Jack Cafferty went above and beyond many of his colleagues in the media by highlighting the ClimateGate scandal on Wednesday’s Situation Room. He presented both sides of the controversy, noting the “thousand pages of leaked e-mails and documents,” while summarizing the side of the defenders of the theory of manmade climate change. Most of the viewer e-mails he read sided with the critics of the theory.

The CNN commentator brought up the issue seven minutes into the 5 pm Eastern hour, and incorporated a reference to a film by a certain former vice president: “Al Gore called global warming ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ but suddenly, a lot of people are asking what the truth really is.” He continued with a summary of the issue:

Talk about taking one step forward and two steps back. Chris Matthews, on Wednesday's Hardball, opened the show by offering an apology to members of the military and their families for his infamous West Point is the "enemy camp," quote made during coverage of Obama's Afghanistan speech, as caught by the MRC's Jeff Poor, but immediately after that went to an interview with John Murtha, who himself got in trouble with servicemen and women for falsely accusing Marines of killing innocent civilians in Iraq.

Matthews opened the show by saying he received a "some very tough calls from parents of cadets and former cadets," for calling West Point an "enemy camp," and offered, "I deeply apologize." But after attempting to repair that bridge, he didn't do himself any favors by turning to Democratic Representative John Murtha to talk Afghanistan war policy. For the record Matthews followed Murtha with Republican Representative Mike Pence, but given the damage done with the "enemy camp" remark perhaps he should have had aired Murtha second, or even better, brought on a Democrat who isn't being sued by a Marine for falsely smearing him of slaughtering innocents. 

The following Matthews apology and odd turn to Murtha were aired on the December 2, Hardball:

In a perverse advertisement currently on the its Web site, CBS is trying to cross market the crass television show "How I Met Your Mother" with the children's holiday classics "Frosty the Snowman" and "Frosty Returns."

The disgusting result was the video "Frosty the Inappropriate Snowman," in which Neil Patrick Harris's voice (in character from the sitcom "How I Met Your Mother") was dubbed over Frosty footage.

Harris' Frosty said things like, "We've got to have a bros' night at a strip club" because it's "healthy" and "harmless." He also discussed his "porn collection" and "the Dominator 8000 - the best bull whip on the market."

Well-known scenes of the classic Frosty delighting children by coming to life were perverted by the ad which included Frosty saying, "I have been with a lot of women. Blondes. Brunettes. Redheads. Big boobs. Small boobs. Medium boobs. Some boobs that were big but kind of in a bad way."

-- commercial below fold --

Newsweek.com on Tuesday offered a bizarre, liberal fantasy that posited what would happen if Al Gore won the 2000 election. Writer David Rakoff composed the supposedly satirical article, which features Gore averting the 9/11 terrorist attacks: "An August 2001 Daily Intelligence Briefing warns, 'Bin Ladin [sic] Determined to Strike in the U.S.,' which prompts the president to authorize the strategic bombing of targets in the Khost province of Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border."

Rakoff, who has written for Salon.com and contributed to the audio version of Jon Stewart’s book, portrayed Joe Lieberman as a disloyal vice president who ultimately resigns.

He also spun Gore as a quick acting President who took action after Hurricane Katrina and kept the death count down to 17 people:

On Wednesday’s CBS Early Show, correspondent Bianca Solorzano reported on the couple who snuck into the White House state dinner, but avoided fully explaining the role a Pentagon official played in the scandal. She claimed emails between Pentagon liaison Michele Jones and Michaele and Tareq Salahi: “actually undermine their claims that they were invited...”

Solorzano quoted one email in which Jones told the Salahis that “it doesn’t seem likely” she could get them an invitation to the event and that she “then left the Salahi’s a voice mail before the dinner, saying they did not get an invitation.”

However, Solorzano failed to cite later emails in which Jones reacted to the Salahis getting into the dinner. After getting home from the White House gala, Tareq Salahi sent an email thanking Jones for her help: “Hi Michele, You are an Angel!....it worked out at the end. We ended up going to the gate to check in at 6:30pm just to check, in case it got approved since we didn’t know, and our name was indeed on the list! ☺ We are very grateful and God bless you.” Jones replied back: “Tareq, You are most welcome! I here the smile in your email and am delighted that you and Michaele had a wonderful time.”

Just in time for the Christmas season, the Washington Post's "Book World" editor Ron Charles gave readers of the December 2 Style section front page a look at "Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter With the Gospels."

Of course the encounter in question is that of literary critic Mary Gordon, a "liberal, feminist intellectual" who happens to be Catholic, is not a trained scriptural scholar, and admits to having "never actually read the full Gospel" prior to undertaking her "Reading Jesus" project.

"But off she goes anyhow, girded only by her considerable intelligence and disarming sincerity, determined to look squarely at the Gospels, how she reads them and how she maintains what she calls her 'hopeful faith,'" Charles notes approvingly, adding that Gordon's professed disinterest in converting readers or making doctrinal claims is:

It's been nearly two weeks since a scandal shook many people's faith in the scientists behind global warming alarmism. The scandal forced the University of East Anglia (UK) to divulge that it threw away raw temperature data and prompted the temporary resignation of Phil Jones of the university's Climate Research Unit.

Despite that resignation and calls by a U.S. senator to investigate the matter, ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news programming has remained silent - not mentioning a word about the scandal since it broke on Nov. 20, even as world leaders including President Barack Obama prepare to meet in Copenhagen, Denmark next week to promote a pact to reduce greenhouse gases.

MRC's President Brent Bozell called the networks' silence a "cover-up" Dec. 2.

Other news outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and Associated Press have deemed ClimateGate worthy of reporting, but the networks were too busy reporting on celebrity car accidents and the killer whale that ate a great white shark. Instead of airing a broadcast news segment that might inform the public about the science scandal, both ABC and CBS relegated the story to their Web sites. There was one mention of the scandal on ABC's Sunday talk show: "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

Meredith Baxter, known for her role as the liberal matriarch Elyse Keaton in "Family Ties," came out as a lesbian this morning on NBC's "Today."

Baxter told host Matt Lauer that she's a "very private person" and "not a very political person," but that she understands coming out "is a political act."

"My understanding is that so much research has been done that says that if anybody knows someone who is gay or lesbian, then when they are addressing gay or lesbian issues, political issues that affect their rights, they're less likely to vote against them, to take away their rights," Baxter explained.

"If you knew me before, and you cared about me before, I'm the same woman," Baxter continued. "I'm the same mother to all these children. And if I can be that lesbian you now know, okay, well if I vote this way, than, than that actually might affect this person I know, that Meredith."

CNN’s Larry King carried water for President Obama’s move to send more troops to Afghanistan during an interview of Michael Moore on early Wednesday morning. King later shifted further to the left, asking Moore if he agreed with Jesse Ventura’s call for a new draft and a “war tax” and quoting from Bob Herbert of the New York Times, who labeled the Afghan war a “tragic mistake.”

The CNN host interviewed the famous left-wing director for the first two segments of his program. Near the end of the first segment, King sought Moore’s take on something from his interview of Ventura, whom he interviewed the night before: “Jesse Ventura said last night- and he agrees with your position, by the way- that we should consider bringing back the draft and we should have a war tax so that people suffer if we’re all going to pay a price for this. What do you think?”

The leftist one-upped his celebrity counterpart: “There would be no increase in the troops if there was a draft and if people had to pay for it. I actually have proposed bringing back the draft now for some years, but only draft the children of those in the upper five percent income bracket, because if the wealthy have to send their kids over to Iraq or Afghanistan, trust me, there won’t be many wars.”

The host quoted from Herbert in his last question to Moore: “Bob Herbert, writing in The New York Times today, called this a ‘tragic mistake,’ and then he quotes Dwight David Eisenhower...Eisenhower said, ‘I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can and as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, and its stupidity.’And then he said- this will impress you, I think- Eisenhower: ‘Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.’ That’s from a four star general and a president.”

ABC, CBS and NBC’s collective silence on “ClimateGate” has reached ridiculous levels as the broadcast networks continued to ignore the great and growing scandal. The bias by omission has now become scandalous.

“The networks’ silence on ClimateGate is deafening. Scandal, cover-ups and conspiracy are the bread and butter of the media. Yet they have selectively and deliberately decided not to report this bombshell – or any of the incriminating details surrounding the scandal – because it goes against their left-wing agenda," Media Research Center President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell complained in a statement released today.

Phil Jones announced yesterday that he is temporarily leaving his post as head of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) pending the investigation into the controversial e-mails and documents that started ClimateGate.

Yet none of the broadcast network weekday morning and evening news shows addressed ClimateGate or the incriminating Jones development since the news broke yesterday. This marked 12 days since the information was first uncovered that they have ignored this global scandal.

Imagine if you will that former Alaska governor Sarah Palin was accused of taking gift cards donated to her office for redistribution to needy constituents and using them instead for a personal spending spree.

The media firestorm would swirl uncontrollably, of course, and certainly you couldn't fault the media for reporting on the ensuing criminal trial.

Well, this sort of this has happened, only to the Democratic mayor of Baltimore Sheila Dixon who was convicted yesterday on a misdemeanor charge of embezzling, yet the coverage from the broadcast networks has been non-existent until the trial's conclusion.

A search of "Sheila Dixon" among ABC, CBS, and NBC news transcripts catalogued on Nexis from January 1, 2007 to December 2, 2009 yielded only three hits. None of the stories were about Dixon's trial, and one, an April 30, 2008 "Nightline" story on predatory mortgage lending, cast Dixon in a favorable light as a champion of citizens who have been exploited by mortgage lenders.

Maybe President Barack Obama's administration is just trying to trying to get some George Soros funding. Why else would Obama's people be playing the media criticism game again?

In the latest of a series of White House - media head-on confrontations, Jared Bernstein, the chief economist and economic policy advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, took on the Wall Street Journal in a Dec. 1 post on the federal government's WhiteHouse.gov Web site.

"There's a new report out from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on the economic impact of the Recovery Act," Bernstein wrote. "I'll get to the findings in a second, but somebody over at the Wall St. Journal's editorial page has a whole lot of explaining to do."

Your humble correspondent has been checking the Huffington Post Green section every day since the ClimateGate scandal exploded. After all, that Green section is pretty much predicated on the theory that the earth is warming dangerously and that Man is the cause of it. At first, the Green section had a few relatively minor stories attempting to dispute the revelations of the ClimateGate scandal. However, today the Huffington Post went into a complete panic mode on this topic. Bigtime.

The Green section now features a huge story at the top of the page by Katherine Goldstein which features a slideshow supposedly exposing "The 7 Biggest Lies About the Supposed 'Global Warming Hoax'." However, even many of their own readers aren't buying the lame excuses presented as you will see here. 

So let us now join the Huffington Post Green section as irritation is expressed over the term "ClimateGate" as they wish it to be replaced by "SwiftHack":

Good Morning America’s Diane Sawyer on Wednesday conducted a generally tough interview with Joe Biden on the subject of Afghanistan, but ignored an embarrassing gaffe from the Vice President: "Our number one enemy concern is the existential threat, al Qaeda. Number two is the stability of a nuclear state called Afghanistan, under siege by radicals." Did the Vice President, perhaps, mean Pakistan? It's unclear as Sawyer didn't follow up. [Audio available here.]

Earlier in the segment, responding to Sawyer’s comment that Republicans believe setting a date for removing troops is a bad idea, Biden argued, "How are they emboldened, knowing that by the time we train up the Afghanis, we're going to be gradually handing off, beginning in 2003 [sic]?" Beginning in 2003? Would journalists allow Sarah Palin to get away with such obvious malapropisms?

Media Research Center President and NewsBusters Publisher Brent Bozell will appear on a live 20 to 30-minute-long Web cast starting at noon EST. You can submit a comment or question in the comments field below the video window there.

Be sure to catch the Webcast, hosted by Heritage New Media Partners, live at live.mrc.org.

It's perhaps indicative of the culture, but there has been a media obsession with the scandalous aspects of Michaele and Tareq Salahi crashing a White House State Dinner on Nov. 24. 

However, the incident also demonstrated how vulnerable President Barack Obama could be to outside intruders, and that fact isn't getting the lion's share of the attention. Instead, coverage like that from NBC's "Today" show has been about reality TV and exclusive interviews. This soft focus, argued Fox News host Glenn Beck on his Dec. 1 broadcast, could have repercussions.

"Let me ask you, what's more reasonable: people walking by the Secret Service, and they're just, like, I don't know, sleeping - zzzz ... Really?" Beck said. "Or this is a publicity stunt? I don't think either of these are reasonable, but given the choice just between those two, I think I'd probably go with the publicity stunt."

If you needed any more assurance the growing ClimateGate scandal is far more significant than America's media has been portraying, you got it Tuesday night from Comedy Central's Jon Stewart.

Somewhat surprisingly, "The Daily Show" host in his opening sketch tore apart the scientists involved in sending the obtained e-mail messages for showing "a clear effort to raise fears about global warming, and hide evidence against it."

Stewart even mocked the man responsible for spreading more fear on this subject than anyone on the planet: 

Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented. OH. OH the irony. 

Irony indeed (video embedded below the fold with transcript, vulgarity alert, h/t Story Balloon):

There's something about these big events that cause MSNBC "Hardball" host Chris Matthews to go off script and say something seemingly ridiculous.

Matthews has publicly admitted President Barack Obama has given him a thrill up his leg after a campaign speech in Feb. 2008, and uttered "oh God," earlier this year after an Obama address to Congress, prior to the Republican response from Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal earlier this year. And on Dec. 1, he referred to West Point as "the enemy camp" in coverage following a speech from Obama announcing his intentions to increase troops in Afghanistan. And, later that night - Matthews took a shot at former Vice President Dick Cheney (emphasis added).

"The president said tonight that we're fighting in Afghanistan because al Qaeda is in Pakistan," Matthews said. "Is that what this is all about? Is that why we're fighting and some are dying in Afghanistan? To deliver the message to the government over in Pakistan to fight harder against al Qaeda. It sounds more Rube Goldberg than ‘Remember the Alamo.' Also try tonight to workout whether the president's goals in Afghanistan are achievable. Are they? And of course, there's always Dick Cheney who jumped it from under his bridge to bite the president's ankle even before he made the speech tonight."

How much can the left-wing blogosphere hate Dick Cheney? Apparently enough to compare him to notorious Seventies serial killers. The blogger calling himself "Meteor Blades" at Daily Kos compared Cheney to Ted Bundy in a post Tuesday afternoon titled "The Last Person Who Should Be Opening His Mouth."

Whatever Democrats think about Obama's plans for Afghanistan, he writes, "the one thing we can all agree on is that we're sick of hearing arsonists hanging around the fire they started telling us the best way put it out." He's furious that Politico would carry Cheney's criticism of Obama:

It takes no special effort or reading between the lines to see the main theme behind Cheney's remarks: Obama is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Nothing any Democratic President can do will ever stop the flow of "weak-on-defense" canards that began 60 years ago with shrieks of "Who Lost China?"....

During a special 9:00 p.m. edition of Countdown after President Obama's Tuesday speech, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann attacked former Vice President Cheney for a recent interview criticizing President Obama for some of his actions in the war on terrorism, with Olbermann accusing Cheney of being "cowardly" for opposing the administration's plan to try suspects behind the 9/11 attacks -- like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- in New York City: "So cowardly is Mr. Cheney, in fact, that he trembles at the thought of an accused terrorist coming to New York City in chains." Olbermann also charged: "Mr. Cheney revealed that unlike authentically tough people, he is still so panicked that he still mistakes acting tough for being tough and makes the corollary error that failing to act tough implies that you are weak."

And because the former Cheney took exception with Obama for giving an unusually "deep bow" to some world leaders, after invoking President Nixon bowing to Japanese Emperor Hirohito, Olbermann snapped: "If you can`t summon up just the boilerplate grim respect your former responsibilities still demand, maybe you should shut up, Dick."