Campaigns & Elections

A sneering Terry Moran on Wednesday night slammed an out-of-touch Republican Party in the wake of Barack Obama's reelection. According to Moran, Rush Limbaugh showed "contempt" for the President's voters and "slandered" them as "moochers." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

In contrast, Moran extolled Obama as "grayer and maybe wiser." He cheered, "But in the America of the 21st century, he gets something, he embodies something that more and more voters see as the country's destiny."

Would CNN's Anderson Cooper refer to far-left Democrats as "extremists"? On Wednesday night's Anderson Cooper 360, he asked how the GOP would court Latino votes with party "extremes" standing in the way.

"I mean how do you change it? You've got – because you have extremes in your party who certainly on the -- on the immigration issue, for instance, don't want to see some sort of a compromise," he told Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who admitted the GOP was moving in the "wrong direction" with Latinos. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

As of shortly before 1 p.m. ET, at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, there is no story about what the Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday evening about just-reelected Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., namely that he " is in the midst of plea discussions with the feds probing his alleged misuse of campaign funds." There is also no story on the home page at Politico.

Selected paragraphs from Michael Sneed's Sun-Times report follow the jump (bolds are mine):

On the night after the election, CNN's Piers Morgan buttered up Obama aides and supporters while trashing the Tea Party and the "extreme right" for being "intransigent" and pushing "archaic" policies.

"I think he [Obama] won a very convincing victory," Morgan told Newark Mayor Corey Booker after the President won just 50 percent of the vote and received 9 million less votes than his 2008 total. He laughably praised Vice President Biden as "one of the unsung heroes. I thought his vice presidential debate was terrific." [Video below the break. Audio here.]

ABC journalist Barbara Walters took to the airwaves on Wednesday to assail the Republican Party for being "behind" on social views. Walters and her View co-hosts looked to analyst Matt Dowd for post-election spin. Per usual, he spent his time lecturing the Republican Party, repeating an assertion that the GOP represents "Mad Men" and not "Modern Family" America.

Walters, who sometimes pretends she's still an objective journalist, derided, "You look at their platform. You looked at things that were said about rape – I mean they were behind in their social views." [See video below. Mp3 audio here.] Earlier, replying to Dowd's gloomy predictions, she wondered, "So does that mean that Democrats are going to win and win and win?"

Pseudo-conservative and liberal media darling Joe Scarborough is known for his whacky theories but on Thursday’s Morning Joe he posited a new one that puts the icing on the cake.

Speaking with co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist, the MSNBC host said that if the GOP had selected former Utah Governor Jon Hunstman, the Republican Party would have done much better against President Obama.   [See video below break.  MP3 audio here.]

On Wednesday's NBC Today, correspondent Andrea Mitchell provided a gushing profile of the First Family winning four more years in the White House: "Obama's family is key to his success....Like the Kennedys, the Obamas swept into their first term on the promise of hope....And now with four more years ahead, the First Family continues to be the President's strongest base of support." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Set to various musical scores, Mitchell's report looked at the Obamas and past first families: "For generations of Americans, the Kennedy White House is the iconic standard for the First Family. Young and beautiful, their two-child home represented a timely American portrait....Ron [Reagan] was a striking contrast to his father's rugged conservative image, making headlines with a risque appearance on Saturday Night Live."

After NBC News spent a week hyping President Obama's response to Hurricane Sandy as a major boon for his re-election campaign, on Thursday's Today, political director Chuck Todd completely dismissed Republicans citing the event as one reason for Mitt Romney's defeat: "Believe it or not, that Sandy finger-pointing is something that is being pushed around...when you look at the entire scope of this election and the demographics...it's a pretty absurd idea."

Moments later, co-host Matt Lauer grilled former Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour on some in the GOP being critical of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie praising Obama's handling of the storm. Barbour explained: "Hurricane Sandy saved Barack Obama's presidency....But that's not Chris Christie's fault. Now, I do think the news media made a much bigger deal out of it, that made it sound like Christie was almost endorsing Obama. All Christie said was, is the President's trying to be a good partner."

Should Republicans unilaterally disarm in the media-bias wars?  Joe Scarborough seems to think so. Arguing that it distracts Republicans from performing the political blocking-and-tackling needed to win elections, Scarborough has called on Republicans to "stop blaming the media."

Saying "let's makes this personal," Scarborough cited as an example of the supposed distractions to which he was referring the controversy over the tape Morning Joe aired in September from a Romney campaign stop.  Readers will recall that the clip seemed to show Romney asking the crowd, which had been chanting "Romney!", to change to "Romney/Ryan."   But Scarborough suggested just the opposite: that the crowd had been chanting "Ryan!" and that Romney asked them to change to "Romney/Ryan."   View the video after the jump.

Now that their guy will be in the White House for another term, the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, has apparently commenced its "Cleaning up Benghazi" project -- as, naturally, has the Obama administration.

As part of that effort, the wire service's Greg Risling, reporting from Los Angeles at 6:14 p.m., made only the vaguest of references to how the film "roiled the Middle East" and "sparked violence ... killing dozens," without mentioning how it was dishonestly leveraged by terrorists as cover for protests and violence, and of course without mentioning how Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and so many others in his administration spent well over a week -- despite clearly knowing better -- citing the film as the cause of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya which killed four Americans, including Libyan ambassador Christopher Stevens. Excerpts follow the jump (saved here in full for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes; bolds are mine):

Bob Schieffer poured cold water on President Obama's victory during CBS's post-election coverage on early Wednesday morning: "He's not going to have a mandate here. The President has been re-elected, but nobody's put the stamp of approval on his program. I mean, when the vote is this close...he's going to have a very, very difficult time."

Schieffer repeated these same points on Wednesday's CBS This Morning, and pointed out that the incumbent liberal "almost lost the popular vote...so people are going to step back, and they're going to say, why should I cooperate with him?"

On the same night he apologized for making a horribly inappropriate comment about Hurricane Sandy, Chris Matthews on Wednesday had Bill Maher on Hardball to compare Karl Rove and Republicans to Nazis. After Matthews wondered about Rove's erroneous predictions, the liberal comic mocked, "It was a little Hitler's bunker, wasn't it? I wanted to rush in with a cyanide capsule there. I thought he was going to say, 'I don't want to live in a world without national socialism.'" [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Matthews himself got into the act, comparing Rove to Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, a former propaganda henchman for Saddam Hussein: "Is [Rove] the Baghdad Bob of the 2012 election, the last guy to admit something's new and something bad is happening?" Again, this is the same program in which the MSNBC anchor apologized for his "terrible"  election night comment: "I'm so glad we had that storm last week."

In his "Winners and losers from Election 2012" feature filed at his paper's website on Wednesday afternoon, the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza concluded that foreign policy in general was a "loser" in the campaign, failing to move votes (emphasis mine), "Despite all of the media attention that Libya drew in the final month of the campaign, foreign policy was an afterthought — at best — for most voters," he noted, adding that "Just 5 percent of people in the national exit poll said foreign policy was their most important issue. Interestingly, Obama won that group by 20+ points."

But as we've noted in numerous places on this blog, the administration's ever-shifting storyline on Benghazi failed to get scrutiny in the media, and new, damning revelations were downplayed or ignored, especially as the election drew closer and closer:

Reacting to Democratic Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren's victory in Massachusetts, CNN's Ali Velshi gushed on Wednesday morning, "I have to say, regardless of party, good for her."

"She prevailed. She got crushed and now she's going to be a U.S. senator," he noted her prior setback, when she failed to become the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

With President Obama's election win, the worldwide celebrations have commenced again. NBC's Today show documented as much as they possibly could on Wednesday morning.

Reporting from London, foreign correspondent Michelle Kosinski was tasked with narrating the story of how the election has been perceived and reported overseas. Eerily similar to four long years ago, jubilant residents from other sovereign nations were shown in a high spirits after a second term was guaranteed to Obama. [ video below, MP3 audio here ]

CNN contributor John Avlon dumped on Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) early Wednesday morning, when he quipped that she was re-elected on "a bad night for wing-nuts."

"And I mean, look, it was a bad night for wing-nuts last night, but Michele Bachmann is straight through in a redrawn district that was drawn to be more conservative," Avlon said after CNN projected that Bachmann would win re-election. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Now that the 2012 presidential election is over and Barack Obama has been safely reelected, the journalists at ABC's Good Morning America woke up to the fact that the President has "refused" to provide details the terrorist attack in Libya and that the administration "didn't want to talk about it." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Fill-in host Elizabeth Vargas blithely announced, "In the meantime, the Libya issue has been overhanging this election. Allegations of a, quote, massive cover-up, by Senator John McCain about this administration's, really, refusal to really put to rest this issue before voting day." Martha Raddatz, who moderated the vice presidential debate, agreed, saying, "They didn't want to talk about it. Everybody tried to pin them down on that. They did not want to talk about it." "Everybody" tried to pin them down on Libya? 

On Wednesday's NBC Today, political director Chuck Todd cited Florida as evidence of "this demographic time bomb went off and caught the Republicans off guard," referring to the Hispanic vote in Tuesday's election. He then predicted the same "bomb" could go off in other states in the future: "...it's going to happen in Georgia....Texas and the state of Arizona..." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

During a panel discussion moments earlier, there was universal consensus among NBC journalists that GOP must abandon its principles to attract more voters. Meet the Press moderator David Gregory proclaimed: "The party has got to find a way to reach out to Latinos, the fastest growing voting bloc, to become a more diverse party with the ability to shed some of the orthodoxy around taxes, around spending over the role of government, and this process is going to begin this morning, the soul searching and redefinition."

In the aftermath of Barack Obama's reelection, the lecturing and advice from the liberal media began on Wednesday's Good Morning America. ABC analyst Matt Dowd mocked the GOP as a "Mad Men party in a Modern Family America." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] (The Mad Men reference is to the AMC series set in the 1960s. Modern Family is a gay-friendly sitcom on ABC.) 

According to Dowd, "And it doesn't work anymore. And it just doesn't fit anymore." Host George Stephanopoulos insisted the results indicate that "this is a changing America, which makes it a changing electorate." In a follow-up segment on females, Stephanopoulos asserted Republicans have "got to be thinking, what are we going to do in the future?"

It's no secret that the liberal media have boosted Obama with bias by commission, going out of their way to treat him with gauzy coverage, softball interviews, and by hyping his celebrity status, but bias by omission played an even larger role in the media's part to ensure the president's reelection, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell told Stuart Varney this morning. [see video below page break]

Appearing on the November 7 edition Fox Business Network's Varney & Co. shortly after 10 a.m., Bozell, also the founder and president of the Media Research Center, told the audience that the media simply "stopped reporting the news" on things that would, if covered, make Obama look bad. The only questions which remain, Bozell added were:

In a fawning report on Wednesday's NBC Today on President Obama winning re-election, correspondent Kristen Welker provided gauzy commentary: "...the Chicago crowd was electrified as the President delivered a soaring speech in which he thanked all those who supported him, including his family....The President's daughters are a little taller, his hair grayer, but in his speech, Mr. Obama sounded a lot like the man America first elected four years ago." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Welker touted how "the President struck a tone of healing" and "joked that unlike 2008, the first daughters will not be getting a dog this year." She also noted that one of Obama's first phone calls "was to former President Bill Clinton, of course, one of his top surrogates during this campaign season."

On Tuesday's NBC Today, correspondent Kristen Welker described an Obama campaign "filled with anticipation and nostalgia" and the President giving his final stump speech in Iowa "With an eye on his future" and having "reached back to the past." Welker continued to fawn: "...the state which gave Mr. Obama his first 2008 victory, launching his improbable and historic journey. An emotional night, even for a president known for keeping his cool." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Later in the report, Welker touted: "And while [Obama's] top surrogates stormed the battleground states, some of the biggest names in entertainment also lent their voices, from Jay-Z to Bruce Springsteen..."

The film "SEAL Team Six" came under fire for being an Obama-booster just before the election. Its Obama-supporting producer Harvey Weinstein gave credibility to those charges when he lauded the President and took shots at Mitt Romney and John McCain on CNN on Monday night.

"I didn't have to do anything to remind anybody about the decision that Barack Obama made to pull the trigger on Osama bin Laden," Obama-donor Harvey Weinstein told CNN. Host Piers Morgan teed him up by calling the drama "quite overtly political in the most magnificent propaganda-style way." [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Norah O'Donnell lived up to her reputation on Tuesday's CBS This Morning for tossing softball questions at liberal guests while hounding conservative ones. During an interview of Obama campaign flack David Axelrod, O'Donnell wondered if "the minority vote will be bigger than it was in 2008." Charlie Rose assisted his co-host in asking, "Are we looking at a new Democratic majority - a different voter group that are coming together to be the majority in America?"

By contrast, the former NBC correspondent peppered Romney adviser Kevin Madden with questions that cast doubt on the Republican presidential candidate's chances to win. CBS political director John Dickerson also mangled polling data on minority support for Romney by asking Madden if the former governor "has trouble even breaking out of single digits with Latinos, and, certainly, with African-Americans...isn't that a problem for an incoming president - to do so poorly among minority voters?"

As voters cast their ballots to decide the future direction of the country, President Obama encouraged people to go our and vote – and bring their ID’s along with them.  I guess the ship has sailed on Al Sharpton’s bridge he intended to sell to us.  We have the President of the United States and the leader of the Democratic Party telling voters to bring their IDs to the polls.  This is the seat of irony since the president's own attorney general equated Voter ID laws to a new poll tax and called them an affront to minority voters.