Time

President Obama may need to call out Israel on its compromised "moral standing" in the world, Time's Joe Klein [file photo at right] argues in a March 17 Swampland blog post.

So what does Klein see as Israel's sin? Prime Minister-elect Benjamin Netanyahu's choice of the hawkish Avigdor Lieberman for foreign secretary.

Lieberman's campaign for prime minister was distinguished by his call for a loyalty pledge that citizens would have to sign in order to vote in Israeli elections:

Jeff Goldberg on Avigdor Lieberman. I second the motion--and add this: I suspect that President Obama is going to have to say something about Israel's selection of a politician who has frequently made racist noises as its Foreign Minister. He should be very clear that this severely compromises Israel's moral standing in the world.

[...]

Time offered its "Ten Questions" interview to Gov. Bobby Jindal, but the questions it selected from readers were mostly negative, underlining how unpopular the GOP is. One even insulted his personal appearance, with the increasingly common liberal mockery that he resembles the nerdy Kenneth the Page character on NBC’s 30 Rock. Here’s a sample:

What is your reaction to the negative reviews of your response to President Obama's address to Congress? -- Tanya Gupta, Washington

I live in a volatile seismic area and was troubled by your comment that funding volcano-monitoring is "wasteful." What makes some spending superfluous? – Caitlin Kidder, Kent, Wash.

What do you think of comparisons following your speech between you and a character on 30 Rock, Kenneth the Page? -- Jae Edward, Minneapolis

Voters rejected the GOP in November. What changes do you think it needs to make in order to become relevant again? – Ankit Agarwal, Boston

Why are you turning down stimulus dollars for one of the poorest states in the Union? -- Sonja Blair, Edmond, Okla.

Amy Sullivan’s article on Time.com on Thursday, “The Catholic Crusade Against a Mythical Abortion Bill,” tried to downplay President Obama’s past and current support for abortion, and tried to use a technicality to “prove” that there is no chance of passage for the staunchly pro-abortion Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA): “...FOCA has also provided ammunition for those on the right who want to paint Obama as ‘the most pro-abortion president ever.’ It’s been less than a month since he took office, but so far the President has given social conservatives little evidence to back up that charge. He did repeal the Mexico City policy banning federal funds to foreign family planning organizations that provide abortion referrals or services — but so did Bill Clinton.” In reality, the Obama adminstration’s record on the issue consists of much more than merely support for legislative proposals and signing executive orders.

Whether it's a shot at competitor Newsweek for putting Markos Moulitsas on the payroll, or a brief moment of clarity, Time magazine has named the disgustingly liberal website Daily Kos as one of the most overrated blogs on the Internet.

I kid you not. 

Such a revelation seems even more odd given the absence of any conservative websites in Time's "25 Best Blogs of 2009."

But before we get there, here's what the magazine had to say about DK:

Hat-tipping gay blogger Andrew Sullivan, Time's Amy Sullivan (no relation) expressed impatience at the Obama administration for not moving yet on ending the ban on openly gay personnel serving in the U.S. Armed Forces.

Sullivan is chagrined that a Kansas National Guardsman was reportedly discharged after Army brass discovered her MySpace page in which she declared she is a lesbian.

Here's the February 11 Swampland blog post in full, entitled, "They Didn't Ask, She Didn't Tell, and Yet...":

Earlier today my colleague Tim Graham noted how on February 5, Time magazine's Michael Grunwald compared GOP critics of the Democratic stimulus package to the geese that downed US Airways Flight 1549:

It's hard to take Republican leaders too seriously when they criticize the recovery plans for the economy; it's sort of like those geese criticizing the evacuation plans for US Airways Flight 1549.

Well, Grunwald's quip got a larger audience today as a co-host of ABC's "The View" regurgitated the line on the Feb. 10 edition of that program:

Time magazine is clearly dispensing with "news" reporting this week. Michael Grunwald started his article "How to Spend the Stimulus" with this sentence: "It's hard to take Republican leaders too seriously when they criticize the recovery plans for the economy; it's sort of like those geese criticizing the evacuation plans for US Airways Flight 1549."

That would be the geese that were ground into the jet engines of the airliner that crash-landed in the Hudson River.

Clearly impressed with his own comic stylings, Grunwald continued: "Their critiques seem even more comical when you see their alternatives. They warn that President Obama's stimulus package will explode the debt – so they want to make George W. Bush's debt-exploding tax cuts permanent. They say Democratic spending plans are full of pork – then they propose an extra $24 billion for the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal equivalent of Oscar Mayer. Let's just say their idea bank could use a bailout."

It would be funny if the subject matter wasn't the destruction of unborn children in the womb. Time magazine's Amy Sullivan asked in a Swampland blog post headline from February 4: "Barack Obama, Pro-Life President?"

Sullivan's evidence? Well, the president has picked a Pentecostal preacher -- who once worked for a New Jersey Congressman with a 100% score by NARAL Pro-Choice America -- to head his faith-based initiatives office and "abortion reduction" is one of the major stated goals of one of the president's advisory boards:

Time magazine acknowledged that Michael Steele’s election as chairman of the Republican National Committee "makes history," but their story quoted only social and political liberals for analysis. Steven Gray insisted: "In a TIME interview during that [post-election] period, Steele praised Obama's election as America's first black President. He made clear that as RNC chairman, he would move to temper the party's rigidity and truculence." Truculence? Here's the dictionary definition:  

1. feeling or displaying ferocity: CRUEL, SAVAGE

2. DEADLY, DESTRUCTIVE

3. scathingly harsh; VITRIOLIC

4. aggressively self-assertive: BELLIGERENT

Steele fans and foes alike in the GOP would love to see what Steele actually said on this front, since the Time writer described it so colorfully. (Doesn't it sound like the Time writer's thinking of....Rush Limbaugh?) Then Gray turned to how Steele could display less "rigidity" on snuffing out the lives of the unborn:

The old joke about CNN in the 1990s was that it stood for the Clinton News Network. The current joke about the anti-Israel Associated Press is that AP stands for Allah Press. In the 70s, people joked that NBC really meant National Broadcasting for Communists. We've all heard the various joke acronyms before, of course. But, the presumed sentiment of the individuals working for these news agencies aside, these are just sarcastic jibes cast at journalists and the companies they work for. But, a current situation blurs the line between mere jokes and reality. Time Magazine has employed a photographer named Callie Shell that has apparently been doing double duty as both a "journalist" AND a member of team Obama, taking pictures subsequently sent out as official White House photos.

How is it that we can have someone thinking that bias cannot be presumed when that same person is working for both a news agency and at the same time for the subject of that news? Is the love that the press has for The One so blurred that they cannot see a difference between covering Obama and working for Obama?

Time magazine columnist and Obama apologist Joe Klein opened his January 21 piece by exulting in how "stunning and cathartic" it was to hear President Barack Obama begin to recite the presidential oath of office:

A man named Barack Hussein Obama is now the President of the United States. He came to us as the ultimate outsider in a nation of outsiders — the son of an African visitor and a white woman from Kansas — and he has turned us inside out. That he leads us now is a breathtaking statement of American open-mindedness and, yes, our native liberality.

It didn't take long for Klein to go from singing Obama's praises to cursing the outgoing president and the chief justice he named to the Supreme Court. It seems his Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) may be mutating into a new virulent strain, JRDS, which should last the length of John Roberts's tenure:

In the Life Magazine book of commemorative photographs titled The American Journal of Barack Obama, a set of essays in the back recount Obama’s life and triumphs. Time Senior Writer Nancy Gibbs, who recently compared Obama in Time to a prince born in a manger, championed Obama’s breaking the chains of religious conservatism in American life. His ascent marked "a growing consensus that something had gone wrong, that the phenomenon of politicians nailing campaign posters on the gates of heaven and laying exclusive claims to God’s designs was unwise, unfair, even unholy."

She even transformed Obama into a secular savior, leading "the kind of mass revivals that used to sweep across the prairie and set souls on fire... Obama was busy building a new church, looking for the seekers, those who had lost their faith in politics or never had any in the first place, and he invited them home."

On Monday, both The New York Times and The Washington Post noticed a long-simmering trend: Time and Newsweek have increasingly abandoned news reporting in favor of being more opinionated "thought leaders." In the Post, reporter Howard Kurtz bluntly declared, "The rival editors are turning out weeklies that are smaller, more serious, more opinionated and, though they are loath to admit it, more liberal."

Newsweek editor Jon Meacham and Time editor Rick Stengel didn’t want to admit a bias. "I'm not ideologically driven by any means," claimed Meacham. "I'm really conscious of trying to be fair and balanced," argued Stengel, although Kurtz noted he was at one time an aide to the Bill Bradley 2000 presidential campaign.

Believe it or not, global warming is being cited as one of the reasons a US Airways flight landed in New York's Hudson River on Friday.

Media were considering blaming the incident on the Bush administration until it became apparent that as a result of pilot Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger's heroic efforts, as well as those of his flight crew, there were no fatalities.

With nothing bad to pin on the current President, the good folks at Time magazine found another predictable culprit (h/t Tom Nelson):

Time TV writer and blogger James Poniewozik raised eyebrows when he reported that although he voted for Barack Obama, MSNBC's gleeful Obama coverage makes him sympathetic to Americans whose legs are not so thrilled. He disdained their "blatantly triumphalist" promos as worse than Fox News, and suggested MSNBC is wildly inconsistent for first suggesting that Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann aren’t objective enough to anchor major political events like the conventions, but then decide they’re just fine for anchoring their hero Obama's inauguration:

...MSNBC has decided it's OK to relax and let its pro-Bama freak flag fly. As if to confirm every "real vs. fake America" stereotype Sarah Palin and company perpetrated during the campaign, MSNBC's inauguration coverage will even run in Starbucks in New York, San Francisco and Seattle. (Seriously: did David Brooks think up that promotion?) On one of its incessantly running Inauguration Day promos, a narrator gushes, "When a new President inspires the nation, one day Americans will ask: where were you when Barack Obama became President?"

Besides the confusing timeline of that sentence, there's something almost bludgeoningly hortatory about it. Mind you, I voted for Barack Obama enthusiastically, in the primaries and the general election--and yet hearing stuff like this (Obama = The Moon Landing) I can empathize with the people who didn't.

Susan Crawford's recent assertions of torture simply do not add up, and your main stream media isn't going to investigate anytime soon.  Had Crawford made an assertion that there was unequivocally no torture to speak of at Guantanamo, the media would be sifting meticulously through her statements with a fine-toothed comb, smearing her reputation at every turn.  Instead, her arguments seemingly confirm what the leftist media has long assumed - that our government has condoned torture tactics - and because of that, everything is taken at face value.

Crawford recently told Bob Woodward of the Washington Post that: 

"We tortured (Mohammed al-) Qahtani.  His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

The basic premise of this story however, had apparently been completely refuted in retrospect, back in February of 2008.  By whom?  Why, the Washington Post.

On February 12th, 2008, the Post printed an article titled:

U.S. to Try 6 on Capital Charges Over 9/11 Attacks

New Evidence Gained Without Coercive Tactics

You read that correctly, the staff writers went out of their way to inform the public that the evidence against the 9/11 conspirators was ‘gained without coercive tactics.'

TIME magazine got a twofer on a recent screed headlined "Is Israel Losing the Media War in Gaza?." Not only did TIME use its article to take a few swipes at Samuel Joe Wurzelbacher (known as Joe the Plumber) but it also took the opportunity to once again blame the Jews for everything going on in Gaza.

Naturally, TIME's description of Joe the Plumber was more a cut at him than an accurate picture. Not only that, but TIME seemed to have somehow forgotten that Barack Obama made Joe famous, not John McCain!

Apparently, Time Magazine doesn't think that politics is a proper subject for social-networking sites such as FaceBook. In fact, one almost gets the feeling that Time thinks the Internet would be wholly free of passion and even vitriol were it not for politics making its evil presence known in cyberspace. And whose fault is all this vitriol? Why it's the Jews, of course.

At the very least, Time is seen lamenting that politics has become such a lively part of the World Wide Web. In a recent article titled "Facebook Users Go to War over Gaza," Time seems to say that social networking sites on the Internet were free of vitriol until politics and the war in Gaza came around.

Starting this week, MRC’s Notable Quotables newsletter is evolving from a printed hard-copy product to an all-electronic Web and e-mail publication, complete with audio and video clips of the worst quotes from each issue.

Every two weeks, Notable Quotables offers a concise summary of the liberal media’s most outrageous and/or humorous eruptions, and the very best quotes are harvested once a year so the journalists can receive “awards” at our annual DisHonors dinner in Washington, D.C.

To give you a flavor of what’s in each issue, here are the most obnoxious quotes from this week’s (January 12) edition. If you've been a subscriber to the print edition, or if you’d like to sign up for our new HTML or plain-text e-mail, please go to www.MRC.org/subscriptions.

Discussing on MSNBC Thursday night his latest screed for Time magazine (“The Bush Administration's Most Despicable Act”), Joe Klein maligned the Bush-Cheney administration, telling 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue host David Shuster: “I think this has been a profoundly un-American administration.” Klein, whose piece for the January 19 edition of the magazine contended Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials “perpetrated what many legal scholars consider to be war crimes,” lamented on MSNBC that “it's going to be very hard to prosecute these people” but, he ruminated about “the fanciful idea” that “it might happen overseas” with “Cheney being snatched mid-stream while, you know, fly fishing in Norway as Augusto Pinochet, the dictator in Chile, was.”

In the magazine harangue posted Thursday, Klein argued that Bush “led directly to the abuses” of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo “when he signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention -- the one regarding the treatment of enemy prisoners taken in wartime -- did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban.” He declared: “It was his single most callous and despicable act. It stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his presidency.”

As opposed to the national embarrassment to sober journalism that is Joe Klein?

The fiftieth anniversary of Fidel Castro’s Iron Curtain around Cuba may suggest that in some dark corners of the world, Soviet-style communism still lives. But it also demonstrates that antique "peaceful coexistence" bias is as persistent as the Castro brothers. Time magazine is still demonstrating the tired tendency of moral equivalence, treating the free world and the miniaturized communist world as bickering kids who should hang up their boxing gloves. Tim Padgett wrote:

The Cuban revolution deserves its due: it overthrew the putrid Batista regime and showed the U.S. that its worst impulses could be thwarted. But after 50 years, maybe it's time for both sides to move toward (yes) a resolution.

How are America’s "worst impulses" proven to be morally exceeded by Castro’s reign of poverty and oppression? How is Batista "putrid" and Castro so obviously superior? Can’t both be regrettable dictators? But Time finds no moral equivalence there. Padgett insisted it’s time for grown-ups to take over the diplomacy, and Obama is just in time. Dictatorship is to be treated with light humor:

It's not often that meteorology intersects with geopolitics - but Europe could be in store for another Cold War, literally.

Accuweather.com's chief long-range and hurricane forecaster Joe Bastardi observed that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's recent cut of gas flows to Europe via Ukraine may have been done so in anticipation of a global cooling cycle on the Jan. 6 "Glenn Beck Show" radio program. Bastardi has a solid reputation among Wall Street traders for understanding weather's impact on energy commodities.

"The thing I want to bring up here - very interesting - most of the solar cycle studies that we know about and that guys like me read have come out of the Russian scientists," Bastardi said. "But when Glasnost developed, the Russian scientists, a lot of their ideas on the coming cool period that a lot of us believe is going to occur - ice, rather than fire is the big problem down the road here 2030, 2040, and the reversing cyclical cycles of the ocean - it came out of the East."

Barack Obama cheerleader Chris Matthews almost got another thrill up his leg Sunday when Time's Joe Klein predicted that 2009 would be a good year for the incoming president.

I guess "winning" the dubious honor of Quote of the Year in the Media Research Center's 21st Annual Awards for the Year's Worst Reporting hasn't encouraged Matthews to be more objective. 

Not a chance, for in the first "Chris Matthews Show" of the New Year, the Obama-loving host displayed a lack of journalistic integrity that has made him a consistent focus of media analysts across the fruited plain.

As Sunday's program wound to a close, Matthews posed the following to his panel (file photo):

In our year-end edition of the Best of Notable Quotables, two of our winners for outrageous liberalism were unloaded on the Charlie Rose show on PBS, a very comfortable TV salon for liberals to speak freely without conservative rebuttal. On December 18, the Rose show was one stop for Time editor Richard Stengel to tout his "titanic" figure Barack Obama as the magazine’s person of the year. Rose played the hype up in the show’s opening:

STENGEL: The story of Barack Obama was the great overarching, titanic narrative of this past year. And so it just -- it would have been pretty much impossible not to select him.

ROSE: And a narrative that had global proportions.

RICK STENGEL: Absolutely. I mean, he was Person of the Year in the most universal sense.

The Media Research Center today announced its Best Notable Quotables of 2008: The 21st Annual Awards for the Year's Worst Reporting, and MSNBC's Chris Matthews "won" the dubious honor of Quote of the Year for gushing over a Barack Obama speech back in February: "I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often….And that is an objective assessment."

Top runner-up for Quote of the Year went to Reuters for this ridiculous post-election headline: "Media bias largely unseen in U.S. presidential race."

MRC President Brent Bozell offered this comment: "Year after year, the liberal media outdo themselves in providing conservatives the sheer joy of laughing at their own words. The year of the Obama Paparazzi was no different, as they salivated over their savior and did everything in their power to crush conservatives. And we wonder why Americans don't trust the media."

Don't get me wrong. I love Christmastime. But in many other respects it can be the most dreaded time of the year for us media watchers. It is, after all, the time when liberal journalists decide to assign their year-ending accolades on everything from movies and music to politicians.

It's doubly dreadful when we're talking about Time magazine's Joe "Anonymous" Klein.

In a December 17 piece doling out his "Teddy awards" -- as in the first President Roosevelt, not the lingerie -- Klein began by cooing sweet nothings over Obama's political courage before giving muted praised for McCain. When all was said and done, Klein even praised Condi Rice, but even that was in service of his left-wing affinity for negotiating with dictators. [for our archive of Klein bias, click here]

While Klein largely disdained the McCain campaign's post-Palin message, he cheered the Arizona Republican for keeping Rev. Jeremiah Wright off-limits:

Now that Barack Obama has won the White House, Time must feel it's safe to call the magazine's "Man of the Year" an anti-gay rights bigot.

Such was revealed in an article posted Thursday entitled "The Problem for Gays with Rick Warren — and Obama."

It's quite a shame that the following paragraphs weren't front page news during the campaign as they surely would have changed the way many liberals viewed the junior senator from Illinois (emphasis added):

Barack Obama is finding out that his honeymoon with the mainstream media may be considerably shorter than he had expected. Inviting Pastor Rick Warren to pray at his inauguration hasn't endeared him to a core constituency and now Time Magazine has joined in the bash fest. Its Web site carries the piece, "The Problem for Gays with Rick Warren — and Obama." Authored by John Cloud, the article begins by citing Warren's criticisms of homosexuality and then clobbers Obama for his association with him:

Gays and lesbians are angry that Barack Obama has honored Warren, but they shouldn't be surprised. Obama has proven himself repeatedly to be a very tolerant, very rational-sounding sort of bigot. He is far too careful and measured a man to say anything about body parts fitting together or marriage being reserved for the non-pedophilic, but all the same, he opposes equality for gay people when it comes to the basic recognition of their relationships. He did throughout his campaign, a campaign that featured appearances by Donnie McClurkin, a Christian entertainer who preaches that homosexuals can become heterosexuals.

"The way they wrote this story... it's an embarrassment. If you go to the Obama for President site, you won't see the kind of language that Time magazine put in a news story," Media Research Center president Brent Bozell told viewers of the December 17 "Hannity & Colmes." [audio available here]

Appearing live via satellite from the MRC's new state-of-the-art studio, Bozell scoffed at writer David Von Drehle's syrupy write-up:

Look at this quote. I mean, [Democratic strategist] Kirsten [Powers] says that they're flowery. Get this: "We are all accustomed to that Obi-wan Kenobi calm, though we may never entirely understand it." What they hell are they talking about?!

Was Time magazine's Jay Carney hired by the Obama transition as Joe Biden's director of communications in order to keep a tight lid on the Beltway's greatest gaffe machine?

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz reports, you decide:

Time magazine's Jay Carney, who said over the summer that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is "incredibly prone to say the wrong thing," will soon be in charge of ensuring that doesn't happen again.

[...]

In July, before Barack Obama picked the senator from Delaware as his running mate, Carney said on MSNBC that "Biden may be the answer" because of his foreign policy credentials. The "downside," Carney said, is that Biden has said the wrong thing "throughout his career. . . . He's smart, but he speaks -- shoots from the hip and sometimes says just wrong thing at the wrong time."