On Thursday, MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell celebrated five years of her 1 p.m. ET hour show, Andrea Mitchell Reports, with highlight reels and congratulatory messages from her NBC colleagues. The accolades for Mitchell followed five years of her using the program to routinely praise liberals and bash conservatives.
Here is a sampling of how Mitchell's supposed news show often devolved into left-wing commentary:
"Michelle Obama says she does not want to distract from her husband's campaign. She instead wants to be part of the solution. This in an exclusive interview with USA Today. Barack Obama's wife says that one of her biggest balancing acts is keeping the focus on the campaign while staying true to who she is....She's Princeton, she's Harvard, she's so smart and so beautiful and you know a mom and a wife and a partner and yet people get caricatured."
– Mitchell, June 30, 2008. [Read full item]
"How do you, as a deficit hawk, justify going along with a larger tax cut, for those who really don't need it? And it's been argued it's not stimulative. The upper income people, it really doesn't add to the stimulus that you get from the lower income people....I mean the issue is, what is the rate of the tax going to be? And you've had Warren Buffett and Bill Gates and other high earners, to say the least, saying at a time of deficit crisis that they don't need these tax breaks."
– Mitchell to then-Senator Judd Greg, December 7, 2010. [Read full item]
"It's incredible, Martin, it just seems as though it were yesterday, but it's really four years ago that she was – that historic moment, taking up the gavel with all the children and grandchildren, you know, collected around her. We were anchoring from the Hill that day. And it was such a big step. And now – how things change in politics....It's got to be painful, but she's doing it with class."
– Mitchell to Politico's Martin Kady about Nancy Pelosi stepping down as House speaker after Democratic losses in the 2010 midterm election, December 21, 2010. [Read full item]
"It was three days of hell. It must have been excruciating for you to do through that, excruciating for everyone involved, on both sides. And unresolved in the end....How did you feel at the time about the way the hearings treated you?...How is it to live with this, this history? You are now part of history. You have been for 20 years. Do you get past that, just personally?...Anita Hill, a living legacy."
– Mitchell's softball interview with Anita Hill marking twenty years after Hill testified before Congress about her claims that then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her, October 12, 2011. [Read full item]
"And maybe this was Mitt Romney's supermarket scanner moment, but I get the feeling, take a look at this, that Mitt Romney has not been in too many Wawa's along the roadside in Pennsylvania."
[HIGHLY EDITED CLIP OF MITT ROMNEY TALKING ABOUT TECHNOLOGY USED AT WAWA CONVENIENCE STORES]
MITCHELL [LAUGHING]: "It's amazing."
– Mitchell introducing a deceptively edited clip of Romney that made his comments seem like a gaffe, June 18, 2012. [Read full item]
ANDREA MITCHELL: And this is Mitt Romney with CNBC's Larry Kudlow yesterday.
MITT ROMNEY: It's a very strange, and in some respects, foreign to the American experience type of philosophy. If you have a business and you started it, you did build it, and you deserve credit for that. It was not built for you by government.
MITCHELL: Without getting into the argument as to whether he is taking the President out of context over the "build it" business, he is still using the term "foreign" and I'm telling you, this is happening every day, it is a dog whistle....Foreign is suggesting somebody who grew up in Indonesia...
– As Mitchell slammed Romney, NBC political director Chuck Todd and The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza both dismissed her assertion as simply being what she wanted to hear, July 24, 2012. [Read full item]