John Kerry

It seems that the media cannot resist spitting on the Romneys when they are down. On last Saturday’s Weekends with Alex Witt, Ms. Witt decided to cover Ann Romney’s recent interview with CBS This Morning as part of her end-of-show The Big 3 segment. Witt played a clip from that interview in which Romney bemoaned Americans’ lack of trust in their government due to the current scandals.

After the clip, Witt tag-teamed with liberal journalist Patricia Murphy, editor of Citizen Jane Politics, to bash the Romneys for re-entering the national political conversation. “Patricia, too early for the Romneys to resurface?" Witt inquired. "You think the public really wants to hear from them after the last election?" she asked, a not-so-subtle way of passive-aggressively wishing the Romneys would crawl into a hole. [Video below. MP3 audio here.]

How enthusiastic can NPR be in avoiding the emerging Obama scandals? Try this: So-called “All Things Considered” aired no features on Benghazi or the IRS on Saturday or Sunday. (This excludes on-the-hour news updates.) But they found time for six minutes on the trade in rhino horns.

It was more ridiculous on “Weekend Edition” Saturday and Sunday – they also skipped both. NPR correspondent Michele Kelemen reported on Secretary of State John Kerry for 4 minutes and 22 seconds without a single word about Libya. Somehow the State Department’s Benghazi fiasco wasn’t listed as a “thorny issue” in the Middle East:

Pardon the age of this item, but it's on an issue of campaign history. On March 13, NPR Fresh Air host Terry Gross interviewed new CNN host Jake Tapper about politics and journalism, and whether there was blowback from presidents and candidates over tough questions. But Gross felt compelled to bring up the "lies" told about John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign -- without expressing anything specific.

Tapper said he was assigned as a Swift Boat Veteran fact checker by ABC. Gross said, "So you were fact-checking some of the Swift Boat attacks against presidential candidate John Kerry. There were so many lies in those attacks. What was the fact-checking like, and how effective do you think it was in trying to counteract the lies?"

Yet another example of why I've long referred to Mike Malloy as the Voice of the Guard in the Gulag.

Bad enough that this most creepy and vampiric of men can barely let consecutive sentences pass without reference to carnage and bloodshed. On his radio show Tuesday, Malloy slandered Sen. John McCain as a war criminal who murdered civilians during the Vietnam War and was justifiably tortured for doing so. (audio clip after page break)

Gee, maybe one day we'll look back and realize that the advent of Barack Obama was the day "when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."  Politico, at least, apparently thinks so.

In an item today, Politico claimed that "Obama’s choice of John Kerry as the nation’s top diplomat is the strongest signal to the international community — and the smart set in Washington’s political class — that the president is truly committed to striking deals designed to save the world."  More after the jump.

The arrogance of Lawrence O'Donnell knows no bounds.

On Tuesday evening, the host of The Last Word actually offered his name to be interim senator of Massachusetts if John Kerry becomes the new Secretary of State while proposing that newly-retired Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) temporarily fill in for him on MSNBC (video follows with LexisNexis transcript and commentary):

Norah O'Donnell helped Bob Schieffer hype his upcoming segment with actor/director Ben Affleck on Thursday's CBS This Morning. O'Donnell played a clip of the soon-to-be aired interview and remarked, "He sure does sound like a politician. He won't give you a straight answer!"

Schieffer ballyhooed Affleck's supposed credentials to be a possible replacement for Senator John Kerry, who could be named the next Secretary of State [audio available here; video below the jump]:

Mitt Romney recently told CBS’s Scott Pelley that a leader would “say which of those things that you should take out of the budget that are no longer essential,” and when pressed to be specific, Romney nominated "the subsidy for PBS,” and subsidies for Amtrak, the NEA, and the NEH. This raises one obvious question. In moderating tonight's first general election debate of 2012, can longtime PBS star Jim Lehrer be fair to a candidate who wants to zero out the subsidy for PBS?

In his 1992 memoir A Bus of My Own, Lehrer confesses he could sound like a “PBS superpatriot” in lauding his own newscast. For his own career at PBS, Lehrer professed he loved how Watergate “crumbled” Nixon’s plans to “crumble us” in liberal taxpayer-funded broadcasting:

Talk about missing the elephant (or is it donkey?) in the room – on Tuesday's CBS This Morning, Nancy Cordes reported that Senator John Kerry is "playing Mitt Romney in mock debates" with President Obama before Wednesday's debate. But she didn't once mention that Kerry's debate skills didn't help him in 2004, when he lost a presidential race to President George W. Bush.

Cordes did note that "Romney and...Kerry know each other well. They're both longtime politicians from Massachusetts." She also twice emphasized that Obama's campaign was "working hard...to try to lower expectations about his performance" during the upcoming presidential debates.

Leading into tomorrow’s presidential debate, journalists are busy setting expectations for the candidates. On Sunday’s Good Morning America, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos argued that Mitt Romney is under “huge, huge” pressure: “He is behind right now. He is behind nationally, he’s behind in all of the battleground states. This is the last big audience that Mitt Romney is going to have with about four and a half weeks left to go.”

But more undecided voters will be swayed by the media’s post-debate spin about who won and who lost than by any pre-debate expectations. Reviewing the last several campaigns, MRC analysts have found a clear trend of network reporters fawning over the performance of liberal candidates, while harping on any perceived weaknesses or gaffes from conservatives.

One of the most reliable pro-Democratic pundits is none other than George Stephanpoulos — not especially surprising, given his track record as a loyal operative for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, but hardly the objective, unbiased voice touted by ABC News. MRC has documented how, in eight out of the last nine general election presidential debates (every one since he joined ABC News in 1997), Stephanopoulos has gone on his network’s airwaves to claim victory for the Democratic candidate, all in the guise of offering impartial analysis. [Video review below the jump.]

Does anyone remember anybody in the establishment press speculating over who might hold Cabinet positions during a second Bush 43 term in the fall of 2004 without qualifying it with "if Bush is reelected"? Neither do I.

But at the Politico on Thursday, the closest Josh Ragin got in an item found at the web site's "The Cable" section speculating on whether John Kerry or Susan Rice is better positioned to be Obama's nominee to be "America's next top diplomat" (i.e., Secretary of State) was quoting a Republican Senate aide who merely referred to the possible fireworks "if it's the beginning of a second Obama term." That doesn't even qualify as a qualifier either, because a victorious Obama might attempt to confirm a new nominee to replace Hillary Clinton during a lame-duck session. Excerpts follow the jump (bolds are mine):

CNN's Wolf Blitzer resorted to using old footage of Democratic Senator John Kerry (Mass.) as a soldier to make his point about how the U.S. needs to speed up its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.

"And I immediately recalled what Senator John Kerry told Congress when he returned from the Vietnam War four decades ago," Blitzer said Friday of when he got news of the deaths of American soldiers in Afghanistan. He aired footage of Kerry's 1971 testimony before Congress given as a soldier returning from Vietnam, where he called the war a "mistake" and challenged Americans to realize that. [Video below the break.]

On Sunday's NBC Nightly News, CNBC chief Washington correspondent John Harwood warned that, unless the Romney campaign succeeds in changing the campaign subject away from Bain Capital, he could be "left out in the political wilderness pretty quickly" if both the Obama campaign and the media press Romney on the subject persistently.

After host Lester Holt asked "why is the question of when" Romney "was actually running things" at Bain Capital "so key," Harwood responded:

CNN on Friday surprisingly accused President Obama of "swiftboating" presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney with continuously false attacks regarding his service at Bain Capital.

The idea appears to have first been raised by CNN correspondent Jim Acosta during his interview with Romney on The Situation Room (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Saturday's Fox News Watch, two studies from the Media Research Center - parent organization to NewsBusters - were cited during the program. The first mention came during a discussion of Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Cory Booker's criticism of the Obama campaign's attacks on Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital.

After panel member and FNC contributor Judy Miller wondered why either Romney's time at Bain Capital or the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's association with President Obama should not be considered "fair game," fellow panel member Jim Pinkerton of the The American Conservative magazine brought up the media's double standard of focusing much more on Republican Romney's wealth in 2012 as compared to Democrat John Kerry's wealth in 2004. Pinkerton:

Appearing on Tuesday's The O'Reilly Factor on FNC, former FNC anchor - and former ABC correspondent - Brit Hume recounted the liberal bias many journalists exhibit in how they treat wealthy Republicans versus wealthy Democrats.

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday's The O'Reilly Factor to promote his book, Exit Interview, former ABC News president David Westin denied seeing a liberal bias among his colleagues when he was head of ABC News, and, when confronted by a recent study by the MRC's Business and Media Institute, rationalized the greater attention the media have paid to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's wealth this year as opposed to Democratic nominee John Kerry's wealth in 2004.

NPR's Tamara Keith filed a one-sided report on Monday's Morning Edition about Mitt Romney's "apparent shift in emphasis, if not an outright reversal" on the issue of energy policy. Keith cited the "liberal news site Think Progress" as one of her main sources for her report. She also turned to a former aide to Democrats John Kerry and Deval Patrick without giving his political/ideological affiliation.

Fill-in host David Greene spotlighted in his introduction to Keith's report how "the GOP candidates have seized on price spikes as a line of attack against President Obama, largely saying the answer is more domestic oil drilling. But one of those candidates, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, used to have a position somewhat contrary to that."

The Daily Beast's Andrew Sullivan this weekend called Mitt Romney "the most dreadful candidate since John Kerry."

Appearing on the syndicated Chris Matthews Show, Sullivan must have forgotten that in 2004 he endorsed Kerry over George W. Bush (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The ridiculous media hypocrisy concerning all the fuss over Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's wealth and income tax rate was perfectly demonstrated on MSNBC's Morning Joe Monday.

After claiming that Romney's "tax issue is not remotely" past him, John Heilemann, the National Affairs editor for New York magazine, admitted that he never reported John Kerry's income tax rate during the 2004 campaign (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Barack Obama and his reelection committee must be thrilled to know the media are going to assist them in invoking class warfare this campaign season.

NBC's Chris Matthews certainly did his part Sunday practically beginning the syndicated show bearing his name asking the truly revolting question is Mitt Romney "Just too damn rich?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Monday I noted how Washington Post staff writer Greg Miller failed to report that alleged top-secret information leaker John Kiriakou was employed from 2009 to 2011 as an investigator on the Foreign Relations Committee for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.).

Today in a follow-up story about Kiriakou's wife Heather resigning her CIA analyst post, Miller once again failed to mention Kiriakou's connection to Sen. Kerry. What's more, whereas in the second paragraph of his January 23 article, Miller noted that Kiriakou had served as "a senior Senate aide," Miller today failed to even note Kiriakou's two-year tenure as a staffer with the U.S. Senate.

Former CIA agent John Kiriakou has been charged today with "repeatedly leaking classified information to journalists as well as violating the federal law that forbids disclosing the identity of covert intelligence officers," NBC News's Michael Isikoff reported earlier today. Isikoff noted in the second paragraph of his report that Kiriakou "between 2009 and last year worked as an investigator for Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee."

The Washington Post's Greg Miller also filed a story on the matter this afternoon, but omitted the fact that Kiriakou, who contributes to the liberal Huffington Post, was hired by the liberal senior senator from Massachusetts.

On Thursday's World News on ABC, substitute anchor David Muir brought up the Gallup Daily Tracking Poll numbers from Monday which at that time showed President Obama with a 47 percent approval rating and a 45 percent disapproval rating, the first time in recent memory that his approval number was higher than his disapproval.  (Video below)

But, since Monday, the Gallup tracking poll numbers have turned further against Obama each day, with today's poll showing that the President's approval rating is back down to 41 percent with his disapproval up to 50 percent. As Muir referred to the Gallup survey as "one poll," he did not inform viewers that this same poll had trended away from Obama since Monday.

On Wednesday's Early Show, CBS somehow thought a Democratic super PAC's cynical ad aimed at discouraging Republican primary voters from voting for Mitt Romney was newsworthy. Correspondent Chip Reid outlined that Romney's French-speaking ability might be "political poison," and cited how French fries were renamed "freedom fries" in 2003 and how John Kerry was accused of looking French in 2004 [audio clips available here; video below the jump].

Fill-in anchor Rebecca Jarvis stated in the introduction to Reid's report that "something from Mitt Romney's past is coming back to haunt him...Apparently, he speaks French." Co-anchor Jeff Glor added that "apparently, speaking French is not a plus when you're running for president."

On last night's CBS Evening News, correspondent Nancy Cordes listed one and only one sticking point in the failure of the so-called "supercommittee" to reach a deal, and that was, she said, how "Republicans on the supercommittee were pushing to make the Bush-era tax cuts permanent for everyone."

And only one politician, Democratic Senator and supercommitee member John Kerry, was permitted to frame the story for CBS viewers. "This is not a tax cutting committee. This is a deficit reduction committee," Kerry asserted. "And we do not believe that the wealthiest people in America should get another tax cut."