Mark Murray

In a jarring campaign ad for Jeff Flake's U.S. Senate campaign, Dr. Cristina Beato alleges that, when he worked under her as Bush's Surgeon General, Flake opponent Democrat Richard Carmona angrily pounded on her front door during the middle of the night on one occasion. As a "single mom," Beato told viewers, "I feared for my kids and myself." Carmona "has issues with anger, with ethics, and with women," she added.

This charge --  leveled in a November 2007 interview with majority and minority counsels for the House Oversight Committee --is, if true, very troubling. So how is MSNBC -- the network most obsessed with the GOP's supposed "war on women" -- reacting to the explosive charges? By bemoaning how nasty the Flake campaign is by running the ad, of course. From the October 15 edition of MSNBC's Jansing & Co.:

While the Obama acolytes at MSNBC are insisting that the Janesville, Wisconsin, GM plant was "closed" in December 2008 on President Bush's watch, NBC News senior political editor Mark Murray was more nuanced in an appearance with Thomas Roberts on MSNBC shortly after 2:30 p.m. Eastern today. Even so, Murray's reporting was misleading and is easily negated by a Web search turning up reporting by the Janesville [Wis.] Gazette from February 2009.

Here's what Murray told Roberts:

Continuing to beat the drum of Mitt Romney's campaign not being transparent on Wednesday's The Daily Rundown on MSNBC, fill-in host Luke Russert melodramatically asked: "Is this one of the most secretive presidential campaigns in history?" On Tuesday, regular host Chuck Todd predicted that Romney could be "the least transparent president in a generation." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

In response to Russert, NBC News political editor Mark Murray lamented the inability of the media to throw Romney off message: "I would actually say that they've demonstrated incredible message discipline. They have talked about the things that they want to talk about. When you bring up other matters, whether it's Donald Trump, whether it's Syria, whether it's this transparency in campaign...[the campaign says] those issues aren't – don't matter. What voters really care about is the economy."

Democratic National Committee boss Tim Kaine appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe on Friday. When Kaine campaigned successfully for the Virginia governor's job in 2005, The Washington Post and other liberal media outlets pushed him as both pro-choice and a "devout Catholic" and a former missionary. If he was the kind of politician who brought "devout" to the office -- say, with anti-abortion or anti-euthanasia leanings -- the Post would have found it offensive, not attractive. 

So check out what MSNBC thought was the most relevant piece of Kaine's biography on Friday (and he was talking campaigns, about Rand Paul and Dick Blumenthal): he served as principal of a Catholic school in Honduras, and he "plays the harmonica and sings in his church choir." Who said the Democrats were secular?

It's reported that Kaine is a member of St. Elizabeth's parish in Richmond, which is 96 percent black. He's not pictured in the choir in that linked story. Is he in the choir now?  In a previous piece boosting Kaine's faith by NBC's Mark Murray in the liberal magazine The Washington Monthly, Murray explained he had to drop out of the choir when he was elected mayor of Richmond in 1998.