Paul Ryan

There were serious fireworks on the set of ABC's This Week Sunday.

Mostly at odds were George W. Bush aide Mary Matalin and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman with the former eventually telling the latter, "You're hardly credible on calling somebody else a liar" (video follow with transcript and commentary):

Jay Leno again waded deeply into presidential politics on Tuesday evening.

Commenting on Vice President Joe Biden's "middle class has been buried" gaffe, the NBC Tonight Show host said during his opening monologue, "I’m sorry, which candidate is he campaigning for? I’m confused" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Andy Cohen plays a ridiculous game on Bravo's Watch What Happens Live called "Marry, Shag, or Kill" in which he gives three names to his guests, and they have to choose who they'd marry, shag, and kill.

On Current TV's Say Anything Monday, host Joy Behar played this game with Cohen with the subjects being conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, Republican presidential nominee Paul Ryan, and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary).

In an irony of ironies, a CNN roundtable on media bias featured a liberal figure of the institutional media, Chrystia Freeland, claiming that Paul Ryan has gotten "pretty fabulous treatment" at the hands of the media. Her statement came on Sunday's Reliable Sources.

"I think he's had pretty fabulous treatment in the press and maybe actually a lack of scrutiny of what he's actually saying," Freeland opined, pointing to the "image" of him as "superwonk." She ironically addressed media bias as a liberal member of the mainstream press. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

Calling them "Cheetos-eaters living in their mothers' basements," Joe Scarborough, angered by criticism by conservative bloggers of a segment on last week's Morning Joe, has told them to boycott the show.

Last week, Morning Joe ran a clip of the crowd chanting at a Romney campaign event.  Morning Joe superimposed a screen graphic indicating that the crowd had been chanting "Ryan!"  Romney was then seen instructing the crowd to instead chant "Romney-Ryan!"  Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski proceeded to rip Romney for what was depicted as an egocentric display. In fact, there is considerable controversy as to what the crowd was chanting, with various people reporting from the scene that the crowd had in fact been chanting "Romney," so that Romney's action was gentlemanly, not egocentric.  Listen and judge for yourself. On today's show, Scarborough ran a clip of the campaign event, but without the Morning Joe screen graphic that was at the heart of the controversy.  View the video after the jump.

MSNBC and Andrea Mitchell got caught in June selectively editing a video of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to make him look like an out of touch moron.

As the Blaze reported Thursday, Morning Joe aired a video this week that has aroused similar suspicion.

When he's not shamelessly touting his conservative bona fides, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough spends most of his time bashing Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

Apparently these attacks have become so well-known throughout the liberal media that CBS Late Show host David Letterman Thursday night played one for his audience in a brief segment he called "Joe Scarborough: Sweet Jesus" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Libtalker Ed Schultz and The Nation magazine's John Nichols could soon be receiving a flood of offers to buy swampland in Florida. Perhaps by then they will each be a bit more skeptical.

Both were among numerous liberals who yesterday took hold of a bogus story by the hook and swam for all it was worth. (audio clips after page break)

NewsBusters has been showcasing the most egregious bias the Media Research Center has uncovered over the years — four quotes for each of the 25 years of the MRC, 100 quotes total — all leading up to our big 25th Anniversary Gala tomorrow evening. (Click here for posts recounting the worst of 1988 through 2011.)

Today, the worst bias of 2012 (so far): Newsweek sees Barack Obama as “grotesquely underappreciated,” afflicted by critics who are simply “dumb;” Chief Justice John Roberts becomes a media hero by voting to save ObamaCare; and an ex-CNN correspondent charges Republicans are trying to take the country back “to the good old days of Jim Crow.” [Quotes and video below the jump.]

Saturday, Joel Pollak at Breitbart's Big Journalism observed that President Obama is having some trouble drawing big crowds these days, and that the national press is exaggerating the turnout at his events.

He specifically cited the situation this weekend where Politico and the Wall Street Journal claimed there were "18,000 people inside a 5,000-seat arena at an Obama event in Milwaukee on Saturday." I looked at the Associated Press's national site, and the AP did the same thing, while adding that the crowd with the made-up size was "the largest yet of Obama's reelection campaign." Really.

Stick a fork in Romney, he's done! The election's over! According to hard-left MSNBC contributors anyway. It's just a matter of time before Chris Matthews demands a prime slot on the president's inaugural ball dance card.

Speaking on Wednesday’s Morning Joe, Donny Deutsch ridiculously proclaimed the race over and asked regarding the first presidential debate, “What do you think's going to happen October 3rd that we haven't seen already?”  The segment focused on a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll which found President Obama with a 5-point lead in their poll. Of course, the most recent AP/Gallup poll has the race within 1 point, but that doesn't seem to faze Deutsch.  [See video below.  MP3 audio here.]

MSNBC contributor Michael Eric Dyson made a comment on the Martin Bashir show Monday that left the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart totally speechless.

Talking about Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's position on abortion and marriage, Dyson said, "He needs to speak to his fellow Republicans whose numbers ain’t so hot in that regard, and who watch more porn and go to more strip clubs than other people" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Has Maureen Dowd's documented hatred of Paul Ryan pushed her over the edge? The New York Times columnist is accused by several pundits of employing anti-Semitic tropes in her latest Sunday Review column, the charmingly titled "Neocons Slither Back," currently the #1 e-mailed Times story as of noon Monday. Meanwhile, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof harshly criticized Mitt Romney and accused Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of "interfering in American elections."

Paul Ryan has not sautéed in foreign policy in his years on Capitol Hill. The 42-year-old congressman is no Middle East savant; till now, his idea of a border dispute has more likely involved Wisconsin and Illinois.

....

Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor. The hawkish Romney adviser has been secunded to manage the running mate and graft a Manichaean worldview onto the foreign affairs neophyte.

While virtually everyone in the so-called mainstream press is hammering GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan regarding what he calls an “honest mistake” about his time while running in a marathon 22 years ago, only one major network has reported an embarrassing flub President Obama made over the weekend -- twice.

If you want to learn any aspect of the controversy involving the Wisconsin Republican, you don't have to look far. From Ryan's original claim that he finished a four-hour marathon in less than three hours to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's accusation that the Republican used “fictitious math” in the matter, you can find it in virtually every news organization across the country.

During any presidential campaign, wild accusations fly back and forth between the GOP and the Democratic Party, but the liberal media hit a new low last Wednesday when they made the ridiculous assertion that Republican Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan has been lying about the number of times he's hiked Colorado's mountainsides.

With the economy and jobless rate in the nation in terrible shape, the first attack on this unimportant subject came from James Fallows of the Atlantic magazine with an article entitled “Paul Ryan, Mountaineer.”

We really have entered an alternate reality.

On CBS's Face the Nation Sunday, substitute host Norah O'Donnell not only asked Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan about how he could have gotten his marathon time wrong from 22 years ago, she actually equated the error to Al Gore saying he invented the internet (video follows with transcript and commentary):

New York Times campaign reporter Trip Gabriel joined vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan and his brother Tobin on a plane above the Rocky Mountains – and devoted a full story to probing Ryan's claims on climbing them, in Friday's "For Ryan, Perks Of Joining Ticket Can Be Weighty."

Gabriel rode with the paper's trendy passion for partisan-slanted "fact-checking," but at an even more petty level. After last week's controversy over Ryan's marathon time, Gabriel portrayed Ryan as on the defensive over another silly atheletic-related controversy, this time over how many mountain summits he had climbed, which Gabriel linked to Ryan's debunked claim to have run a super-fast marathon.

The photo caption: "Paul D. Ryan with his brother Tobin on Wednesday over the Rockies, where they sorted out the facts behind a mountainous claim."

When CNN's Piers Morgan argued that President Obama needed time to fix the economy, Paul Ryan answered him on Wednesday that Obama slowed what should have been a quick recovery.

"You have to give President Obama a bit of time just to get things back on track," the liberal CNN host pushed. Ryan countered that "usually when we have a deep recession in America, we come bounding out of it with fast economic growth and quick job creation," before adding "We're limping out of this recession right now." [Video below the break. Audio here.]

MSNBC's Chris Matthews went on a rant early Wednesday morning about Republicans accusing President Obama of trying to bring European socialism to America.

Unfortunately, the aging Hardball host conveniently forgot that he basically said the same thing to Paul Ryan in 2010 (video follows with transcripts and commentary):

San Antonio mayor Julian Castro was quite a media hit at the Democratic National Convention Tuesday.

Given all the scrutiny presenters got for their addresses at last week's Republican National Convention, one has to wonder if the press will fact-check the following section of Castro's speech (photo courtesy MTC/Newscom):

Apparently the mainstream media have a conservative bias towards Congressman Paul Ryan.  Such is the ludicrous assertion held by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speaking on CBS This Morning following the first night of the Democratic National Convention. 

First, Schumer claimed that Ryan, “creates this halo for himself that he’s a budget reducer” then goes on to claim that, “the mainstream media, maybe not the two of you [Charlie Rose and Norah O’Donnell], but the mainstream media, not just the hard right, gave Ryan this halo. Undeserved.”  Lastly, Schumer argued that, “The halo came from the mainstream media who needed a hard right guy to say here’s the real compromiser.”  [See video below.  MP3 audio here.]   

Within minutes of Paul Ryan concluding his convention speech in Tampa, the media attacks were launched. Why, the man is loose with the facts! He only spews vitriol and nonsense!

DNC political director Patrick Gaspard quickly sent out a fundraising appeal: “Paul Ryan's speech to the Republican Convention tonight wasn't grounded in reality.” It was impossible to tell where the Democratic Party ended, and the “news” media began. 

"No one's ever going to nominate Joe Biden to be the chairman of MENSA --  he's not Albert Einstein," MSNBC political analyst John Heilemann told Chris Matthews on the Tuesday edition of Hardball. "But what he's always been a master of is applied intelligence," he added, remarking on the vice president's preparation for the October 11 debate with policy-wonky Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Heilemann enthused about Biden's role in 1987 in scuttling President Reagan's nomination of Judge Robert Bork, "supposedly one of the smartest guys in all of the history of conservatism, of conservative legal theory."

"There's not many debates Joe Biden lost in his career," the New York magazine writer added of the Delaware Democrat who "goes to school" by preparing heavily, whether its to take on Sarah Palin or Robert Bork. Completely omitted by Heilemann, of course, was the revelation during the 1988 presidential campaign of Biden's having plagiarized a speech by then-British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, which, of course sank his run for the presidency. [video embed follows page break]

While the Obama-loving media ignore or make excuses for the almost incessant gaffes by Joe Biden, they are carefully scrutinizing every word said by the Republican nominees for President and Vice President.

Doing its part Tuesday was CNN.com which moments ago actually published an article with the headline "Ryan Muddles Origin of Reagan's 'Are You Better Off' Line":

This wasn't at all what Ed Schultz was expecting.

On his radio show Aug. 30, Schultz asked listeners who live near the closed GM plant in Janesville, Wisc., to act as "fact checkers" and challenge claims made by Paul Ryan in his GOP convention speech about then-candidate Obama's visit to the plant in early 2008. (audio clips after page break)

In the past couple of weeks, a new media strategy has emerged to assist Barack Obama in his quest for reelection: say that every claim by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are lies.

MSNBC's Martin Bashir did his part Tuesday by actually calling the Republican vice presidential nominee "a compulsive liar" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

So much for budget and Medicare reform. On Saturday, New York Times congressional correspondent Jonathan Weisman sounded pretty confident that Paul Ryan's budget plan would sink Republican prospects in Congress in November, forwarding confident-sounding Democrats set to bash Ryan's proposals, even naming individual races, in "Ryan's Budget Proposal Is Pitting G.O.P. Troops Against Top of the Ticket." The text box: "A big deal for Romney-Ryan is shunned by the rank and file."