Parsons at the Los Angeles Times wrote the following: "Rather than dismiss Benjamin as a heckler, the president engaged her, asking her to let him explain but also pausing to listen as she continued to talk while security closed in around her." That behavior is in direct contrast to how she behaved last decade during the Bush administration -- something never mentioned in any coverage of Thursday's speech I found. The full exchange with Obama followed by a recounting of what made Benjamin an overnight sensation in Sepetmber 2002, follow the jump.

Imagine that. Politico has a very negative story on our second-term president.

After over five years during which the online publication has engaged in virtual non-stop fawning over the wonders of Barack Obama -- going all the way back to shortly after its founding in January 2007, when Ben Smith found someone who described him as "frighteningly coherent" -- Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei tonight employed adjectives and described personality traits of their beloved "44" and those surrounding hime which just about anyone with eyes, meaning everyone except all too many members of the establishment press and those who have been deceived by them, has recognized for a long, long time (bolds are mine):

There are times when I really think I live in different country than liberal media members.

Take Al Sharpton for example who in his most recent Lean Forward ad for MSNBC said that America isn’t living up to the Pledge of Allegiance’s creed of “One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Bill Maher said something on HBO's Real Time Friday that Barack Obama's fans in the media didn't consider when they promoted the former junior senator from Illinois to the White House.

"This president wouldn't be president if they had caught him" smoking pot. "He'd still be a community organizer" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Here's a headline I bet you thought you'd never see written by a liberal columnist: "How Sarah Palin Is Right About Washington."

Yet there it was at Monday's Bloomberg View written by none other than Margaret Carlson who most of you likely remember as one of the perilously liberal contributors to the old CNN political talk show Capital Gang:

They must be paying by the word over at Politico. It's difficult to come up with another explanation as to why reporter Jonathan Martin would slog through about 3,100 words on an item entitled "Black pols stymied in Obama era." He could have easily summarized why this is the case in eight words: "Because Barack Obama is all about Barack Obama." Oh, he could have added a few more, namely "and everybody knows Barack Obama is all about Barack Obama."

Since he didn't limit himself, yours truly will note a few things Martin still left out, identify a few interesting points that were made, and then quote certain naive and/or inflammatory statements contained in Martin's mess.

The left's media-echo chamber just got louder. On Thursday morning in a claimed exclusive, the Politico reported that "(Former presidential adviser and campaign official David) Plouffe will appear regularly on Bloomberg Television to offer analysis and commentary on political and business issues as they impact the intersection of Wall Street, Main Street and K Street and will lend his expertise to the discussion of technology, demographic changes and crisis management."

That day at his new place of work, in response to a "kerfuffle" over errors in an academic paper which showed that, throughout history, government debt levels have held back economic growth -- errors which the authors insisted in a New York Times op-ed did not alter the fundamental validity of their conclusions, Plouffe delivered exactly what one would expect of a "former" lead Obama apparatchik:

Sometimes, the left simply can’t argue against hard facts. In a book excerpt warning of the “resurgent right” on Salon.com, leftist Lee Fang accused Brent Bozell of “gross exaggeration” in describing media apathy on Obama scandals.  

Fang reported that in a speech at the Council for National Policy in February 2009, Bozell claimed by the time the national networks ran "a single story on Reverend Wright, 42 states and the District of Columbia had voted." Dear Mr. Fang: please identify the exaggeration in that fact.

Two Democratic political operatives were convicted Thursday of forging names to get Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the 2008 Indiana presidential primary ballot.

Given the media's belief that there's no such thing as voter fraud, it will be interesting to see if outlets other than Fox News report this:

There are times when I’d really like to see a liberal brain next to a conservative brain to see if there really is a physiological difference.

Consider Salon’s Joan Walsh who on MSNBC’s The Cycle Wednesday actually said the reason former President George Bush’s poll numbers are up is because President Obama is doing such a good job (video follows with transcript and commentary):

It could easily be argued that one of Barack Obama’s biggest cheerleaders at CNN since the day he threw his hat into the presidential ring in 2007 has been Soledad O’Brien.

This is why one had to laugh uproariously when she ended her final Starting Point show Friday hypocritically saying, “I think if I’ve learned anything over the past year it's that facts matter and we shouldn't be afraid to have tough and honest conversations" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

While you were watching Rand Paul's historic filibuster and the debate surrounding budget sequestration, an economic theory battle was waging between two of the nation's foremost liberal economists Paul Krugman and Jeffrey Sachs.

In his most recent salvo published at the Huffington Post Saturday, Sachs spoke heresy to Obama-lovers across the fruited plain including Krugman claiming that following the 2008 financial crisis, "It was the Fed, not the fiscal stimulus, which prevented a fall into depression."

Being that March is Women’s History Month and March 8 is International Women’s Day, what better time to showcase a prominent female journalist being treated poorly by her male colleagues, particularly ones from the "war on women" network itself, MSNBC.

Speaking with the liberal Huffington Post, CBS This Morning co-host Norah O’Donnell describes a not-so-pleasant experience with former NBC colleagues Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann back in 2008:

For conservatives, it's been truly delicious the past few weeks watching previously devote Obamaites break ranks with their colleagues to finally tell the world that the emperor has no clothes.

A fine example Monday was the perilously liberal economist and media darling Jeffrey Sachs who published an article at the Huffington Post with the headline "How Obama's Politics Led to Sequestration":

Remember all that talk about a post-racial society if Barack Obama was elected president?

On the Martin Bashir show Monday, the host introduced Lehigh Professor James Peterson as a new MSNBC contributor, and virtually the first words out of Peterson's mouth were, "structural racism," "structural inequality," and "an over-aggressive criminal justice system that is racially biased" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

A Washington Post contributor published an article Tuesday amazingly citing as true claims by a - wait for it! - satirical website that former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has taken a job with Al Jazeera.

For her part, the former vice presidential candidate is having a good old time on Twitter at the author's expense:

"If you go and you talk to most people, they mean well but they don't have much of a breadth of education, of knowledge, of understanding what the real issues are, and therefore they listen to pundits on television who tell them what they're supposed to think, and they keep repeating that and pretty soon they say, 'Oh, that must be true.'”

So marvelously said Dr. Benjamin Carson - the neurosurgeon who blasted onto the political scene last week with an extraordinary speech at the national prayer breakfast - on Fox News's Your World Monday (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):

Buzzfeed's Ben Smith, who used to toil at Politico, must be blind in one eye and can't see out of the other.

In what appears to be a sudden revelation in his column ("Obama Prepares To Screw His Base") on ObamaCare's harsh treatment of young people, Smith notes how they "will pay disproportionately for ObamaCare." What this really represents is something which alarmed those who studied the bill both before and after its passage in March 2010. In other words, people who follow these things closely have known about this situation for years. But course, it has fallen on deaf, deliberately ignorant, or deliberately negligent establishment press ears. Thus, most low-information voters don't know what's coming. Beyond that, Smith acts as if the Obama administration hasn't been shafting young people ever since Barack Obama took his first oath of office in January 2009, when it has been doing so in a variety of ways on a daily basis. Excerpts from Smith's somnambulance, wherein he actually tries to blame Sarah Palin for what's coming, follow the jump (bolds are mine throughout this post):

"You really wonder if Democrats would win any elections if we had an honest media in this country."

So marvelously stated conservative author Ann Coulter on CNBC's Kudlow Report Thursday (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As of 9:47 ET this morning, according to the Associated Press, this is where the manhunt for Christopher Dorner stands: "Police spent all night searching the snowy mountains of Southern California but were unable to find the former Los Angeles police officer accused of carrying out a killing spree because he felt he was unfairly fired from his job.

We don't have to search very far for bias in the wire service's coverage of Dorner's "manifesto" (full uncensored version is here), which he apparently sent to CNN's Anderson Cooper. AP's unbylined report carrying excerpts from it cite Dorner's comments on the following politicians: former President George H. W. Bush (i.e., Bush 41), Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Chris Christie. Notably absent is any mention of our current president. As seen after the jump, Dorner effusively praises President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle (paragraph breaks added by me; expletive cleaned up):

As NewsBusters reported last week, America's media were in total swoon mode over Hillary Clinton following her testimony before Congress.

On Saturday, syndicated columnist Cal Thomas said of their behavior on Fox News Watch, "They're going to part the waters like Moses did the Red Sea to give her a clear path to be the first woman president...They treated [Barack Obama] as a Messiah, they’re going to treat her as the Virgin Mary" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Four years ago, ABC's Bill Weir gushed during coverage of Barack Obama's first inauguration, "Even the seagulls must have been awed by the blanket of humanity.”

On Sunday, Diane Sawyer said of Washington, D.C., on Inauguration Eve, "The whole city has a smile on its face" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

When Barack Obama was inaugurated 44th President of the United States in January of 2009, his adoring fans in the media could not contain their elation as they reported on the event. As President Obama prepares to be sworn in for a second term, here is a look back at just how thrilled they were last time around. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

On Sunday, Daniel Day-Lewis won a Golden Globe for playing the part of Abraham Lincoln in the film "Lincoln," and Julianne Moore won for her portrayal of Sarah Palin in HBO's schlockudrama "Game Change."

On NBC's Tonight Show Monday, host Jay Leno quipped, "The foreign press realize that the greatest challenge for any actor in Hollywood - pretending to be a Republican. That is the hardest acting job that they can do" (video follows with commentary):

It certainly was no surprise that HBO's schlockudrama "Game Change" won best TV movie at Sunday's Golden Globe Awards.

But when Julianne Moore accepted her award for best actress for her role in said piece of detritus, it was truly sick-making hearing her say, "I'd like to give a shoutout to two people who I think made a significant difference in 2008 election, Tina Fey and Katie Couric" (video follows with commentary):

President Barack Obama and his administration have been on the receiving end of a great deal of leftist criticism recently for its "lack of diversity" (to be clear, I find that entire discussion tiresome, as it would be more productive to spend time on problems like John Kerry's anti-American history, Jack Lew's bankrupting budgetary intransigence, and Eric Holder's unprecedented obsession with suing states exercising their sovereign rights).

With that backdrop, it's incredibly convenient that Colin Powell "just so happened" to appear today on NBC's "Meet the Press" with David Gregory, the Washington elitist disguised as a journalist who on Friday escaped prosecution for violating District of Columbia gun and ammunition law three weeks ago, to accuse the Republican Party -- the party whose members ended slavery, provided the margins by which landmark civil-rights legislation passed in the 1950s and 1960s, and whose ranks rarely if ever included members of the Ku Klux Klan while southern Democrats were infested with such members for nearly a century -- of having "a dark vein of intolerance."