Slate

On June 11, Slate editor Emily Bazelon whipped out the Nazi card against Congressman Trent Franks.  The media site, which is an affiliate of the Washington Post, unsurprisingly went after the Republican legislator for his remarks about rape on Wednesday concerning a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks into a pregnancy.

Of course, liberals tried to tie these remarks to Todd Akin, who made scientifically inaccurate statements about sexual assault and pregnancy last year. Yet, even some notables on the left are saying Franks is no Akin.

So Slate’s Justin Peters had a nice “squirrel” piece yesterday about gun “accidents," wherein he sought to use a rash of recent gun accidents involving young children as a news peg to push for more stringent gun control on the state level.

With five scandals plaguing the Obama administration, you would think that a Washington Post affiliated site would be drilling down on Eric Holder’s possible perjury about the seizure of phone records and emails of journalists.  That’s a story that hits close to home for any journalist. Yet, Peters decided to apply the defibrillator paddles to the gun meme. In a way you have to admire the left-wing media's persistence.

Last week, gay marriage advocates on the left began to show their true colors. It started with Slate’s Jillian Keenan advocating for polygamy and The Huffington Post’s Abby Huntsman admitting that “gay marriage opens the door to legalizing polygamy and other things.” MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry went a step further, writing in The Nation on April 15, that the gay marriage debate helps us to realize marriage shouldn’t really matter at all.

“As we race to a victorious finish, it is time to begin forcefully articulating that, in fact, maybe we do want to change marriage – because while marriage should be a choice, it should not be an imperative… I hope we will be like the child who asks what difference it really makes. Because I suspect the goal of achieving this right is less about the ceremonies, the flowers, the love or even the economic benefits. I suspect the real goal is to achieve a more inclusive recognition of the authentic and enduring ways that we connect ourselves to one another, without needing the words ‘husband,’ ‘wife’ or even ‘spouse.’ The difference we want this movement to make is bigger than that.”

"There's a strong consensus he was pretty normal." That's how Slate's Emily Bazelon described surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who seems to have been discovered by the police. You cannot make this stuff up. The Slate writer interviewed two family friends, who attended Tsarnaev's high school who said of him:

"He was really nice,” Sam Greenberg [Bazelon’s family friend], now a junior at Harvard, told me over the phone. Sam played junior varsity soccer with Tsarnaev for a year and also hung out with him occasionally in the athletic area after school. “He was pretty quiet. Didn’t have a ton to say but was very normal, seemed like a nice kid.”

Give Anthony Weiner another chance! Slate’s William Saletan fawned over the genius political rehab strategy deployed by former disgraced Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), as he’s mulling whether to run in New York’s mayoral election this year. Saletan’s  April 10 piece, laughably headlined " I'll Be His Weiner Wife, " observed how the recent Weiner expose -- sorry, I mean feature -- in a recent New York Times Magazine “doesn’t look like a strategy. It’s so deeply embedded in the narrative that you can’t see it."

"Weiner has made this a story not about himself, but about his wife and their future together. You have to forgive him because she has forgiven him, and if you hold a grudge against him, she’s the one you’re really punishing," Saletan argued. Cut Weiner out of politics for life and you hurt Huma as well. Heck, you're probably hurting America too! Isn't that patronizing at best and misogynistic at worst?

Most Americans would agree that a federal study -- burning through hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars by the way -- on duck penises is not exactly a high priority when we need to get our fiscal house in order. But Patricia Brennan would disagree with you, and she took to the liberal online journal Slate to do so last Tuesday.

Wait, did I mention that Brennan has a vested interest in defending the study of duck dongs? She's a research professor at University of Massachusetts, Amherst receiving federal money for the study?

Aside from insinuating that conservatives "miss the point of basic science" and whining about the “fierce” competition within the scientific community for federal funding, she explained why we should pick up the bill -- sorry I could resist -- for her study:

Has Slate’s John Dickerson been replaced with a pod person?  If not, the CBS Political Director is exuding signs of schizophrenia – or sheer forgetfulness. While in January Dickerson counseled the president to "go for the throat" of the Republican Party, in today's piece at the online opinion journal he's calling for Obama to court Republicans on a "grand bargain" to avert the looming debt crisis.

Today, Mr. Dickinson used anecdotes and Sun Tzu axioms to convey the point that Obama should not be such an agitator if he wants a deal to solve our fiscal woes.

So, Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog posted today that the Earth is warming at an alarming rate.  In fact, it’s rising “faster than it has been in 11,000 years.”  Of course, this is rubbish.  Global temperatures have stagnated for the past sixteen years, and 1936 saw warmer temperatures than 2012.  The blog’s author, Phil Plait, has cited Think Progress and another so-called media watchdog group, which shall not be named, in his posts – so you know it has a left-wing tilt.

Some in the media have reported on the Obama administration reneging on its promise to be transparent and open.  The president’s drone policy is a testament to its commitment to secrecy.  The creation of a secret kill list is also another instance where Obama has betrayed a campaign promise to his liberal base.  So, why aren’t watchdog groups vociferously protesting the president’s 180-degree flip on this position?

Paul Thacker wrote on the left-leaning Slate website yesterday that Obama is no different from Bush in stonewalling FOIA requests, and skirting civil liberties – but gets away with it because of his party affiliation:

Christopher Hitchens has been brought back from the dead by Slate, but it won’t do them any good. Yesterday, they republished a hit piece by the atheist from 2010 that was vintage Hitchens: the man was a great polemicist but a third-class scholar. Facts never mattered to him. ("The Pope's entire career has the stench of evil about it.")

Hitchens said the scandal “has only just begun.” Wrong. It began in the mid-60s and ended in the mid-80s. Current reports are almost all about old cases.

On Wednesday's CBS This Morning, John Dickerson stood by his Friday column for Slate where he concluded that President Obama "can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP." Dickerson answered conservative critics of his piece by claiming that he "wasn't trying to give advice. I was trying to highlight, in a very stark way, what seems like an impossible-to-avoid conclusion about this second term."

The liberal CBS News political director also repeated many of the points he made in a follow-up column for Slate on Tuesday [audio clips available here; video below the jump]:

Newsweek stopped its print edition at the end of 2012, but they still tried to scandalize the country by producing a fake cover honoring Obama’s second inauguration as “The Second Coming.” This absurd attempt at myth-making is a natural progression. The “cover” story was written by Evan Thomas, who proclaimed on MSNBC a few years ago that Obama was “sort of like God” in being above the gritty political fray.

It was just as absurd when Newsweek writer David Frum, the formerly conservative Bush speechwriter, tweeted this piece of media-elite nonsense: “First term Obama: punchee, 2nd term Obama, puncher.”

"The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat."

So astonishingly wrote CBS News political director John Dickerson at Slate Friday evening in a piece astonishingly titled "Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party."

Have you been enjoying your Thanksgiving turkey leftovers? Do you have a preference for the white meat? If you do, then racism could explain why you prefer the white meat to the dark meat.

In an article worthy of The Onion but published in all seriousness in Slate, writer Ron Rosenbaum plumbs the depths of absolute ridiculousness to explain his white meat racism theory. First he details why white meat is supposedly so horrible:

Remember when liberals scoffed at the fact that Romney could win more than 60% of the white vote? Not only has Romney successfully tackled that hurdle, and liberals are apparently mad about it. Tom Scocca of Slate Magazine wrote on November 2 about the “tribal appeal” that Mitt Romney has with whites and why “white people think” he’ll be a better president. I’ll give you a hint: It’s R _ C I S M.

After proudly declaring his support for President Obama (and how Slate will traditionally list all its staffers' votes for the Democrats), Scocca insists they are not in a liberal bubble. He channels the insufferable and dismissive tone American liberalism has successfully monopolized over the past years.  He claims “White men are supporting Mitt Romney to the exclusion of logic or common sense, in defiance of normal Americans.”

When George McGovern died at 90 over the weekend, liberals were guaranteed to remember him as if 1972 were yesterday. Slate’s Ron Rosenbaum wrote an article titled "George McGovern was a winner:  His 1972 campaign was the most lopsided loss in presidential history. But this man was no loser.”  

Rosenbaum wants to run through the potentialities that could have led to a glorious McGovern victory in ’72.  Rosenbaum  says McGovern talked of "the role of the media, which basically took over presidential politics that year with the advent of the self-regarding 'Boys on the Bus' campaigning mode." Rosenbaum was on that press bus: 

As I suggested yesterday (hardly a prediction since it was so clearly going to happen), "2016: Obama's America" has taken in enough in estimated gross proceeds this weekend ($6.238 million from Friday through Sunday) to become the top conservative post-1982 documentary (and number six overall, behind four Michael Moore films and Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth").

Some critiques, currently compiled at the Hollywood Reporter (this post went directly to the underlying write-ups), are coming in, and let just say that there's no Michael Moore-level fawning:

Matthew Yglesias has been posting at Slate.com, supposedly a paragon of online establishment press journalism, as a business and economics correspondent since November of last year. His background is unmistakably leftist: ThinkProgress, the Atlantic, TPM Media, and the American Prospect.

On Saturday, a Yglesias found a blog post which was apparently too good to check at The Richmonder, a lefty enterprise run by Jerel Wilmore. The Richmonder's post claimed that "Paul Ryan traded on insider information to avoid 2008 crash" (post has been retracted; excerpt was obtained at democraticunderground.com; some of what follows is also here):

"Do You Believe Obama Actually Changed His Mind About Gay Marriage?"

That was the question posed in the title of a column written by Slate editor David Plotz. And here is his succinct answer:

I don’t.

In sharp contrast to the misty-eyed hallelujahs offered up by most of the mainstream media in the wake of President Obama's "evolution" to the point where he announced his support of gay marriage, Plotz remains extremely skeptical about his supposed conversion:

Ten years ago, perky actress Jennifer Love Hewitt tried to jump-start a music career with a song titled “Bare Naked.” Now she’s trying that attention-grabbing tactic again with a sleazy new Lifetime series called “The Client List.”  She plays a massage therapist who turns tricks.

That network has adopted a new slogan: “This is not your mother’s Lifetime.” That’s appropriate for a new drama with a single-mother whore at its sympathetic center. We learn she was forced into being a sex worker when her husband mysteriously left her – you know, the way of the world for single moms.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, on a trip underwritten by the U.S. State Department (aren't justices expected to keep their distances from the government to protect their perceived impartiality?), was in Egypt on Wednesday at a Cairo University law school seminar. While there, according to the Associated Press's Mark Sherman, she told students that (in Sherman's words) "she was inspired by last year's protests that led to the end of Hosni Mubarak's regime" and to speak to them (in her words) "during this exceptional transitional period to a real democratic state." The news that Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist parties now control about 75% of the seats in the country's parliament seems not to have registered with Ginsburg or Sherman -- or, for that matter, the State Department.

Sherman's AP story failed to note what Ms. Ginsburg said about the U.S. Constitution in an Egyptian TV interview, as did virtually all of the rest of the establishment press. ABC's Ariane de Vogue is currently the most notable exception, but as readers will see, she clearly buried the lede. Here are key paragraphs from her report (the related video is at Hot Air; the relevant portion begins at the 9:28 mark; bolds are mine):

You Tube is launching a series of nearly 100 new channels. The set of new channels is laden with liberal voices and controversial material, and is practically devoid of conservative and Christian voices.

Liberal-leaning channels include offerings from sources such as Slate, The Chopra Well (with Deepak Chopra, a New Age guru and Huffington Post contributor), and Take Part TV (makers of Al Gore's 2006 global warming scare documentary ''An Inconvenient Truth'').

One of the most popular articles on the liberal website Slate right now is by former Newsweek legal reporter Dahlia Lithwick, denouncing the "mainstream media" which fail to understand the Occupy Wall Street movement. The article is titled "Occupy the No-Spin Zone." Lithwick speaks as a participant, since "I spent time this weekend at Occupy Wall Street and my husband spent much of last week adding his voice to the protesters there." (Her husband, Aaron Fein, is a sculptor, so he has the free time.)

Dahlia's not just denouncing Fox News (all liberals do), but denouncing the mainstream media for not being leftist enough, for devoting "four mind-numbing years" to chronicling the Kardashians and taking the Palin family seriously:

During Thursday's 12 p.m. ET hour on MSNBC, host Contessa Brewer, who is soon to be leaving the anchor chair, declared that moderate Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman was "trying to turn things around with a new take-no-prisoners strategy, calling out his conservative competitors for their far-right views."

Brewer talked to Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of the liberal Slate magazine, who wrote a fawning profile of Huntsman for Vogue magazine. She wondered: "Is Jon Huntsman sort of an anti-Republican?" Weisberg didn't agree with that description, but argued: "He's what used to be the mainstream of the party, he's the kind of Republican who could win a national election against Democrats....But for some reason, for various reasons, the Republican Party seems to have been taken over by the Tea Party movement, by these sort of patriotic anarchists."