Joan Walsh

To a liberal media member, politics means never having to say you were wrong.

On Tuesday's "The Ed Show," Salon's Joan Walsh said she looked "kind of stupid" for defending Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) last week, then went right on defending him (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Both CNN's Anderson Cooper on Wednesday's AC360 and CBS's Nancy Cordes on Thursday's Early Show highlighted conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart's early part in spreading news of the lewd photo Tweeted from Rep. Andrew Weiner's Twitter account. Cooper played up Breitbart's supposedly "questionable credibility," while Cordes reported how "supporters of Weiner note that it was [the] right-wing blogger...who broke the story."

The CNN anchor raised Breitbart's involvement 15 minutes into the 10 pm Eastern hour as he introduced the second part of an interview of the New York Democrat conducted by his colleague Wolf Blitzer:

Ed Schultz re-introduced his "Psycho Talk" segment on Monday after deciding in January to shelve the feature following the tragic shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) in Tucson.

This ended up being quite fitting, for earlier in the program, Schultz engaged in some psycho talk of his own accusing Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich of wanting to end the food stamp program "to give tax breaks to old white millionaires" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

NBC's David Gregory started a Newt Gingrich is racist trend Sunday that liberal media members across the fruited plain quickly embraced.

After the "Meet the Press" host accused the former House Speaker of racism for having the nerve to call Barack Obama "The most successful food stamp president in American history," Salon's Joan Walsh out in San Francisco jumped on the bandwagon as did Chicago film critic Roger Ebert:

CNN's Howard Kurtz is either astonishingly naive or so strongly in the tank for Barack Obama that he's willing to ignore the totally obvious to assist the President's reelection efforts.

On Sunday's "Reliable Sources," Kurtz actually discussed with far-left guests Joan Walsh of Salon and John Aravosis of Americablog.com - without ever disclosing the painfully inconvenient truth! - why the "so-called liberal media" don't report divisions within the Democrat Party especially left-wing disappointment with the current White House resident (video follows with transcript and lots of commentary):

I've said for years it takes an amazing amount of rationalizations to be a liberal these days.

On Tuesday's "Hardball," Salon editor Joan Walsh demonstrated perfectly what I mean (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Wednesday's AC360 on CNN, ABC's Ashleigh Banfield punted on Nir Rosen's offensive Tweets against CBS's Lara Logan and tried to explain them away: "We're using a lot of electronics to get information out as fast as we can nowadays before we can really digest the ramifications of what we say...And so, I'm certainly not going to cast aspersions on Mr. Rosen. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

Anchor Anderson Cooper turned to Banfield and Salon.com's Joan Walsh immediately after playing his taped interview with Rosen during the 10 pm Eastern hour. Cooper first asked Walsh for her take on the controversy, and she promptly criticized the disgraced journalist: "I thought it was horrible, Anderson, and I assumed that he was making light of a sexual assault...So, I'm not going to call him a liar. Only he knows what he knew. But it was incredibly insensitive, and even...aside from the sexual assault aspect, to be mocking someone that you don't like who has been injured and mistreated, I would rather think that we don't have those responses...Maybe that's naive of me."

Having mercilessly attacked Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) for six days in a row, MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Wednesday set his sights on conservative talk show host Glenn Beck.

After an opening teaser in which the "Hardball" host referred to "the right-wing freak-out over Egypt," Matthews ended up doing two segments about the Fox News star in which he and his perilously liberal guests called the object of their disaffection a "fear mongering," "completely crazy," "full mooner," "Captain Queeg" (videos follow with partial transcripts and lengthy commentary):

A former advisor to George W. Bush smacked down Salon's Joan Walsh Monday for questioning the 43rd President's psychological compass.

Appearing on MSNBC's "Hardball," GOP strategist Ron Christie also gave Chris Matthews a much-needed education on why going into Iraq was a successful part of Bush's strategy to prevent America from a follow-up attack after 9/11 (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Worked into a tizzy over conservative radio talk show hosts and a Republican congresswoman complaining about the reported cost of President Obama's state visit to India, MSNBC's Chris Matthews today suggested racial animus -- against President Obama and the country of India -- played a role in the criticism. Yet at the same time Matthews put down Indian journalists by suggesting their reporting is inherently unreliable.

The Hardball host blasted Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Michele Bachmann for citing an Indian news agency's reporting on the cost of his state visit to India. A White House official says those reported cost figures are "wildly inflated."

"First of all, I consider this whole thing disgustingly ad hominem. It's an attack on our president, and sometimes I do think there's an ethnic aspect," Matthews groused, bringing the specter of racism into his complaint.

  Chris Matthews, on Wednesday's Hardball, not so cryptically compared the actions of Republican volunteers to that of Nazi-style tactics from the 1930s as he claimed the restraining of a MoveOn.org activist by a Rand Paul supporter reminded him of what "we saw from hoodlums in the thirties in another country I will not mention" and added: "I mean it isn't far from what we saw in the thirties, where all of a sudden, political parties started showing up in uniform." Matthews, who was joined by Salon's Joan Walsh and the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, even went on to claim physical attacks against political opponents was something that existed exclusively on one ideological side as he asserted that it was "right wing by its very nature."

This was the second night in a row Matthews advanced this theory and he didn't bother to mention the other side of the story, that a Jack Conway volunteer perhaps had acted violently at the Paul rally as well. The Post's Cillizza, to his credit, actually tried to talk Matthews down as he told the MSNBC host: "I don't think it is right wing by its nature. I would say at the end of campaigns, passions get very inflamed...I do not think it is a right wing thing, I do not think it is a left wing thing." However Cillizza failed in his effort to bring reason to the Hardball host as Matthews challenged Cillizza to "Name the last liberal progressive candidate who hired a private army, the last one that was stomping his political, her political opponents in the street?" before getting on his liberal high horse: "Well we see different kinds of passion here, don't we? We see one passion being reporters trying to get stories in Alaska so they could undercover skull-duggery. We have the passion of a woman who shows up to demonstrate with a wig on and a placard and then we see the passion of the other side, which is to hire armies of paramilitaries and stomp people."

                                                                                                                        (video after the jump)

A frustrated Chris Matthews, on Tuesday's Hardball, chided the left for being disappointed in Barack Obama as he essentially told them, he's the best they've got and are going to get. During a segment in which the Salon's Joan Walsh and Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall wondered why Obama and Joe Biden were admonishing their base to stop whining, Matthews took up for Team Obama as he tried to calm down the lefties: "This president has done what we were all taught in graduate school to do, what progressives have believed in from years and years, decades ago...You compensate for the loss of consumer spending and business investment with government spending...No one has had a better idea since the 1930s. Number two, The Wall Street crowd needed governing. They didn't have any, now they've got some. Number three, he's pushed for progressive taxation, he's going after the rich. He's not giving them their tax cut." [audio available here]

At the end of his program, a desperate sounding Matthews listed a bunch of races Democrats still had a chance in,  and then pleaded to the left to unify behind those candidates because "the bad guys are gaining." (video & audio of "Let Me Finish" segment below the fold)

The following exchange was aired on the September 28 edition of Hardball:

On Tuesday, NewsBusters identified the media's emerging strategy of discrediting Glenn Beck by pitting his religious beliefs against other Christians.

Mere hours later, as if on cue, MSNBC was all over it.

"Hardball" host Chris Matthews invited on liberal Salon editor Joan Walsh and Democratic strategist Bob Shrum, two people who are something less than experts on the religious right, to help him psychoanalyze conservatives.

Their conclusion was all too predictable: Beck's rhetoric is harmful to Catholics and smacks of anti-Papal Klan rallies.

It has now been established by the media that Mormons like Beck are anti-evangelical, anti-Catholic, and possibly just plain anti-Christian.

Prepare yourself for liberals who bash conservative Christians at every turn to suddenly care about Christians getting bashed (video below with partial transcript):

Chris Matthews almost got another tingle up his leg on national television Tuesday talking about how wonderful Barack Obama is.

So did Salon's Joan Walsh,

In the opening segment of "Hardball," the host and his perilously liberal guests concluded by trying to figure out why conservatives don't like the current White House resident.

In the end, and sadly predictable, the conclusion was the color of Obama's skin.

But before that, the sycophantic praise and exultation for the object of their affection was literally breathless (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Chris Matthews in the course of less than two hours Thursday appeared to radically change his opinion about Shirley Sherrod's pending lawsuit against Andrew Breitbart.

As NewsBusters previously reported, Matthews during the 5 p.m. installment of "Hardball" got into a heated argument with former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean about the contents of the controversial video Breitbart posted at BigGovernment.com on July 19.

For some reason, rather than air that segment as part of the normal 7 p.m. rerun, MSNBC did a live broadcast bringing Politico's Ken Vogel in to discuss the matter with Matthews and original guest Salon's Joan Walsh.

What resulted was a completely different presentation than what aired just two hours prior with Matthews far more critical of Breitbart than he previously was and far more supportive of the merits of Sherrod's case.

Let's look at the videos to see the glaring difference in these segments (partial transcripts also follow with commentary):

Chris Matthews and Howard Dean on Thursday got into a heated argument about what was included in the controversial video excerpts Andrew Breitbart published at his website last Monday involving former USDA official Shirley Sherrod.

In the opening segment of the 5PM installment of MSNBC's "Hardball," Matthews was discussing with the former Vermont Governor as well as Salon Editor-in-Chief Joan Walsh the announcement that Sherrod intends to sue Breitbart.

After playing both videos posted at BigGovernment.com back on July 19, Matthews noted, "That part in there about redemptive revelation was actually in the initial tape."

He then asked Dean, "Why do you think if this was a complete slime job, why do you think Breitbart kept that in there?"

The Governor's absolutely absurd answer started the fireworks (video follows with partial transcript and commentary): 

In the past six days, you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting some liberal media member claiming that Fox News was responsible for Shirley Sherrod's dismissal from the Agriculture Department.

So obsessed with this idea were the folks on PBS's "Inside Washington" Friday that the lone conservative on the panel Charles Krauthammer had to defend FNC's honor like a knight in shining armor protecting a princess from a gang of marauding Huns.

Two days later, CNN's Howard Kurtz and Politics Daily's Matt Lewis did their darnedest to convince Salon's Joan Walsh of the facts - unfortunately to no avail.

Getting fed up with the stupidity from his colleagues on the left, Mediaite's Steve Krakauer Sunday evening tried to once and for all put this matter to rest:

UPDATE AT END OF POST: Walsh responds, claims this isn't what she said!

Joan Walsh on Sunday said former USDA official Shirley Sherrod is allowed to say anything she wants about racism -- including calling Fox News and Andrew Breitbart racist -- because her father was killed by a white man.

Discussing last week's controversy on CNN's "Reliable Sources," Salon's Editor-in-Chief actually claimed, "The woman's father was murdered by a white farmer, and there were witnesses, and the white justice system never found the murderer guilty." 

"She's entitled to talk about race any way she wants to."

When Matt Lewis of Politics Daily asked incredulously, "Any way she wants to," the sparks began to fly (video follows with transcript and commentary): 

If you're going to write an article blasting the opposition for distorting facts, it absolutely behooves one to double check all of their own statements for accuracy.

Such is the case of Joan Walsh, Editor-in-Chief of Salon, who recently penned a piece titled, The Shame of Right-Wing "Journalism".  The article includes the sub-heading, "Andrew Breitbart and Tucker Carlson distort facts to smear liberals, and it works. What liberals should learn."

Apparently, it didn't take long for liberals to learn at all, as Walsh was quickly called out by Chris Hayes of The Nation, feeling it necessary to make ‘a factual correction' in the piece.

Oh, sweet irony.

Walsh updates her piece with Hayes' response at the end, and admitting to the error, but it remains an amusing endeavor to combat alleged distorted facts with actual distorted facts.

The problem, as Hayes explains it to Walsh (emphasis mine throughout):

Can anyone think of an angrier group of writers in political punditry than the ones currently published at Salon.com?

Throughout the Elena Kagan hearings, both Joan Walsh and Joe Conason have written anti-Republican screeds accusing GOP lawmakers of all sorts of unsavory things to score political points despite what's likely be a certain confirmation.

However, this disposition goes beyond just the SCOTUS hearings.

On MSNBC's June 30 "Morning Joe," Conason went after Harvard Professor Jeffrey Miron, who appeared to promote his book "Libertarianism, from A to Z." Apparently what drew the indignation from Conason was the theory that government can actually make things worse in an economy: 

Did you know that calling attention to an area where a Supreme Court justice nominee is from, which happens to be a well-known bastion of liberalism, is bigoted? 

If you didn't, you want to take a look at the wisdom of Salon.com's Joan Walsh. In her June 28 post "It's not even coded bigotry anymore," Walsh argued that references to SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan's Upper West Side of Manhattan roots are bigoted -since the neighborhood has Jewish features, references to it are anti-Semitic and as she puts it, "not even coded."

"That said, Republicans on the Senate Judicial Committee are trying to make the case she's outside the mainstream of American jurisprudence, by attacking her clerking for (and admiring) legal giant Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court justice, while singling her out as a denizen of ‘Manhattan's Upper West Side' - you know, the neighborhood known for Zabar's and bagels and, well, Jews," Walsh wrote.

Walsh wasn't clear about what she thinks these Senate Republicans are trying to accomplish. Conventional wisdom suggests Kagan will be easily confirmed, but pointing out the neighborhood she is from, with documented evidence of having an ideological liberal leaning, is going to accomplish what?

Three noteworthy quotes from journalists I tweeted over the holiday weekend:

Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, author of the ‘The Promise: President Obama, Year One,’ on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night, placing himself with Obama against conservatives:

When Obama said “we are the ones we've been waiting for,” we didn't show up. It was the right-wingers at the town meetings.

Jake Tapper to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, on ABC’s This Week:

Before this crisis occurred, you were perhaps best-known nationally as a critic of big government, as a critic of big spending. And here you are, desperately asking for big government, big spending.

A truly extraordinary thing happened on CNN Sunday: a mainstream media representative actually took Rush Limbaugh's side in a dispute with Bill Clinton.

As readers are likely aware, the conservative talk radio host and the former President exchanged words last week over who was to blame for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

"Reliable Sources" host Howard Kurtz broached this subject in Sunday's second segment eliciting a rather surprising response from Reuters' global editor-at-large Chrystia Freeland:

I have to say, on this one I'm on Rush Limbaugh's side...I'm not accusing Rush Limbaugh of being guilty of too much balance, but I do think blaming the media is a very weak thing for politicians and businesspeople to do. And I think we in the media should really be pretty, pretty careful before we agree with the criticism.

Not surprisingly, Salon's Joan Walsh didn't agree, and once again found herself alone in her perilously liberal views as the cameras were rolling (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Joan Walsh was unable to name an extreme left-wing media figure yesterday while appearing on MSNBC and today she is digging in deeper on her blog.

Now she says that she wasn’t just talking about media figures, of which Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz are just the most obvious examples, but that she was talking also about violent nut jobs who threaten politicians.

The title of her post is “There is no liberal Rush Limbaugh,” and I guess she’s correct if she’s talking about ratings.

The problem on the right includes extremists who've made death threats against Democrats like Patty Murray, Bart Stupak, Nancy Pelosi and, of course, President Obama. There's no one on the left posing the same threat to leaders on the right -- or if there is, I'd like to know about it.

Hot sparks flew on the set of MSNBC's Morning Joe today igniting a brief but entertaining firestorm. The cause? Joan Walsh somehow being unable to name any leftwing extremists. This set off an angry reaction from co-host Mika Brzezinski which included a funny impersonation of a conveniently clueless Walsh. It was one of those moments that needs to be viewed in order to be fully appreciated but here is a transcript of the heated exchange:

JOE SCARBOROUGH:  ...I think it helps us all to say there are extreme voices on the left, there are extreme voices on the right, and it's our responsibility to call out people, I believe, on our side.  

JOAN WALSH: Who would you have me call out? I mean who would you say on the left is comparable to Rush and...

SCARBOROUGH: Don't do it.

MIKA  BREZEZINSKI: Mmm-mmm! No thanks, Joan. We're good. We're good.

SCARBOROUGH: Can we talk about the Chinese now?

MIKA: I think it's all very obvious.

WALSH: Is it obvious? Who on the left is comparable to Rush and Glenn on the right?

MIKA: Okay, Joan, if it's not obvious to you I'll talk to you off-set.  I mean, my God! Alright so let's read from the Washington Post...

Liberal Salon.com editor Joan Walsh appeared on the April 14 edition of Hardball and mocked Sarah Palin for suggesting that some of Barack Obama's policies are un-American. She sneered that this was "ridiculous" and attacked, "The choice of un-American is a typical Sarah Palin, divisive thing to say."

However, the same Joan Walsh appeared on the December 30, 2009 Hardball to talk about the Republican response to the thwarted Christmas plane bombing. She ranted, "The climate right now is that Republicans use everything they can to undermine and delegitimize this President. And it's actually un-American. It's traitorous in my opinion."

Walsh derided, "Do you want to give aid and comfort to our enemies? Continue to treat this President like he wasn't elected and he doesn't know what he's doing!" Again, in contrast, the April 14, Walsh proclaimed, "[Conservatives] just want to stay on, 'It's un-American. It's un-constitutional. They don't like the Constitution.' And these are loaded words. These are words that are whipping people up with fear."

Even when Chris Matthews attempts to side with the conservative/Republican position on an issue, he ends up either bashing them or praising Democrats, something he did three times on Wednesday's Hardball.

First up Matthews raised a GOP concern that Barack Obama should not speak in an "elevated" position, by using a podium, at the health care summit because it would present Obama as "standing up there like God" over them. [audio available here]

Later on Matthews appeared to defend tea partiers when he scolded Salon's Joan Walsh for using the term "teabag" which has a "sexual connotation" but just moments earlier accused conservatives of "leaping up and down orgasmically" over Scott Brown's win.

According to ABC, CBS and NBC, an athlete involved in a three-month-old sex scandal is more newsworthy than a statement of principles signed by more than 80 conservative leaders.

Not just more newsworthy. The broadcast network morning shows devoted more than 30 minutes of coverage about Tiger Wood's statement to the press on his sexual "indiscretions" scheduled for Feb. 19. By contrast, the Feb. 17 signing of the Mount Vernon statement by 80 prominent conservative leaders received zero coverage. Both CBS and NBC sent camera crews to the event.

ABC provided the lion's share of the Tiger coverage, giving more than 17 minutes of airtime to the Woods story. A crisis management professional, a family therapist and two sports writers were brought on to speculate about the impact his expected apology would have on Woods' image and career, as well as the pros and cons of his wife Elin appearing alongside him.

Woods coverage on CBS clocked in at more than nine minutes while NBC, currently covering the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, gave Woods only four-and-a-half minutes.

On Wednesday's Hardball (not aired until midnight due to Olympics) Chris Matthews brought on his liberal compatriot from Salon.com Joan Walsh to double team Let Freedom Ring's Colin Hanna and slander the tea partiers as racist nuts that represent the new face of the conservative movement, and dismissed those who seek to reassert the country's founding principles, like those who signed the Mount Vernon Statement, as increasingly irrelevant. [audio available here]

However it was the two liberals who received a lesson on the Constitution from Hanna who left Matthews so bewildered he blurted: "What does a patriot mean these days?"

First up Matthews began the February 18th edition of Hardball by slandering the entire tea party movement and mocked them as "Original Intent" characters:

Salon editor Joan Walsh said Sunday that MSNBC's Chris Matthews roots for Barack Obama.

Appearing on CNN's "Reliable Sources," Walsh was asked by host Howard Kurtz to comment on Matthews' remark that he had forgotten the President was black during Wednesday's State of the Union address.

"There's no such thing as post-racial, and so I disagree with Chris about that," said Walsh.

"But on the other hand, I think his heart really is in the right place in terms of -- you know, he roots for this president" (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):