Nikki Haley

At the Daily Beast on Sunday, liberal Peter Beinart called on Democrats and liberals to "strongly denounce" former South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian's insult campaign against Palmetto State Governor Nikki Haley, or else "Democratic Party bigotry is likely to get worse."

It's too early to test Beinart's long-term prediction (such bigotry is bad enough already), but the denunciations he desires are nowhere to be found, even as Harpootlian has doubled and tripled down on his original wish to see Haley sent “back to wherever the hell she came from.” Meanwhile, the establishment press has virtually ignored Harpootlian's unhinged harangues.

Have liberals already conceded defeat in today's South Carolina special election? Though polls show the race a true toss-up, some Democrats are attacking not just Republicans, but smearing the entire state as well.

During today's Stephanie Miller Show, guest Charlie Pierce of Esquire Magazine slammed the Palmetto State as "tribal", "a cult" and the ultimate dig, "religious"! From the program:

On Election Day in South Carolina, as Republican Mark Sanford seeks to regain his old congressional seat, Mika Brzezinski did her best to stop Joe Scarborough from mentioning an ugly slur that the Chairman of the state's Democratic party had made against Republican Governor Nikki Haley.

Former South Carolina Democratic Chairman Dick Harpootlian was caught in controversy this week as he pledged to send Haley—daughter of Indian immigrants—"back to wherever the hell she came from.” According to the Morning Joe panel, Harpootlian has apologized for that remark.  But Harpootlian has never apologized for his 2012 remark, comparing Haley with Adolf Hitler's mistress Eva Braun.  When Scarborough began to cite that slur, Mika sought to silence him. Brzezinski actually resorted to the schoolkid technique of repeating "bah, bah, bah, bah" in order to drown Scarborough out, adding "we don't need to repeat it." View the video after the jump.   

It’s bad enough that MSNBC is extremely liberal, but when they acknowledge their biases but don’t attempt to correct them, it shows how incorrigible they are. Take Monday's Morning Joe, where the panelists discussed offensive comments made on Friday by outgoing South Carolina Democratic Party chairman Dick Harpootlian.

During his speech, which Vice President Joe Biden was in attendance to hear, Harpootlian disgustingly commented that Haley, who is of Indian decent should be sent, “back wherever the hell she came from and this country can move forward.”  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.] 

It's not often that yours truly visits Huffington Post. One of those rare occasions occurred early today as I was preparing the post (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog) about South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian relishing the idea that his party's candidate for Palmetto State Governor in 2014 might send current Republican Governor Nikki Haley "back to wherever the hell she came from."

In writing about Harpootlian's response to the controversy over his insensitive and arguably racist and nativist remark, HuffPo's Alana Horowitz, who serves as its Front Page Editor, wrote that Haley "is no stranger to scrutiny over her ethnic and religious background." To what sort of "scrutiny" did Horowitz refer involving Haley's "ethnic and religious background"? See after the jump:

South Carolina's Jim DeMint made quite a splash Thursday when he announced he was leaving the Senate to run the Heritage Foundation.

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, also a South Carolina native, tossed his hat into the ring hours later asking viewers to tweet Governor Nikki Haley and tell her why she should name him to be DeMint's replacement (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Assessing the presidential race in the Midwest with Chris Hayes on Thursday night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow said Ohio Gov. John Kasich may be the "cockiest of all of the cocky breed of the Republican governors right now," but his loss on union bargaining rights was so stinging "I actually think the Republican establishment in Ohio is pretty wussy compared to what they were like in 2010."

That sounds a lot like a taunt that Ohio Republicans may want to tack to the bulletin board. They were discussing how Wisconsin doesn't look as good as they think it should:

The liberal media can’t seem to help themselves. While counter-arguments are occasionally acknowledged, most journalists of the progressive persuasion are not interested in fair and balanced coverage of politics. Facts and figures are seemingly subjective in the whole scheme of things. Severely limited studies and polls seem to provide them with all the information they need. Oh, and almost everything is racist.

The Washington Post has been one of most reliable offenders, as far as daily publications are concerned. For example, Rosalind Helderman, Jon Cohen and Aaron Blake collaborated on a report that was published today suggesting the “Republican Party base is white, aging and dying off.” This is according to an “extensive analysis" by David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Not too long ago, the Left was going apoplectic about a Sarah Palin-affiliated website showing a map of targeted congressional seats denoted by crosshair symbols. MSNBC in particular was strong in condemning violent rhetoric in politics, suggesting that conservative rhetoric in particular could incite crazies to violence.

Fast forward to this week. On Sunday, YouTube user edbex posted video that shows South Carolina AFL-CIO president Donna DeWitt taking some whacks at a pinata with a black & white photo of Gov. Nikki Haley (R-S.C.) affixed to it (h/t Daily Caller's Matt K. Lewis). [Update: Our friends at our sister site MRCTV have the video as well; You can watch it embedded below the page break]

New York Times media reporter Jeremy Peters on Tuesday defended Republican Gov Nikki Haley of South Carolina from a phony scandal story that made the rounds of the media via Twitter last week, in "A Lie Races On Twitter Before Truth Can Boot Up." Peters reminded readers that Haley had previously been hit with an "unfounded blog report of marital infidelity." So why did the Times eagerly make that "unfounded" report a news story in 2010?

Updated [14:38 et]:  Audio available here and video added after the jump.

Appearing on NBC's Sunday web-based feature Press Pass, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley tore apart the media obsession with the contraception debate: "The media thinks that women only care about contraception, that's not true. They care about contraception, and education, and health care, and jobs, and the economy."

Haley leveled the criticism after Meet the Press host David Gregory grilled her on the "gender gap" in Republican support being an obstacle to Mitt Romney defeating President Obama in November. Haley took Gregory to task for the question: "I find it comical that the news media wants to continue to talk about a gender gap, and so I'll challenge you to ask a man about the gender gap as well."

It's tough to believe this actually happened in the year 2012.

During an interview with South Carolina's Republican Governor Nikki Haley, Time magazine's editor-at-large Belinda Luscombe disgracefully said, "In New York City, which you're visiting for a couple of days, a lot of our taxi drivers are Sikhs. If you get one, are you going to give him a slightly bigger tip?"

Gov. Nikki Haley (R-S.C.) appeared on the April 3 edition of ABC's The View to discuss her new book, “Can’t Is Not an Option.” Liberal journalist and View host Barbara Walters hoped to conduct a relatively positive interview, hailing Haley as a "true American success story."

But doing a positive segment on a successful female conservative Republican politician was just not an option for liberal co-host Joy Behar, who tried to transform the segment into an occasion to further the liberal media's "war on women" meme. (Audio here, video after the jump)

On Monday, liberal radio talker Randi Rhodes ripped into the South, including a wish that it would secede again. She played clips of HBO interviews of Southerners done for Bill Maher and complained "Bobby Jindal even converted from Hinduism -- Nikki Haley, too -- in order to be acceptable to the conservative South in Louisiana and uh -- [about a five second pause] Georgia! I mean, that is crazy that in order to be acceptable to the party you have to, you know, pretend that you've given up your religion!"

Haley is governor of South Carolina, not Georgia, and her family are Sikh, not Hindu. Jindal converted to Catholicism in high school, so it's a little tough to argue it was all political calculation. Haley and her husband attend a Methodist church but she also was married in the Sikh faith out of respect for her parents. Liberal outlets like NPR have raised questions about the sincerity of her conversion.

Liberal bias is rampant among the media, but there is no more tangible example of it than in how the media treat Conservative women. The most recent cover of Newsweek features a very wide-eyed Michele Bachmann, looking surprised and unattractive. Perhaps more disturbing is the caption Newsweek placed below the presidential candidate's photo: "Queen of Rage."

Bachmann, an attractive 55 year-old mother of five, is a three term member of the House of Representatives, constitutional conservative and prominent voice of the Tea Party movement. But if you get your information from liberals or the mainstream media, you might know her as 'crazy,' a "zombie" a"phony-ass broad" and a "skank."

In his Friday report covering the June state and local employment report released by Uncle Sam's Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Associated Press's Derek Kravitz told readers about the three biggest seasonally adjusted job-losing states (Tennessee, Missouri, and Virginia), but had nothing to say about states which gained jobs. This was a curious omission indeed, given that BLS told us that "nonfarm payroll employment increased in 26 states and the District of Columbia and decreased in 24 states."

Only Kravitz knows why he neglected to tell us about the job gainers, but the list of the top eight states in that department should make readers wonder if the wire service reporter's omission was motivated by inconvenient (for liberals and leftists) likely explanations for the improvements in most of them (keep in mind that though it's not an apples to apples comparison, the economy as a whole added only 18,000 seasonally adjusted jobs in June):

CBS hounded four Republicans from the left during a town hall on the economy which aired on Tuesday's Early Show. Bob Schieffer, Erica Hill, and Rebecca Jarvis pressed Reps. Paul Ryan and Allen West, Senator Tom Coburn, and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to consider tax hikes to deal with the deficit. Schieffer also specifically accused the three members of Congress of "doing nothing" to fix the economy.

The two online questions which Jarvis took from viewers touted Democratic talking points about deficits under former President George W. Bush and how cutting the federal budget would lead to an increase in the unemployment rate, due to the laying off of federal employees. She also vigorously pursued both Rep.  Ryan and Rep. West. about the issue of jobs. In the first instance, the CBS business correspondent used an earlier answer from Haley, which emphasized the issue, to actually accuse the greater Republican Party of not paying enough attention to this issue, as well with the overall issue of the economy:

In the '80s the liberal media filled the airwaves with tales of woe from the homeless as a way to distract viewers from the runaway success of Reaganomics. In the 2000s, the same media chatted with one frustrated gas station customer after another to slam then-President George W. Bush.

However in 2011, with over 44 million Americans on food stamps, a new high according to the latest data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (See Table 2), the Big Three broadcast network news programs have been virtually devoid of anecdotal sob stories of moms and dads struggling to pay for their kids' box of Frosted Flakes, as a way to hammer Barack Obama's failed economic policies.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews honored Martin Luther King Jr. Day by accusing white Republicans of being afraid of black people. During a Monday night Hardball special called "Obama's America," Matthews insultingly asked former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele if, at GOP conventions, black-Americans at those events were told not to "bunch up" because "you'll scare these people" and added: "Did you fear that if you got together with some other African-Americans these white guys might get scared of you?"

Steele, who was the only Republican on the panel, seemed shocked by the question as he responded to Matthews: "No! What are you talking about?" and then proceeded to cite the successful candidacies of Tim Scott, Allen West and others in the GOP field that would suggest white Republicans weren't exactly afraid of, as Matthews put it, "black folk hanging together."

The following is the full exchange from the panel that featured Steele along with the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson and Democratic Congresswoman Donna Edwards, as it was aired on the January 17 edition of Hardball:

(video and audio after the break)

  On Saturday’s Fox News Watch, liberal FNC analyst Alan Colmes asserted that the Tea Party was a "bunch of angry white guys who went around and put up racist signs." As a debate ensued pitting Colmes against the other three panel members, he later defiantly asked, "How many blacks did they elect?" leading Jim Pinkerton of the New America Foundation to fire back: "The Tea Partiers elected two - Allen West and Tim Scott, Florida and South Carolina."

Host Jon Scott began the segment by assuming that the liberal Colmes would not have any complaints about the mainstream media’s coverage of the elections. After Colmes voiced his approval of the media, Scott sarcastically posed: "For instance, the Tea Party. Tea Party always got favorable coverage, right? Or fair coverage?"

Colmes then unleashed on the Tea Party: "Oh, they got, look, the Tea Party was a bunch of angry white guys who went around and put up racist signs at these at, these events on lawn chairs who had nothing better to do on weekends than sit on lawn chairs with signs suggesting Obama was a Muslim who wasn’t born in this country."

The news that it could be a good year for women electorally did not cheer up the likes of MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson and the Politico's Jeanne Cummings, because it turns out it's only going to be a good year for women on the Republican side like Nikki Haley, Meg Whitman, and Carly Fiorina or as Carlson put it: "It's not a compassionate women year." [audio available here]

Matthews, on Monday's Hardball, invited on Carlson and Cummings to take a look at "gender politics" and found that it could be a good year for women, just not the kind of women they like, in other words the more conservative momma grizzly types that Sarah Palin supports. Cummings even bemoaned that a loss of the House could result in "one giant blow to women" in that it "could take down the Speaker, Speaker Nancy Pelosi" who was "a real shining star for the achievements and the rise of women in government."

The following is the full segment as it was aired on the August 30 edition of Hardball:

Chris Matthews, on Wednesday's Hardball, invited on recently defeated Republican Representative Bob Inglis to slam Matthews' favorite targets, namely the Tea Party, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and after he got the requisite criticisms out of the South Carolina congressman of those entities asked him if he could explain how primary voters from his own party could nominate an Indian-American like Nikki Haley, even though they've "got a problem with a black president?" Matthews, clearly not grasping the concept that perhaps voters in South Carolina could cast their ballot based out of purely ideological and not racial motives, asked Inglis the following question:

How do you figure your state out? It's pretty conservative obviously. It's Strom Thurmond country in many ways and, and it has people like DeMint pretty far over and then people like Lindsey Graham who are sort of regular conservatives. But then you nominated, your party has nominated an Indian-American woman, Nikki Haley. Obviously an attractive candidate, she knows how to present herself obviously, but what's that about? Is that just an interesting little aspect? "It's okay to be Indian-American but we got a problem with this black president?" What's that about? [audio available here]

Before Matthews ended his show on that stumper of a question, he egged on the soon to be former Representative Inglis to attack the Tea Party, Limbaugh and Palin, as seen in the following exchanges that were aired on the July 14 Hardball:

Newsweek on Saturday did an astonishingly poor job of exploring why Republican women are suddenly being attacked for their beauty even suggesting it's all the former governor of Alaska's fault.

"There seems to be an insistent, increasingly excitable focus on the supposed hotness of Republican women in the public eye, like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Michelle Malkin, and Nikki Haley-not to mention veterans like Ann Coulter," the article now being prominently featured at the magazine's website began.

Hypocritically, Julia Baird's piece never once explained or wondered why the same thing isn't being done to Democrat women.

Instead, the numerous headlines exclusively trivialized physically attractive GOP females such as the following from the website's front page (h/t Twitter's @buszero):

In 1992, the feminists in the media rejoiced at what they called “The Year of the Woman,” when ten Democratic women (and one Republican) were running for the Senate in the aftermath of Anita Hill’s unproven sexual-harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas. Just two years before, seven Republican women (and two Democrats) ran. But the media yawned.

In 1992, the evening newscasts aired 29 stories exclusively devoted to women Senate candidates. In 1990, there was one...on election night. In 1992, the morning shows interviewed women Senate candidates on 26 occasions. In 1990, there were zero interviews.

This was all about the party affiliation. When the liberals Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein both won primary elections from the U.S. Senate in California in 1992, Time reporter Margaret Carlson almost levitated in ecstasy. “There was a rush, an exultation, that surpassed any political moment I have ever known -- better even than Geraldine Ferraro's vice-presidential candidacy."  

When’s the last time a journalist referred to Barack Obama as a former “small-time agitator?” That’s exactly how the Washington Post described Republican Nikki Haley in a profile piece on Saturday. A headline for the article by political reporter Philip Rucker critiqued, “Nikki Haley goes from small-time agitator to credible candidate for S.C. governor.”  

The piece on the conservative politician also offered this back-handed compliment: “Haley is friendly, and funny in a generic way; yet she keeps her politics from becoming too personal.”

On Wednesday's CBS Early Show, Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer provided analysis of Tuesday's primary elections across the country, describing the South Carolina gubernatorial race "where they continue to draw their political plot lines from, you know, 'Desperate Housewives' or something" and how Nevada Democrats were "very happy" with the victory of tea party candidate Sharron Angle.  

Speaking to Early Show co-host Maggie Rodriguez, Schieffer ran down the most watched races in Arkansas, California, South Carolina, and Nevada. When he got to South Carolina, he described gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley as "very conservative." After making the 'Desperate Housewives' comparison, he remarked how the GOP primary in the state was "providing some entertainment, as it were, for the rest of the country. I mean, you had Governor Sanford down there and his adventures. And now these allegations against Nikki Haley." He quickly added that the allegations of adultery against Haley were "without foundation" and that "Nobody has proven anything."

Rodriguez then asked if "Harry Reid is happy or fretting the fact" that tea party-backed Sharron Angle won the GOP senate primary in Nevada. Schieffer declared: "I suspect that Democrats in Nevada are very happy about this....I think the Reid people think that he would have a much better chance beating her than some of the other Republicans in the primaries."

Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday again highlighted charges of adultery against Republican Nikki Haley. He pressed the South Carolina gubernatorial candidate, demanding to know if she'd embarrass the state with scandal.

After reading a quote from a voter, the former operative to scandal-plagued Bill Clinton fretted, "Can you assure South Carolina voters that they're not going to be embarrassed if they elect you?" [Audio available here.]

The ABC host referenced claims, touted by Republican primary opponents, that she had been unfaithful. Stephanopoulos quoted, "And last night, the man you face in the runoff, Congressman Barrett, said 'Character is not one of the things that matters, it's the only thing that matters.'"

Ex-Clinton operative tuned journalist George Stephanopoulos on Monday touted allegations about a supposed affair between South Carolina's Nikki Haley and a lobbyist. Recounting the details of the charges leveled against the Republican politician, the Good Morning America host marveled, "And down in South Carolina, they can't just seem to get enough of it, in the gubernatorial primary, the leading candidate embroiled in a bit of a sex scandal."

Stephanopoulos and reporter Steve Osunsami engaged in gossip over the accusations. Osunsami warned that one of Haley's accusers is "sharing phone records that he says details conversations he had with Haley at all hours of the night." Stephanopoulos chided, "Yeah. Something like 600 phone conversations. Boy, that state is going through a lot."

It seems rather hypocritical for the GMA host to push this story. When FBI agent Gary Aldrich wrote a damaging book about Bill Clinton in 1996, the then-Democratic operative tried to bully the media into not covering the story.