The general election has apparently begun. This week, the liberal media launched a pre-emptive attack on Republican campaign tactics even as TV interviewers slobbered all over Barack Obama. Here are the Media Research Center’s "Worst of the Week" (audio and video links below the fold):

# GOP: Merchants of Slime and Hate. It’s Hillary Clinton’s campaign, not the GOP, which has pummeled Barack Obama these past weeks, but journalists are nevertheless impugning Republicans as dirty campaigners. The May 19 Newsweek cover story channeled Democratic talking points to claim "the Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968." (Ever listen to Democratic rhetoric on Social Security?) Co-authors Richard Wolffe and Evan Thomas questioned whether John McCain really wanted to "rein in the merchants of slime and sellers of hate who populate the Internet...who exercise their freedom in ways that give a bad name to free speech."

In this week’s cover story, Newsweek’s Richard Wolffe and Evan Thomas juxtapose Democratic talking points about the sliminess of Republicans (“successfully scaring voters since 1968”) and testimonials to the managerial wizardry of Barack Obama (“he has ‘grace under fire’”) and present the entire package as an insightful look inside “The O Team.”

The eight-page spread, decorated with several behind-the-scenes photographs of the candidate and his top aides, paints Republicans and independent conservative groups as the source of all campaign nastiness. The authors even question whether John McCain, who has earned innumerable media accolades as a champion of more government regulations on free speech (“campaign finance reform”) is not perhaps a co-conspirator with those awful conservatives:

Newsweek’s May 5 cover story professes to address Barack Obama’s "Bubba Gap," the growing chasm between the would-be Democratic nominee and white "working class" voters. Evan Thomas, Holly Bailey, and Richard Wolffe don’t so much report on the gap as complain about hateful conservative rumor-mongering. The authors complain that Obama is not just running against Mrs. Clinton or Sen McCain, but against every historical hobgoblin who liberals can dig out of a musty closet. Obama's not only opposed by George W. Bush, who hates pointy-headed intellectuals, but in Newsweek's historical imagination by "demagogues like the anti-Semitic right-wing radio priest of the 1940s, Father Charles Coughlin; Red-baiter Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, and race-baiter Gov. George Wallace of Alabama."

The Newsweek team explicitly tied these men to the people who posted damaging tidbits from Reverend Wright sermons on YouTube and the spreaders of Obama's leaked remarks on the Huffington Post about bitter people clinging to guns and religion. They began by lamenting the injustice that a black man, long so oppressed, could be accused of elitism:

Obama still has his fans in the MSM, or Hillary her detractors . . .

Appearing on this afternoon's Hardball, the seemingly mild-mannered Evan Thomas of Newsweek took a surprisingly tough shot at Clinton, disputing the very premise of her now-famous "it's 3 AM" ad. Discussing Hillary's comeback, Evans offered his blunt assessment with no real prompting.

EVAN THOMAS: What I don't get about this ad, the whole idea about 3 AM is you want coolness and detachment, right? She's not cool and detached. She's either really hot and angry, or she's icy cold and tough. But I don't think of her as cool. I think of Obama as being the cool, detached guy. Now maybe he doesn't have the experience, but I think if you peel this onion, there's something about it that just doesn't make sense to me. She doesn't strike me as the person who's the cool, detached, steady person at the other end of the phone.

Brent Bozell's last column referred to a year-end think piece by Newsweek's Evan Thomas on our hurtfully "hyperpartisan" political atmosphere called "The Closing of The American Mind."

I was especially fascinated when Thomas wrote wistfully of the golden days when America had an "old order – a large, more politically moderate voting public...In 1970, at about 6:30 pm at least two or three nights a week, about half the country could be found watching the evening news on one of the three major networks. The broadcasts tended to be fairly sober-minded, on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand presentations by trusted anchors like Walter Cronkite."

It’s understandable that media elitists would mourn for the Nixon era, when conservatism was still a small remnant and most Republican office holders were almost as liberal as the Democrats. But the idea that there were no hyperbolic divisiveness or harsh rhetoric, with the Vietnam War raging and the radical left on the march, is just bizarre. It’s even more bizarre to claim that biased liberal anchormen like Walter Cronkite, lobbying LBJ to get out of Vietnam, were fair and balanced in their presentation.

The presidential nominating contest keeps creeping earlier and earlier into the election year. The Iowa caucuses are 16 days earlier than in 2004. The New Hampshire primary is 19 days earlier than in 2004. Before the first results, the media were already pushing the contenders around, predicting that most presidential campaigns are toast if they don’t win in one of these states, and in so doing, are only advancing that perception.

All the talk of reforming the primary system – to make it more logical, more rational, more regional, more representative, less tilted to traditional first states like Iowa and New Hampshire – all of these do less for a rational nomination process than reforming the reporters and pundits who want to declare the whole race over from the first shot of the starting gun.

In 2004, John Kerry was estimated to have sealed the winning number of convention delegates by March 11, and the conventional media wisdom was talking him up as the nominee after the primaries on February 3. By the 6th, the Reuters wire service put out a story headlined "Kerry Presidency Seen [As] a Boon for U.S. Markets." Soon, CBS and other media outlets started investigating and attacking the National Guard record of President Bush, as if they were following the orders of Kerry advisers. The general election seemed already under way.

It seems appropriate that the person who wrote the following will now be writing for Newsweek (HT to NB's John Stephenson, who posted on this Tuesday evening):

Yes, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga ("Kos") apologized the next day; you can decide for yourself whether it suffices.

On Friday night’s "Inside Washington," panelists trashed Ross Buettner’s story in the New York Times playing up a close relationship between Fox News boss Roger Ailes and GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. Newsweek’s Evan Thomas said "I think this was the New York Times thinking that Ailes is Darth Vader, because they made him out to be this monster who’s given all this time to Giuliani, but the story itself and the graphics supporting it didn’t support the story." Others agreed. "There’s nothing in this story," said columnist Charles Krauthammer. Colby King of the Washington Post scornfully added, "This is exactly why newspapers in trouble," and said they acted like a tabloid. Thomas concluded, "It says more about the paranoia of the New York Times than anything else."

Using disparaging comments to stoke class warfare, Newsweek called for higher taxes on the “super rich” in the July 23 issue.

The magazine called private-equity partners “Masters of the Universe,” “the true aristocrats” and remarked snidely that “even their secretaries, it seems, have English accents.”

This week’s Newsweek cover story on political courage ("Wanted: A New Truman") is truly baffling. Evan Thomas has a strange way of assessing what marks courage in our presidential contenders. He easily acknowledges that John McCain’s long tenure as a prisoner of war trumps everyone else. But he writes "All the candidates will use their life stories to show a sense of moral purpose." How did Hillary display her sense of moral purpose?

You may not believe it, but Thomas claimed: "Hillary Clinton had a stark moral choice: whether to stay with her husband when President Clinton's philandering with Monica Lewinsky was exposed. Her decision to stand by him could not have been easy." Inside the media-Democrat complex, moral courage is not displayed by condemning adultery. It is displayed by tolerating adultery and maintaining political viability for the party in power – not to mention nicely setting up your own senatorial and presidential campaigns down the line.

Newsweek’s cover story on Don Imus this week carried a confessional tone, offering penance from Newsweek bigwigs for enabling the I-Man due to their hunger to be a part of the "in crowd." Weston Kosova’s story lectured about how the Imus incident compares to Hurricane Katrina and the O.J. Simpson verdict in showing "media power is still concentrated largely in white hands and, as a result, racism is sometimes tolerated and enabled in ways that many white Americans are unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge."

Newsweek is also contrite this week its coverage of the wildly mishandled Duke lacrosse rape allegations, but they offered no broad Big Picture moral about how that shows a media too willing to believe in racism in every legal case. In fact, the story  has a strange subheadline, with the notion of "innocence" in quotes, as in you shouldn't quite believe it, and it prides itself that all the injustice done to the three accused white boys wasn't just a nightmare: "It was also maturing."

On Friday night's edition of Inside Washington airing locally on Washington PBS station WETA, the first topic was whether the media's been unfair to President Bush, given his abysmal approval ratings. NPR reporter Nina Totenberg said Bush received a "free ride" for years, so now the worm has turned and the coverage is fierce. Then the host turned to Newsweek's Evan Thomas, who was frank in his assessment of the media's role:

Gordon Peterson: "What do you think, Evan? Are the mainstream media bashing the president unfairly?"

Evan Thomas: "Well, our job is to bash the president, that's what we do almost --"  

Jon Meacham, editor of "Newsweek," compared journalists to MTV’s teen morons Beavis and Butt-Head for the demands they make on public officials, and portrayed himself as understanding of negative public sentiments of the media:

"One of the things people don’t like about journalists, reasonably, is that we’re kind of like Beavis and Butt-Head. You know, we demand people change, and then when they change, we kick ‘em in the shins and say ‘well, you didn’t change quick enough.'"

Meacham's comments came in the 6:00 hour of Monday’s "Imus in the Morning." Yet, if one were to read the latest issue of "Newsweek," it is apparent Meacham’s words are not followed by action. An article by Evan Thomas, criticized the White House for not changing course quick enough and being hostile to change. It rekindled the story of President Bush’s alcoholism,  and his decision to quit drinking twenty years ago and asserted that this was the last "midcourse correction" of the current president:

On the chat show "Inside Washington" on PBS station WETA last night, the spin was in: Plamegate was a massive zero. No one was more enthusiastic than Newsweek's Evan Thomas. I'm sure the reporting of his colleague Michael Isikoff has him completely persuaded. But here's what didn't come up: how much ink did Newsweek spill hyping this "zero" story up? (Hint: here's just one example.)

When the show's substitute host Kathleen Matthews (wife of Chris Matthews) asked what the bottom line was on Plamegate, Thomas declared: "Nothing! Nothing! This is a big zero of a story that most of the American public has ignored, Washington has been feverishly consumed by, and it means something for Scooter Libby, who may go to jail, so it has some personal consequences, but in the great sum of American body politic, it means nothing."

Norah O'Donnell, Roger Simon, and Evan Thomas all seemed to agree on tonight's "Hardball" that there's no way that President Bush actually read The Stranger by Albert Camus and three Shakespeare plays as he claimed in an interview with Brian Williams yesterday. In other words, all together now, "Bush is an idiot." The originality of the criticism of President Bush continues to baffle my mind as I'm sure it does yours as well.

Video available here.

Of the three, Evan Thomas is by far the worst, joking that he "doesn't believe President Bush does read"--which draws a sizable laugh from O'Donnell--and then continues by saying, "but before we get too snooty about this, he does read some and, you know, that's not a bad thing. If there's some intellectual curiosity by the President, it's to be encouraged."

On this weekend's Inside Washington, Newsweek Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas, who maintained that “most...mainstream journalists believed -- close call -- that we had to go to this [Iraq] war,” have “now changed their view. You can feel it shift over the summer." Thomas observed: “You can feel this summer that group, of which I am a card-carrying member, lurch in a different direction in kind of with a hand-wringing sadness, but you can feel it, they're starting to head for the exits, looking for some kind of face-covering diplomatic solution or something, but boy you can feel it happening." Panelist Nina Totenberg of NPR protested that she was against the war in Iraq from the start, charging: “I think most sane people thought really this would make matters worse and it's made matters worse." (Transcript follows)

Newsweek Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas, who in March condescendingly charged on Inside Washington that opposition to the UAE ports deals was a “classic for talk radio" since "it's something simple idiots can understand,” on this weekend's edition of the panel show again ridiculed talk radio -- this time as a caldron of “anger” on illegal immigration. But Thomas was dubious about whether the anger is really about immigration, or just where talk radio listeners have parked their incessant anger. He asserted that “in conservative talk radio there's this constant anger and it attaches itself to different issues. It sort of moves around. And right now, or for some months, it's been attached to immigration. What's not clear is whether that moveable anger will just find some other issue if Congress does nothing...”

Not even their liberal media colleagues are buying ABC’s May 24 hit piece on House Speaker Denny Hastert in which Brian Ross insisted that “federal officials tell us the congressional bribery investigation now includes the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert,” and "Justice Department officials describe the 64-year-old Illinois Republican as very much in the mix of the corruption investigation.” On Inside Washington aired Friday night on Washington, DC’s PBS affiliate WETA-TV channel 26, NPR reporter Nina Totenberg declared: "That seems to have been a bogus story. It really does seem to have been a bogus story." Evan Thomas, Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek, proposed that the ABC News “investigative unit sometimes goes a beat too," presumably “far,” but another panelist talked over him.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been under attack lately from those in the press, and with Congress out of session, and not much happening in the world of politics over the Easter weekend, the attacks continued this morning on CBS’s "The Early Show." And, once again, Harry Smith got confused by the facts (remember this and this).

Smith interviewed Evan Thomas, Assistant Managing Editor of "Newsweek" magazine regarding an article that appeared in today’s edition of the publication, particularly the portions of the article that dealt with a chat Thomas had with former Army Chief of Staff, General Eric Shinseki. Smith’s first question contained erroneous information:

Newsweek Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas condescendingly charged, on this weekend's edition of Inside Washington, that opposition to the UAE ports deals resonated with the public “because it's something that simple idiots can understand.” After a bit of snickering from the other panelists, especially NPR's Nina Totenberg, Thomas zeroed in on talk radio, even though the most popular talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh, supported the deal. Thomas called the subject matter “a classic for talk radio” because “you can get it on a bumper sticker.” Expressing his support for the UAE's purchase of the company operating several U.S. ports -- “We need Dubai as an ally. On balance, it would be better that the deal went through” -- Thomas proceeded to lament how “it was an easy one to demagogue on talk radio." As if much of the mainstream media didn't pile on too. (Uninterrupted transcript follows.)

Video clip (25 seconds): Real (800 KB) or Windows Media (900 KB). Plus, MP3 audio (150 KB) UPDATE: Rush Limbaugh quoted this item on his Monday, March 13 show: MP3 audio (55 seconds/335 KB)