I always find it amazing when writers in the mainstream press seem to have so little knowledge of America and its history. Of course, I suppose that being blissfully ignorant of US history does help paper over their betrayal, substituting the feeling that they can maintain allegiance to American "ideals" as they attempt to advocate for the sort of socialist/communist vision that they want America to become, quite despite its true character and principles. Heck, if you don't know you are betraying your own country, you can't be ashamed of yourself for it, right? In any case, here we have another prime example of such a betrayal by The New York Times' Thomas Friedman from his May 4 piece where he has decided that America is finished, done, kaput. And guess what? It's all George W. Bush's fault -- shocking, I know.

Freidman imagines that he has found the pulse of the people and he has found that they are aching for nation building. Not nation building in Iraq or Afghanistan, but in the USA. He says we have little to show for our efforts in Iraq, that "we’re just not that strong anymore." He also claims that we have no "leverage" in Iran.

Heck, he should know. After all he and his paper have been attempting to foster these very situations for 8 years. If what Friedman is saying is true, then he and his anti-American paper deserve hearty congratulations for their success at nation destroying -- ours.

ABC’s April 11 “World News with Charles Gibson” is showing they finally get it – ethanol production and high energy costs are causing food shortages worldwide.

“[P]rices are rising across Africa, pushed up by the cost of oil and demand for biofuels,” ABC correspondent Jim Sciutto said.

“Those biofuels are in fact a large part of the equation,” ABC correspondent David Muir added. “Many farmers around the world, who once grew wheat and rice, now grow corn and sugar cane instead, to produce ethanol a more lucrative market.”

David Shuster and Mika Brzezinski demonstrated on today's "Morning Joe" that there's no good-news Iraqi lemon they can't press into bad-news lemonade.

View video here.

Thanksgiving is a time for reconciliation, so let's show some sympathy for our liberal media friends. It's been a tough 24 hours for them. Yesterday, articles appeared in the New York Times and LA Times reporting the dramatically improved security situation in Iraq.

Today brings another blow, as Thomas Friedman suggests that beyond the military successes, there might be an informal kind of political accommodation going on in Iraq that he refers to as an "ATM peace."

Saturday's lead editorial in the New York Times celebrated Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize for his work on "global warming," "A Prize for Mr. Gore and Science." Before the praise, the Times stopped to spout misstatements on Gore's effort to overturn the 2000 election results.

"One can generate a lot of heartburn thinking about all of the things that would be better about this country and the world if the Supreme Court had done the right thing and ruled for Al Gore instead of George W. Bush in 2000. Mr. Gore certainly hasn't let his disappointment stop him from putting the time since to very good use.

But the Supreme Court "ruling for Al Gore" would not have automatically put Gore in the White House, as the paper assumes. Gore asked for a statewide manual recount -- which the Times's own comprehensive report shows Bush would have won.

Thomas Friedman thinks you are "stupid" if you still care about the atrocity committed against this country by Islamofascists in New York on 9/11/2001. He thinks "9/11 is over" and we all should just move on. Even worse, he has decided that we are no longer a great country, but are filled with seemingly meaningless "fear," that we have a dilapidated infrastructure, and that while America used to be "the gold standard," he believes "We aren’t anymore." Friedman is falling for the typical, leftist doom-and-gloom scenario and imagines that China is better than we are, Europe is more inviting, and we have become the new Rome after the fall. His closing line is "We can’t afford to keep being this stupid!" By contrast to Friedman, my opening line to him is "We can't afford to be this self-loathing!" Friedman starts his piece off comparing the current state of the U.S. to a satirical piece in the Onion, which is fitting because Frideman's own piece might be mistaken for a satire on the frivolousness and unserious nature of the left today. Unfortunately, he is serious about his self-inflicted amnesia and seems utterly unconcerned about the threats we face as a nation and a people. Like most truthers he seems to imagine that it has all been hype, a conspiracy theory made up by eeeevil Republicans who merely want to fool enough people to stay in power.

Thomas Friedman shouldn't be so modest. The opening line of his column today proclaims his inability, based on his current trip to Iraq, to see the big picture there. But buried in his description of three experiences from his journey is a conclusion as unequivocal as it is harrowing.

In the first anecdote in [subscription-required] "Letter from Baghdad" Friedman describes his experience visiting a U.S. Army platoon based in Baghdad's Ameriya neighborhood. As the author explains, this had been an affluent Sunni area that had first been ravaged by Shia militias and then by pro-Al Qaedi Sunnis who had 'imposed a reign of Islamist terror" on the neighborhood. Secular Sunnis from the area banded to together to form the “Ameriya Knights" and fight alongside the Americans to expel the Al-Qaeda terrorists.

Senator Charles Schumer is a legendary pursuer of television cameras. But look at the way the national media are covering Schumer’s heavy-breathing pursuit to make Attorney General Alberto Gonzales cry uncle and resign. It makes you wonder just how hard Schumer has to work to get press attention. The media look Schumer-owned and operated.

One interview really captures how the press looks more like a Democratic goon squad than a nonpartisan observers of the national scene. On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” news anchor Christopher Cuomo, son of Mario Cuomo, asked this pushy question on July 27: “Is Alberto Gonzales out of a job at end of business today?” Cuomo wanted the Attorney General whacked, and he wanted it now.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman was at it again, pushing his peace in the Middle East through environmentalism strategy. Invited on this morning's Today show to promote his upcoming Discovery Channel documentary called Green: The New Red, White and Blue, Friedman claimed one of the best ways to promote democracy in Iraq was to bring down the price of oil through energy saving green technology. Friedman also repeated his clarion call to retake the meaning of the word green from conservatives when NBC's Matt Lauer tossed the following softball to him:

Lauer: "Yeah and you say it's time to stop thinking about the green movement as tree-huggers and sissies. This is tough domestic and foreign policy."

Tom Friedman is at it again. Whenever a reporter asks him how to fix the Middle East, Friedman's response is increasingly the same - increase taxes! On this morning's Today show NBC's Meredith Vieira brought on the New York Times columnist to discuss the Iraq debate on Capitol Hill. Setting up Friedman with his own premise, Viera asked: "Well you've said, 'We need to reshape the game board.' What do you mean by that?" Friedman then gave a long-winded response that eventually revealed his solution: "Oil tax." Below is the conversation as it occurred in the 7am half hour of the February 6 Today show:

Meredith Vieira: "Well you've said, 'We need to reshape the game board. What do you mean by that?'"

It's unanimous! Times Watch guest judges Stephen Spruiell, who runs National Review Online's Media Blog, and Times critic William McGowan, author of the upcoming book Gray Lady Down, both picked as his worst quote of the year one from New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. (The quote also earned Quote of the Year honors from Times Watch's parent organization, the Media Research Center.) Spruiell says it was the "sheer arrogance" of Sulzberger's speech that put the paper's publisher over the top.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman declared that the insurgency in Iraq has been defeating the U.S. military for the past four years during an interview Wednesday with Good Morning America’s Diane Sawyer. While making the argument that there is no "two to three year" solution for the violence occuring in Iraq, Friedman declared victory for the insurgents:

Thomas Friedman: "...I don't believe myself that there's a two to three year solution where we just train a few more troops. The issue isn't training, Diane. After all, who's training the insurgents? Nobody. They're doing just fine. They've basically been defeating the U.S. military for the last four years."

Monday's morning shows displayed the Democratic diplomacy that may take over the House and Senate next year. Newsweek's Jonathan Alter was openly dismayed that President Bush refers to North Korea's murderous communist tyrant, Kim Jong Il, as "'The Pygmy'...Not every helpful, actually." On NBC's Today, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman lamented that it's too late for Bush to salvage peace: "North Korea has concluded that this administration wants their, their head on a wall, basically, and therefore there's probably nothing the United States can do now, to really reassure the North to give up their nukes, which is really their life insurance policy." This came just a minute or so after Friedman described Kim as the "Tony Soprano of Pyongyang."

If you have a look at this NewsBusters item of mine, you'll note it is dated August 14th, 2006. It was, as noted there, the first one written after I "broke down" and subscribed to the New York Times 'Times Select' section that gives access to the work of its in-house columnists. In that historic first item, I wrote that in their pay-per-view columns, Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert had sounded the nearly-identical theme: that the Bush administration allegedly sees terrorism as something to be "exploited."

In the ensuing weeks, I wrote no fewer than 22 more NB pieces critical of items on the Times editorial page, the majority focusing on the work of the subscription-required columnists. A pretty good return on my investment, you'd have to say.

Not the smallest bird doesn't fall but liberal pundits blame it on George W. Bush. A refreshing change of pace this morning, then, in the person of Thomas Friedman, who writes that the major responsibility for avoiding future international catastrophe lays not at the feet of the current occupant of the White House, but in Moscow and Beijing.

In the subscription-required The Bus Is Waiting, Friedman propounds the theory that a nuclearized N. North Korea and Iran will inevitably induce a string of countries across Asia and the Middle East developing atomic weapons of their own.

To prevent this, Friedman asserts that it is necessary for:

The new CBS Evening News with Katie Couric showcased her over correspondents (in a change from Schieffer's day she handled the opening plugs for upcoming stories), spotlighted her legs (at the top of the show, as she sat with an interviewee and stood in front of the anchor desk at the end of the program) and marked the Early Show-ization of the evening newscast with stories crammed into gimmicky segment titles: “CBS News Briefing” (four stories in 40 seconds), “CBS News Snap Shot” (“exclusive” pictures of Suri Cruise which Couric giddily touted as “proof positive that yessiree, she does exist”) and a “freeSpeech” commentary in which filmmaker Morgan Spurlock railed against how the media paint Americans into extremist positions. Over new theme music, the voice of Walter Cronkite announced: "This is the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric."

On the political agenda front, Couric opened with a topic apart from Tuesday's events: Setbacks in Afghanistan as the new female anchor handed off to female correspondent Lara Logan: “In the War on Terror, you have to wonder: Is it back to the drawing board? It's easy to forget Afghanistan is where that war began, and that 21,000 U.S. servicemen and women are still there. Now, nearly five years after U.S. forces defeated the Taliban and scattered the al-Qaeda terrorists they were protecting, the Taliban and their terror tactics are back.” While ABC and NBC aired stories on President Bush's speech about the dedication of terrorists and the Democratic reaction, CBS ran a story on Bush's arguments and then countered them with Couric interviewing New York Times columnist Tom Friedman who mocked Bush: “He's saying we're in the fight of our life, that the World War III of our generation, but let's have a tax cut.” Friedman also lamented: “We're a country that is seen widely around the world as exporting fear and not hope."

Video of the opening to Tuesday's CBS Evening News (1:55): Real (3.3 MB), Windows Media (3.8 MB), plus MP3 audio (765 KB).

I just watched Katie Couric's debut as the anchor of the CBS Evening News and it was, much to my surprise, not very different than it was when Bob Shieffer was helming. I expected at least a couple radical stylistic changes that would set the CBS Evening News apart from it's competitors on NBC and ABC and shake things up a little. But there was nothing new. All in all, Couric's debut was, well, ordinary.

I've put together a 4:21 video summary of Couric's debut, available here, in case you missed it.

In terms of substance, Couric began the broadcast by wondering if it was "back to the drawing board" on the war on terror because things seem to be going poorly in Afghanistan. She spoke at length with Thomas Friedman about the words versus the actions of the Bush administration.

Well, MSNBC and Joe Scarborough have clearly figured out how to get their show mentioned in a liberal newspaper. Inside Sunday's Washington Post, reporter Peter Baker wrote an article about conservative disillusionment with Bush on Iraq headlined "Pundits Renounce the President: Among Conservative Voices, Discord." Baker began:

For 10 minutes, the talk show host grilled his guests about whether "George Bush's mental weakness is damaging America's credibility at home and abroad." For 10 minutes, the caption across the bottom of the television screen read, "IS BUSH AN 'IDIOT'?"

In an interview with the CBS News website Public Eye, CBS reporter Sharyn Alfonsi displayed a typically leftish enthusiasm for New York Times columnists and former Democratic presidents who pride themselves on being Southern charmers.

When asked about the last "really great movie or book you've found, Alfonsi mentioned a classic Southern novel and "Also, I just finished Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem. I love him. He’s a great writer and a genius." When asked about the "most fascinating person," Alfonsi displayed her years in Arkansas journalism: "Most fascinating: I interviewed Bill Clinton a few times. He’s a study."

Was Matt Lauer showing balance in criticizing Hillary Clinton along with Donald Rumsfeld this morning - or was his skepticism about Hillary simply voicing the view of the Murtha/Lamont wing of the Dem party?

The focus was yesterday's Senate-hearing mano a mano between Hillary and Rumsfeld and her subsequent call for the president to accept the Defense Secretary's resignation.

Interviewing all-purpose commentator Howard Fineman, Lauer seemed insistent that it was time for Rumsfeld to go.

Lauer: "[Clinton] said the president should accept Rumsfeld's resignation. He lost credibility with Congress and the people. It's time for him to step down. This is not the first person to call for his resignation, but at some point, do you think it's a possibility especially in the near term?"

Fineman held his fire: "Well, the Democrats will try to make it that."

That wasn't good enough for Matt:

Fresh from his most recent trip to the Middle East, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman returned to offer his latest rationale for Bush hatred. Appearing on yesterday's Meet the Press Friedman theorized: "What this administration has done, is actually stolen something from people. Whether it's an African or a European or an Arab or Israeli, it's that idea of an optimistic America out there. People really need that idea, and the, the sort of dark nature of the Cheneys and the Bushes and the Rices, this, this sort of relentless pessimism about the world, this exporting of fear, not hope, has really left people feeling that the idea of America has been stolen from them."

Just a week ago Friedman, right before his departure to the Mideast, sat down with NBC's Russert to espouse the miraculous benefits of a gas tax. Friedman returned just in time, to the still warm seat across from Russert, to the following welcome from the Meet the Press host:

On this Sunday’s "Face the Nation" on CBS, Bob Schieffer once again turned to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman for analysis on developments in Iraq, the overall war on terrorism, and the Israel/Palestinian peace process.

Among the claims Friedman made were claiming that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was the "anti-Statue of Liberty." That America is alone in Iraq, discounting the contributions by the British and other coalition partners. And that he doesn’t "really want to blame America" for the inability of the Israelis and Palestinians to come to a workable peace agreement.

Friedman began by seemingly eulogizing Zarqawi. He focused on how effective Zarqawi was as a terrorist, but doesn’t offer praise to our troops or thanks that he has been removed from the equation in Iraq: