Frank Bruni

The liberal columnists of the New York Times were in fine fettle in this week's Sunday Review. Thomas Friedman went beyond parody, sliding from the terror bombings in Boston to calling for a carbon tax in just five paragraphs: "How to Put America Back Together Again – A good place to start is with a carbon tax."

Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation other than this: We need to redouble our efforts to make America stronger and healthier so it remains a vibrant counterexample to whatever bigoted ideology may have gripped these young men. With all our warts, we have built a unique society -- a country where a black man, whose middle name is Hussein, whose grandfather was a Muslim, can run for president and first defeat a woman in his own party and then four years later a Mormon from the opposition, and no one thinks twice about it. With so many societies around the world being torn apart, especially in the Middle East, it is vital that America survives and flourishes as a beacon of pluralism.

Two New York Times columnists embarrassed themselves over the weekend, betraying anti-gun ignorance in the paper's Sunday Review.

Frank Bruni went hunting for the first time (with the chef of a ritzy Manhattan restaurant), and remarked "what an unfair fight" hunting is, as if he was the first person to think that up. After lamenting "how thoroughly a weapon can be romanticized and fetishized," he pivoted to easy access to guns in "this country of ours."

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, a former White House reporter for the paper, followed Sen. John McCain in mocking attendees of the latest Conservative Political Action Conference (aka CPAC) as "wacko birds" in his column Sunday on gay marriage at the Supreme Court.

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal cracked on New York Times columnist Frank Bruni for his Sunday Review column urging the new pope to "dwell less in the bedroom, more in the soup kitchen." (Last week Bruni guest-hosted the Charlie Rose show and pushed similar talking points.)

Taranto had fun with Bruni in his "Best of the Web" column Monday:

Now that the new pope has been chosen, the life of the Catholic Church continues– and so does the liberal media’s effort to persuade the Church to change its traditions. On Thursday’s Morning Joe, co-host Mika Brzezinski complained, “Secrecy that surrounds the traditions of the Catholic Church -- it’s a recipe for disaster.... There is a lot of work ahead and some serious changes that need to happen blocked by tradition that may make it impossible.” 

For analysis of the Church’s need to overcome tradition, Brzezinski turned to Frank Bruni, former Rome bureau chief for the New York Times but now an openly gay op-ed columnist for the paper. Bruni, of course, agreed with Brzezinski’s premise. To him, the conclave perfectly symbolizes what’s wrong with the Catholic Church: “[The cardinals] lock themselves away. They go – we have no idea what happens until sometimes years later, if ever.” [Video below. MP3 audio here.]

Wait a sec: aren't liberals supposed to be the edgy dudes who like to buck the established order?  The ones who glorify guys with the guts to "speak truth to power"? So what could possibly have turned these hipsters into a bunch of suddenly stodgy sourpusses reaching for their Miss Manners?  Looks like in-your-face is no longer in style when the upstart in question is—horrors!—a conservative!

Continuing his campaign for proper etiquette--and against Ted Cruz--Frank Bruni appeared on Morning Joe today.  The New York Times columnist recently wrote a cranky column calling Cruz an "an ornery, swaggering piece of work."  Bruni took things one stodgy step further, calling Cruz a "whippersnapper." Frank fulminated over Ted's temerity in actually voting against the august John Kerry.  View the video after the jump.

Newly minted Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a Tea Party politician, is "raising bipartisan hackles" and otherwise being a "bad boy" in the previously collegial U.S. Senate, opined political reporter Jonathan Weisman on the front page of Saturday's New York Times: "Texas Senator Goes on Attack And Raises Bipartisan Hackles."

Clearly disturbed about Cruz's treatment of Obama's nominee for defense secretary Chuck Hagel, reporter Weisman even put a mike in front of not one but two liberal Democratic senators who likened Cruz to notorious Sen. Joe McCarthy. Well, at least Cruz is liked by what Weisman called "ardent conservatives."

The trashing of Ted Cruz continues apace in the bien-pensant MSM. From the New York Times, to the Washington Post, to Politico and elsewhere, the liberal media has the new Republican Senator from Texas in its sights.

Joe Scarborough is clearly camped out on the Cruz-bashing bandwagon.  Earlier this month, so offended by Cruz was the sensitive Scarborough that he wouldn't deign to mention him by name.  Today, not to be outdone by Frank Bruni, who called Cruz "an ornery, swaggering piece of work," Scarborough declared that Cruz acts like "a carnival barker at a local Republican event."  View the video after the jump.

Anti-tax activist Grover Norquist has suddenly become liberal Public Enemy #1 as the media pressures Republicans to accede to rising taxes. Frank Bruni devoted one of his excessively personal New York Times columns Tuesday to demonizing Norquist: "Is Grover Finally Over?" The text box: "Pledges are for purists, who have no place in a democracy." Is that how the paper feels about regulatory activists like Ralph Nader?

Norquist is evidently guilty of once regaling Bruni ("on a long train ride") with the case for Mitt Romney choosing the governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Fortuño, as his vice presidential nominee. Bruni used the tale to accuse Norquist of not being a serious policymaker.

Sunday brought an overload of New York Times columnists, including former reporters, calling the previous week's Republican National Convention a celebration of lies and extremism on abortion and gay marriage.

Times columnist and former White House correspondent Maureen Dowd was given more room than usual to rant about Paul Ryan and the Republicans in her Sunday column, "Cruel Conservatives Throw a Masquerade Ball." After calling the Republican Convention "a colossal hoax," she said of Paul Ryan's speech, "the altar boy altered reality, conjuring up a world so compassionate, so full of love-thy-neighbor kindness and small-town goodness, that you had to pinch yourself to remember it was a shimmering mirage, a beckoning pool of big, juicy lies...." Dowd concluded that "....Ryan’s lies and Romney’s shape-shifting are so easy to refute that they must have decided a Hail Mary pass of artifice was better than their authentic ruthless worldview."

The Hope and Change that media shamelessly sold to the nation in 2008 is starting to reach a point of solemn desperation.

Perfectly exemplifying this Tuesday was New York Times columnist Frank Bruni who minutes after President Obama finished his press conference at the G20 Summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, told CNN's Piers Morgan, "He doesn’t seem in command” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

So much for libertine Manhattan. White House reporter turned liberal columnist Frank Bruni supports New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg's overbearing initiative to downsize the sodas New Yorkers will be allowed to purchase in restaurants and movie theaters, in the name of fighting obesity: "Trimming a Fat City."

While Michelle Obama focused on carrots, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg brandished a stick. It’s what we deserve. Cry all you want about a nanny state, but as a city and a nation we’ve gorged and guzzled past the point where a gentle nudge toward roughage suffices. We need a weight watcher willing to mete out some stricter discipline.

New York Times columnist (and former White House correspondent for the paper) Frank Bruni gets nasty and personal again in his Tuesday column "The Right's Righteous Fraud," picking on 21-year-old Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah, for blogging about gay marriage, even throwing out a date rape reference. Judging by the time stamps at Bristol's blog, Bruni has stirred up another round of hateful lefty comments to Palin's original May 10 blog post, some of them simply regurgitating Bruni's bile.

In March, Bruni devoted a column to a former classmate providing a pat liberal morality lesson that seemed a lot like an invasion of doctor-patient privacy, then attacked Newt Gingrich and insulted Gingrich's wife. Today Bruni, who is openly gay, goes after Palin's oldest daughter for hypocrisy and being a bad mother, after Bristol had the audacity to blog her opinion on gay marriage (she's against it):

New York Times reporter turned columnist Frank Bruni is on a nasty streak. He devoted his long Sunday Review column, "Rethinking His Religion," to a former classmate with a pat liberal morality lesson that seemed a lot like an invasion of patient privacy, then attacked Newt Gingrich and insulted Gingrich's wife. James Taranto at Best of the Web explained:

New York Times columnist Frank Bruni has some insufferable friends. Yesterday he spent nearly 1,500 words profiling one of them, a classmate at the University of North Carolina whom he knew at the time as a conservative frat boy who "attended Catholic services every Sunday in a jacket and tie." Bruni, who is gay, "kept a certain distance from him" under the assumption that the young man, whom he does not name in the column, would be hostile to the future Timesman because of his sexual orientation.

A Sunday New York Times column on politicians and wealth from Frank Bruni, who was a White House reporter during the administration of George W. Bush, treated as factual a likely urban legend (well circulated in the liberal media, as shown by Newsbuster Jack Coleman) about the first President Bush: “Running From Millions.” It came after criticizing Mitt Romney as a rich phony:

And Republican or Democrat, they often go to laughable lengths to play that down. A recurring theme from just about every election cycle is the economic altitude of candidates who insist on playacting that they’re less loftily removed from the so-called common man than they really are. Time and again we’re treated to a comedy of manners with predictable pratfalls and a clear take-away: although there has long been a significant economic disparity between the rulers and the ruled, neither group can get entirely comfortable with it.

Some of the worst bias from the New York Times over the past month:

Surging GOPers “Are to Varying Degrees Yahoos”

“The candidates who surged before [Gingrich] are to varying degrees yahoos. They proved it anew last week. Michele Bachmann seemed to be under the impression that we had an embassy in Iran, and Rick Perry was definitely under the delusion that the voting age in this country is 21 instead of 18.” – Former White House correspondent, now columnist Frank Bruni, December 4.

Herman Cain “Seems Like Someone Who ...Has Never Opened a Newspaper”

“Let us pause here to make a necessarily severe assessment: to say that Herman Cain has an imperfect grasp of policy would be unfair not only to George W. Bush in 1999 but also to Britney Spears in 1999. Herman Cain seems like someone who, quite frankly, has never opened a newspaper.” –T.A. Frank in the November 13 edition of the Times Sunday Magazine.

After a stint as a White House reporter for the Times after George W. Bush took office in 2001, Frank Bruni wrote a fairly respectful biography of the president, Ambling Into History. But as a recently minted Times columnist, Bruni has betrayed no similar feeling for the current Republican candidates, who “are to varying degrees yahoos," according to his mocking Sunday Review column "And Now ... Professor Gingrich."

As expected, New York Times coverage of the law passed late Friday night allowing gay marraige in New York State was heavily favorable. Sunday’s front page New York Times story provided the tick-tock on how New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo marshaled support to pass gay marriage in the Republican-controlled New York State Senate in part by convincing “super-rich Republican donors” to support him, in Michael Barbaro’s “Behind Gay Marriage, an Unlikely Mix of Forces.” It included this odd anecdote about a Democratic state senator and holdout against history:

Nobody ever expected Carl Kruger to vote yes.

With Barack Obama’s first press conference as president scheduled on Monday night, one obvious question that comes up is what kind of questions he will receive from the White House press corps. His predecessor, George W. Bush, faced some pressing questions during his first press conference on February 22, 2001.

Liberal firebrand Helen Thomas offered the most politically-charged question: “Mr. President, why do you refuse to respect the wall between the church and state? And you know that the mixing of religion and government, for centuries, has led to slaughter. The very fact that our country has stood in good stead by having this separation -- why do you break it down?” When President Bush answered that he did “respect the separation of church and state,” Thomas blasted back: “Well, you wouldn't have a religious office in the White House if you did.” Since President Obama has decided to retain Bush’s faith-based initiative (although with a new name and slightly new mission), one wonders if Thomas will press the Democrat on the issue.