David Graham

Apparently the sophomoric folks at Newsweek are getting a bit giddy during the short work week leading up to Thanksgiving.

To accompany David Graham's November 23 The Gaggle blog post, Newsweek editors included a photo manipulation featuring the face of Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) on the body of Adam in Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam"

The photoshop was inspired by a March 2009 comment Shimkus made that reflects his religious beliefs, a comment that Graham apparently finds suitable for mockery and as evidence that Shimkus would be a poor choice to chair a committee that might deal with climate change-related issues and legislation:

Update (15:20 EDT): Fargo, N.D.-based radio host  friend of NewsBusters Rob Port takes on this Newsweek item on his Say Anything blog today and eviscerates David Graham's article as error-laden and grossly misleading.

Newsweek -- the floundering weekly news magazine that was recently sold for the princely sum of $1.00 -- apparently assigns a pretty low value on the intelligence of its readers. Take yesterday's online article by David Graham on the reelection campaign of the at-large congressman for North Dakota: "Meet Earl Pomeroy, the Moderate Democrat Touting His Health-Reform Vote."

"Can one Blue Dog’s unorthodox ad strategy localize his election and head off the demise of another incumbent?" asked the subheadline.

Of course, both the moderate and Blue Dog tags bring to mind a Democrat that perhaps agrees with the liberal leadership of his party about half of the time, but is fairly independent and conservative-minded on a whole host of issues. Trouble is, this is precisely what Pomeroy is not, according to both the liberal Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) and the American Conservative Union (ACU).

After getting spanked in the November 2 election, Christine O'Donnell needs to find herself a good Christian man to submit to. Or she could open a Wiccan supply store. 

Those are just two of the six mocking suggestions that Newsweek's David Graham came up with yesterday on the magazine's The Gaggle blog for the Delaware Republican Senate nominee's future.

Graham's list is just more evidence that O'Donnell seems to have inherited Sarah Palin's mantle as the conservative female politician liberal journalists most love to write arguably misogynistic screeds against (emphasis mine):

While Newsweek's David Graham is hard at work defending President Obama's summertime leisure -- "A Short History of Presidential Vacation Outrage" -- by insisting that the press corps always complains about any president's vacation habits, it's instructive that he failed to indict his own magazine.

"War on terrorism stalled, economy on precipice, time for a month on the Crawford ranch."

Accompanied by a disapproving down arrow, that's how the August 5, 2002 Newsweek feature "Conventional Wisdom" derided President Bush's working vacation a mere three months before midterm elections in his first term.

Elsewhere in Newsweek's coverage at the time, writers put the term working vacation into derisive quote marks, and otherwise presented President Bush's time away from Washington, including a quasi-campaign swing called the "Heartland Tour," as a nakedly political move to bolster his sagging approval numbers.

From Martha Brant's August 7 "Web exclusive" entitled "Look Who's Back":

During the previous presidential administration, the liberal media were more than happy to promote the Left's allegations of improper political interference by Bush officials in the workings of the federal government. The Bushies improperly revised government scientists' conclusions, bullied CIA analysts over their interpretation of Iraq intelligence, and perhaps worst of all, politicized the Justice Department, the media insisted.

Yet when it comes to a serious charge of political interference by Obama appointees at the DOJ involving voter intimidation,  Newsweek's David Graham dismisses the charge as simply another effort by conservatives at "staging an effective piece of political theater that hurts the Obama administration." 

As Newsweek editors quipped in their headline for Graham's story, "The New Black Panther Party Is the New ACORN."

As we've noted here at NewsBusters, the liberal media virtually ignored the story about how a DOJ career attorney's case against a New Black Panther member was dropped in May 2009 under the okay of an Obama DOJ appointee.

Now with attention being cast by conservatives on the media's bias by omission, folks like Graham are coming to the defense of the media by painting the matter as a non-scandal, evidenced in part by the conservative media outlets that have been the ones at the forefront of reporting the story:

In an October 20 The Gaggle blog post, Newsweek's David A. Graham sought to explain to readers why the New York 23rd Congressional District special election on November 3 "is more important than" the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races.

Graham portrayed the race -- pitting liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava against Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman and Democratic candidate Bill Owens -- as a bellwether fight for the soul of the Republican Party. Graham noted Scozzafava's socially liberal stances, implying that conservative ire over her nomination tothe GOP ticket in the special election was based solely on the ire of social conservatives.

Yet nowhere in his blog post did Graham explain that economic conservatives and libertarian-leaning Republicans worry Scozzafava is truly a Republican-in-name-only (RINO) on economic matters as well, given her ties to ACORN.

As Human Events reporter John Gizzi noted a month ago (emphasis mine):