Paul Begala

James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal reports that Newsweek's Paul Begala, the perennially trash-talking Clinton political operative, "has a tiresome paean to Dick Lugar, the defeated GOP senator who felt his opponent wouldn’t do enough to reach across the aisle."

If this man didn't have double standards, he would have no standards at all. This is the same Begala that wrote in January 2010 that Barack Obama shouldn’t reach out to newly elected moderate Republican Sen. Scott Brown. He should “throw an elbow under the hoop”:

Bill Maher on Friday evening once again displayed a level of ignorance and intolerance that should completely disqualify him as a political commentator.

On HBO's Real Time, the vulgar anti-theist said Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney doesn't give to charity. "All his charitable donations are to Mormons. He gives to his cult. That’s not a charity. They're not poor people" (video follows with transcript and commentary, serious vulgarity warning):

Greg Gutfeld on Monday attacked comics for not making jokes about the current White House resident.

Appearing on Fox News's The Five, Gutfeld said, "Asking a comedian to make fun of Obama is like asking a priest to mock Christ" (video follows with transcript and absolutely no need for additional commentary):

There may be no more pompous and conceited person on the airwaves today than CNN contributor Paul Begala.

Appearing on Erin Burnett OutFront Tuesday, the former Clinton adviser actually said, "I put together a federal budget that was balanced, and it created the greatest boom in American history and global history" (video follows with transcript and commentary, file photo):

Friday night on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees, the lead story was on a counseling clinic owned by presidential candidate Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and her husband.  Cooper spoke of "allegations that the clinic engages in so-called reparative therapy," described by Cooper as "based on the theory that gay people can be turned into heterosexuals through a combination of prayer and willpower."  The host's use of "so-called" set the stage for CNN political analyst Paul Begala to fulminate.

Using the word "crackpot" to characterize reparative therapy no fewer than nine times, Begala insisted Mrs. Bachmann should be interrogated:

Howard Kurtz didn't have a good Father's Day.

After being shocked that Republicans would actually prefer Obama jokes over those about Republicans, the "Reliable Sources" host expressed dismay that Fox News analyst Dick Morris would actually toe the GOP's line (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Former Clinton adviser turned CNN political analyst Paul Begala Wednesday evening gave Anderson Cooper the predictable Party line about Weinergate being no big deal.

Without skipping a beat, the host of "Anderson Cooper 360" replied, "But, Paul, if this was a conservative Republican, would you be saying the same thing?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Trashing Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) as "Dr. Kevorkian," CNN political contributor Paul Begala condemns the congressman's bold proposal to revamp Medicare in his latest op-ed for CNN.com. If the GOP follows Ryan's plan, "like lemmings," Begala writes that their agenda will end in disaster.

He interprets the plan as nothing less than an attempt "to deny ill and infirm seniors the health care they deserve – while giving oil companies billions in taxpayer subsidies." The "lives and health" of the elderly are now in the hands of the "tender mercies" of the insurance companies. Is this a hint at death panels?

Ryan's plan involves transforming Medicare, which he sees as a fiscally unsustainable program in the long run, into a voluntary system where the elderly are covered by private insurance companies and their premiums are subsidized by the government.
 

Former Clinton advisor and current CNN contributor Paul Begala thought he was being clever Friday evening when he took a cheap shot at George W. Bush on HBO's "Real Time."

Without skipping a beat, St. Louis Tea Party founder and Big Government editor Dana Loesch smacked down her CNN colleague with a delicious jab at his former boss (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Late last week, CNN announced its plan to team up with the Tea Party Express to co-sponsor a Republican presidential debate in September. While this creates the possibility that Republican candidates will actually face questions of interest to Republican primary voters (as opposed to the typical liberal media agenda), it’s also probably the first time a media organization will partner with a group that its on-air correspondents and commentators have trashed over the past two years.

CNN’s liberal commentators have been savage to the Tea Party. Back in 2009, longtime CNN house liberal Paul Begala slammed the Tea Party as “a bunch of wimpy, whiny, weasels who don’t love their country.” A couple of weeks before this year’s election, CNN’s 8pm ET co-host Eliot Spitzer said the Tea Party was “vapid” and leading America “down a dangerous road....They’re going to destroy our country.”

But CNN’s supposedly objective correspondents and anchors have showcased a similar hostility to the Tea Party, attacking them as racist, extremist, pawns of Fox News, or using the vulgar “tea-bagging” nickname favored by left-wing activists to disparage the group. A few of the choicer examples from the MRC’s archive (including video):

The hypocrisy of liberal media members knows no bounds - even on Thanksgiving.

On Thursday, CNN contributor Paul Begala wrote a piece for the Huffington Post extolling the "quintessentially liberal virtue" of generosity despite conservatives giving far more to charity:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

"And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."  -- candidate Barack Obama, remarks at fundraiser, April, 2008

Discussing with Andrea Mitchell today the kerfuffle over Pres. Obama's Christianity, Chuck Todd hearkened back to PBO's infamous bitter-clinger line. Obama offered his pronouncement at a private, hoity-toity fundraiser in San Francisco—and Todd claimed Obama didn't mean to demean by it.  

According to Todd [quoting Paul Begala], Obama is his mother's son, and like the anthropologist she was, he was simply offering an anthropological analysis of the plight of those poor rural Pennsylvanians.

CNN.com's Kristi Keck filed a story on Friday reporting the Republican National Committee started a website mocking President Obama's series of vacations and other actions during the BP oil spill. The headline was "Obama vacation brings rest, relaxation and rebuke." The story's pull quote came from Democratic partisan and CNN regular Paul Begala, who eventually said something incredibly false about his own consistency on the president-bashing:

Paul Begala, a CNN contributor and former adviser to President Clinton, said that vacationing or not, "The president is the president wherever he is.

"I thought it was silly when people attacked Bush for going on vacation, so I'll be consistent and say it's silly when people attack President Obama for going on vacation," he said.

"The Democratic Party is moving faster and more aggressively than in previous election years to dig up unflattering details about Republican challengers. In House races from New Jersey to Ohio to California, Democratic operatives are seizing on evidence of GOP candidates' unpaid income taxes, property tax breaks and ties to financial firms that received taxpayer bailout money."

So began a Washington Post article published Wednesday with the provocative title, "Democrats Digging Harder Than Ever for Dirt on Republicans."

As one reads Philip Rucker's piece, you can almost feel the entire Post staff wishing for Democrats to produce a "macaca" moment that just might save them from a devastating defeat in the upcoming midterm elections (h/t Glenn Reynolds):

CNN contributor and Democrat extraordinaire Paul Begala's Bush Derangement Syndrome got the better of him during a panel discussion on Tuesday's AC360 (as Mary Matalin correctly pointed out later in the segment) when he compared Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal's lie about serving in Vietnam to Condoleezza Rice's 2004 gaffe where she called former President Bush "my husband" [audio available here].

Thirty-one minutes into the 10 pm Eastern hour, anchor Anderson Cooper asked Begala about Blumenthal's statement earlier on Tuesday where he claimed he "misspoke" his false claim about serving during the Vietnam War: "I think only politicians use that word 'misspoke.' Other people call it a lie or just a mistake. But he says he accepts responsibility for misspeaking. What do you make of that?"

The CNN political contributor's answer started out in a reasonable manner, but soon descended into the bizarre, to use his own word. Cooper even expressed his utter surprise that Begala had somehow fit the Bush administration into his answer (the rest of the panel erupted in laughter at Cooper's retort, and obviously at Begala's expense).

There's really little opportunity for the spirit of bipartisanship to exist when you have a part-time operative for the Obama administration/cable network political commentator throwing bombs about the GOP for not catering to the Obama administration's wishes on health care reform.

CNN political commentator and Democratic strategist Paul Begala bashed the opposition on Fox Business Channel's Feb. 10 broadcast of the "Imus in the Morning" program. He claimed the problem wasn't stubborn congressional Democrats wheeling and dealing behind closed doors on health care reform legislation but Republicans wanting to be obstructionists.

"Well, it is kind of preposterous," Begala said. "The Republicans bit is, ‘Well, we'll work on health care if you stop and end and scrap all the progress we've made over the course of a year.' Well no, actually. The health care bill already has 213 Republican-sponsored amendments - 213. And for that they got zero Republican votes. I guess they got one in the House, David [sic - Joseph] Cao."

CNN analyst Paul Begala sure likes creating what liberals call a "climate of violence." A week after insisting Barack Obama should deck Scott Brown on the basketball court – "throw him an elbow under the hoop" – he appeared on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report and joked about how Obama’s "going to clock John Boehner right in the face."

In addition to that Republican-punching vision, Begala strangely insisted that Taco Bell workers speak Spanish in talking about bipartisanship: "I say gracias to the guy at Taco Bell. That doesn't make me bilingual."

Even more strangely, Begala insisted Obama hasn’t been blaming the Republicans for the faltering economy: "The Republican economic philosophy ruined this country and this poor president inherited it and is trying to fix it."

When Colbert asked what the Democrats were going to do next, Begala offered his familiar formula of always offend, never defend:

During CNN’s post-State of Union coverage on Wednesday night, three  liberal commentators- Paul Begala, James Carville, and Roland Martin- put up an energetic defense of President Obama’s rebuke of the Supreme Court during the address. Begala and Carville took issue with Republican panelist Alex Castellanos’s reproof of the President, while Martin rebuked Justice Samuel Alito’s reaction.

Anchor Wolf Blitzer played a clip of the relevant portion of the President’s speech, where Mr. Obama condemned the Court for its recent decision on campaign finance regulations, and highlighted how Justice Alito shook his head and mouthed “not true” in response. Blitzer then turned to the panel for its take on the moment. His fellow anchor Campbell Brown, who was moderating the panel, first questioned Castellanos on Alito’s reaction: “Was that appropriate, Alex Castellanos, to have that kind of reaction from Alito when he said that?”

CNN analyst Paul Begala stuck to his Democrat guns, or elbows on Tuesday night's Anderson  Cooper 360. He urged Obama to keep pushing a liberal agenda and challenge Scott Brown: "Let's see if the president can throw him an elbow under the hoop." Brown made a pledge to get along and work together, and Begala said lay him out:

BEGALA: The one thing I might counsel them, though, if I was still working there, would be, you know, you show your character in defeat sometimes a lot more than you do in victory. And this is a moment, I think, perhaps the president can show his character. Does he really believe in this stuff, or does he just sort of folds his tent and go home? Watching him in the campaign, I think there's a lot more steel in that spine than perhaps Mr. Obama's critics think.

I saw senator-elect Brown saying he wants to play basketball with the president. The first thing I thought of it, yes, good, and let's see if the president can throw him an elbow under the hoop. Barack Obama is going to have to shift into a much more tough-minded fighting mode there as a populist mode. If he wants to sort of answer this very strident [Brown] speech we saw...

On Friday’s Situation Room, CNN forwarded an idea proposed by The New Republic’s Peter Beinart- that Democratic losses in the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey this year would result in the reelection of President Obama in 2012. An on-screen graphic during a discussion of Beinart’s hypothesis read, “If The Dems Lose Next Week: How it might help them in the long run.”

Anchor Wolf Blitzer read the New Republic contributor’s idea during a “Strategy Session” panel discussion with Republican Mary Matalin and Democrat Paul Begala 53 minutes into the 4 pm Eastern hour: “Peter Beinart, writing in The Daily Beast, says...it might be good for the Democrats if the Republicans win both Virginia and New Jersey, the governors’ races next Tuesday. ‘Let’s imagine,’ he writes, ‘that Democrats lose next week because the GOP’s conservative base flocks to the polls while liberals stay home. For Obama, that wouldn’t be so terrible. The more confident right-wing Republicans become, the more likely they will nominate a Palin-like zealot in 2012.’”

Democratic strategist Paul Begala can be relied upon to use the “drug card” against Rush Limbaugh whenever the talk radio host is brought up, and he was true to form on Tuesday’s Situation Room. When anchor Wolf Blitzer asked what it would mean if Limbaugh bought the St. Louis Rams, Begala snarked, “Just don’t put him in charge of the team’s drug policy....Don’t give him access to that medicine cabinet” [ audio clip from the segment is available here].

Blitzer brought up Limbaugh just after the bottom of the 6 pm Eastern hour during in a panel discussion with Begala, Republican strategist Ed Rollins, and CNN personalities Gloria Borger, Joe Johns, and Jessica Yellin. The anchor asked Johns, “Rush Limbaugh- he’s thinking about buying, or at least, participating in a group that’s buys the St. Louis Rams in the NFL....What, if anything, would that mean for the St. Louis Rams?” Johns replied, “Probably very little....you know, [if] you’ve got a good football team in a place...like St. Louis, people are going to watch. And so what if Rush Limbaugh is the owner” [see video from the segment below the jump].

According to the mainstream media, carrying a gun to a protest is just plain crazy, even if perfectly legal. What’s more, it’s indicative of the toxic, hate-filled atmosphere filling conservative protests of President Obama and his plans for health care reform.

“Hardball” host Chris Matthews and his daytime colleagues at MSNBC, for example, have their used air time to marvel at what would possess an average American citizen to go to a rally near where President Obama is speaking with a gun.

But the media reaction was markedly different nine years ago when a group of Black Panthers marched on the Texas Republican Party’s state convention on June 2000 brandishing AK-47s. Indeed, that incident itself was chalked up as then-Gov. Bush’s fault by none other than then-MSNBC "Equal Time" co-host Paul Begala.

Three of CNN’s political analysts- Jeffrey Toobin, David Gergen, and Gloria Borger- all gave President Obama B’s or B-pluses on the economy and overall job performance during the network’s special “The National Report Card: The Second 100 Days” on Thursday. These grades from these “non-partisan” analysts lined-up with the A’s and B’s that Democrats Paul Begala and Donna Brazile gave the president.

CNN conducted a non-scientific poll by phone and on the Internet of how the American people graded the President mainly on several issues, and others such as Hillary Clinton, Vice President Biden, and the news media in general at the 200-day mark of Obama’s presidency. As Wolf Blitzer and his so-called Best Political Team on Television presented the polling results, anchor Campbell Brown polled the “front panel” of Toobin, Gergen, and Borger, as well as the “back panel” of Begala and Brazile, and Republicans Alex Castellanos and Bill Bennett, for their personal grades of the subject in question. All of the participants held up placards with their grade, and explained how they came to that conclusion.

Just after the beginning of the 8 pm Eastern hour, Brown turned to the CNN analysts’ panel for their grade on President Obama’s handling of the economy. Senior legal analyst Toobin unsurprisingly replied, “I’m giving him a B. You know- he’s off to a decent start. He got a stimulus package planned. It passed. It seems like it’s having some impact, but the economy stinks and he’s the president and the buck stops there.”

MSNBC anchor and Keith Olbermann wannabe David Shuster is so beside himself with glee over Gov. Sarah Palin's resignation that he's eager to let the whole world -- or at least some 18,000+ followers on Twitter -- know about it 140 characters at a time. In the process Shuster spewed ad hominem attacks on Palin backers on Twitter and endorsed as a knee-slapper a July 3 slam of Palin penned by veteran Democratic hack Paul Begala.

Earlier Sunday evening the regular substitute host for "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" snickered over Palin's choice of legal counsel and his "intellectual vapidity." Those comments came on the heels of Shuster lambasting Palin's defenders, including columnist Bill Kristol, as intellectually immature juveniles (tweets are in reverse chronological order):

Still laughing over palin lawyer thomas von flein. Now I'm beginning to feel sorry for palin.

Speaking of intellectual vapidity, check out the 4 page letter from palin lawyer. Sheesh

[...]

@laurapocketdem. Good point. I I owe an apology to all middle schoolers. I'm sorry for comparing you to some palin defenders. :)

If Sarah Palin thought resigning as Alaska's governor would end the media attacks upon her and her family, she badly underestimated the power of Palin Derangement Syndrome.

Take for example Paul Begala's demented Huffington Post offering Friday in which he referred to the former Vice Presidential candidate as "the bull goose loony of the GOP."

Sadly, that was one of his kinder descriptions:

CNN’s Anderson Cooper pushed down hard on the totalitarian analogies in a Monday night segment on Bush "torture" policy, comparing our handling of terrorist interrogations to the Nazis (stress positions) and the Khmer Rouge (waterboarding). In a debate with former Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer, Paul Begala brought his furrowed eyebrows and moral outrage to the set:

Our country executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded American POWs. We executed them for the same crime that we are now committing ourselves. How do you defend that?

Over at The Corner on National Review, Mark Hemingway suggested Begala was mangling the historical facts:

What Begala said isn't true. Begala appears to be referencing Yukio Asano, a Japanese soldier convicted of war crimes. His case was popularized — in the context of waterboarding — by Ted Kennedy. See this Washington Post article from 2006:

On Friday’s Hannity show on FNC, host Sean Hannity played an audio clip of liberal CNN contributor Paul Begala as he was interviewed on the April 15 Imus in the Morning, in which Begala engaged in name-calling against Tax Day Tea Party participants: "Why are they out there whining with this Tea Party thing? Just a bunch of wimpy, whiny, weasels who don't love their country and don't want to support – there are guys at Walter Reed who gave their legs for my country, and they're whining because they have to write a check?" He went on to single out FNC’s Hannity and Neil Cavuto before Imus stepped in to defend them. Begala: "Mr. Cavuto, Mr. Hannity, all the rest of those guys, they have representation, they just lost an election – that's not tyranny, that's democracy." After Imus defended Cavuto and Hannity, and called Hannity a patriot, Begala shot back: "Then tell him to pay his taxes and support our country and stop whining about it."

After playing the clip, Hannity held a discussion with FNC’s Kimberly Guilfoyle and conservative columnist S.E. Cupp. Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Friday, April 17, Hannity show on FNC:

Spreading the WordMedia Research Center Founder and President and NewsBusters.org Publisher Brent Bozell issued the following statement on the meteoric rise in the ratings Rush Limbaugh has enjoyed since the inception of the Obama White House and the Democrats' all-out coordinated attack against him.

As announced yesterday, audience numbers surged for Rush-carrying stations across the country, including in several of the nation's largest markets like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston.  Since the orchestrated campaign continued into March, ratings could reach even greater heights for this month.

Bozell:

In January, Politico's John F. Harris exposed a liberal cabal involving telephone calls between White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, ABC's George Stephanopoulos, and CNN's Paul Begala and James Carville.

Since then, Americans on both sides of the aisle have wondered just how far-reaching the political influence of these four is on the mainstream media.

More importantly, just how much is the Obama administration, via its press contacts that worked in the White House before, involved in controlling the message being disseminated?

Consider the following sequence of events involving Stephanopoulos that began with a March 13 press release by the Democratic National Committee: