Village Voice

Liberal bias is rampant among the media, but there is no more tangible example of it than in how the media treat Conservative women. The most recent cover of Newsweek features a very wide-eyed Michele Bachmann, looking surprised and unattractive. Perhaps more disturbing is the caption Newsweek placed below the presidential candidate's photo: "Queen of Rage."

Bachmann, an attractive 55 year-old mother of five, is a three term member of the House of Representatives, constitutional conservative and prominent voice of the Tea Party movement. But if you get your information from liberals or the mainstream media, you might know her as 'crazy,' a "zombie" a"phony-ass broad" and a "skank."

Want to see what sort of rationalizations the scary anti-conservative elements of the media use to justify why they hold any opponents of President Barack Obama’s policies in contempt?

Check out the treatise on the state of “white America” from the Village Voice’s Steven Thrasher. In a long-winded Sep. 29 piece full of invective, Thrasher contends that the “white brain, beset with worries, finally goes haywire in spectacular fashion.” Why? He insisted it was because of the election of Obama and a realization “white America” had lost grasp of the control power in the United States. (h/t @DLoesch)

“About 12:01 on the afternoon of January 20, 2009, the white American mind began to unravel,” Thrasher wrote. “It had been a pretty good run up to that point. The brains of white folks had been humming along cogently for near on 400 years on this continent, with little sign that any serious trouble was brewing. White people, after all, had managed to invent a spiffy new form of self-government so that all white men (and, eventually, women) could have a say in how white people were taxed and governed. White minds had also nearly universally occupied just about every branch of that government and, for more than two centuries, had kept sole possession of the leadership of its executive branch (whose parsonage, after all, is called the White House).”

When the far-left finds a character to assassinate, it doesn't let facts get in the way. That, at least, is the lesson we can draw from the latest bout of liberal character assassination, this one aimed at James O'Keefe.

The slandering of his reputation has occurred mostly at Salon.com, the Village Voice, and an obscure hard-left organization called the One People's Project. Together, they have waged an all-out war on James O'Keefe's character by associating him with supposedly racist people and organizations. Just one problem: their claims are predicated on falsehoods, exaggerations, and assumptions (but mostly just falsehoods).

Max Blumenthal, who penned the Salon piece, and the stalwart non-journalists at OPP (the Village Voice, for its part, issued a mild retraction) alleged that O'Keefe had helped to organize a gathering of "anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism." They also claimed (and produced a cropped picture that could not possibly validate this claim) that O'Keefe had manned the literature table at the event.

Keith Olbermann is not one to pass up an opportunity to attack anything that even hints at being right of center. The repugnant MSNBC host devoted some three-quarters of his Sept. 16 show to claim criticism of President Barack Obama had to have elements of racism, no matter how you sliced it. And therefore, those critics were all despicable human beings, end of story.

However, he did manage to find time to revert to old tried and true method of appeasing his angry left-wing desires - a little bashing of former Republican vice-presidential nominee and Gov. Sarah Palin, with an assist from Michael Musto, columnist for The Village Voice and author of "La Dolce Musto."

Olbermann exhibited some displeasure that the Washington Speakers Bureau would have a flowery Web page touting Palin's accomplishments. But, noted the language on the page didn't include "maverick." However, Musto was there to make his own suggestions.

On June 9 a rally that saw thousands of participants in support of traditional marriage assembled at Albany, New York, the state capitol. One month earlier, a similar rally was held in Midtown Manhattan that also saw thousands in attendance. And in neither case was there much by the way of media coverage.

A Google search of the words marriage rally in New York June 9 turns up many hits on the story. But almost all of them are from blogs as opposed to traditional media sources, though the Village Voice covered the May rally in Manhattan.

Last week's issue of the Village Voice featured Roy Edroso's review of "10 conservative Web scribblers," described therein as "buffoons" and in the article's subhead as "a confederacy of dunces." (Actually, Edroso names twelve bloggers, arriving at his figure of ten by counting the Power Line trio as one person.)

Lefty snark aside, the piece is problematic in part because at least two of the bloggers Edroso scrutinizes, Ann Althouse and Megan McArdle, really aren't conservatives. Moreover, by emphasizing individual bloggers he almost completely ignores lively large-group sites such as the Corner (he examines only Jonah Goldberg's contributions to NRO) and, of course, NewsBusters.

Sunday's New York Times led with Scott Shane and David Johnston's "Mining of Data Prompted Fight Over U.S. Spying," on what the intelligence reporters characterized as a fierce Justice Department debate over the use of "data mining" in the war on terror.

"A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency's secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.