Naomi Wolf on Monday accused former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin of being part of a "cabal" involving George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove.

The feminist author and political consultant made this accusation on CNN's "Larry King Live."

Fortunately, former Bush adviser Mary Matalin was there to contest Wolf's absurdities:

[T]his is why people think liberals are such fringies. I mean you -- you run around saying that she's such a dope, but you were all duped by the dope. That's what you've said about George Bush, too.

In the end, the paranoia on display, as well as the unchecked hatred for Palin, was nothing less than remarkable -- but Matalin was there to bring some sanity to the discussion (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Story Balloon):

"Saturday Night Live" in its recent installment took shots at the Fox News Channel for what it saw as an amazingly one-sided, anti-Obama take on Tuesday's election results.

The skit began with an off-screen announcer declaring, "You're watching Fox News, continuous coverage of the 2009 election -- end of an era."

On screen at that moment was a picture of President Obama above a graphic which read, "End Of An Era."

Actress Kristin Wiig, doing a marvelous impersonation of Greta Van Susteren, then hosted a discussion on the election results which included one-sided opinions from actors impersonating Glenn Beck, Brit Hume, Karl Rove, Shepard Smith, Joe Trippi, and Juan Williams.

The group was ecstatic over what happened in New Jersey and Virginia, but chose not to discuss Democrat Bill Owens victory in New York's 23rd Congressional district (video embedded below the fold h/t Story Balloon):

What would the current debate about the White House strategy to demonize Fox News be without Joy Behar's opinion on the subject?

Fortunatley, the comedienne and "View" co-host took the opportunity to raise this issue Thursday night with her guest conservative author Ann Coulter, and great fun was had by all including folks in the studio who couldn't hold back their laughter.

The fireworks began when Behar said, "[P]eople are p**sed off...because Fox lies a lot." Behar then marvelously accused Fox personalities Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity of playing loose with the facts just moments before she defended -- wait for it!!! -- Dan Rather.

The insanity on display led Coulter to deliciously quip about the media, "There`s more respect for Roman Polanski than for hosts on Fox News" (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, h/t Jeff Poor, file photo):

AP writer Douglass Daniel was enjoying the moderate Republican (and Obama Republican) response to conservatives on the Sunday talk shows. His story began:

Moderate Republicans to conservative Republicans: Turn down the volume — especially on Rush Limbaugh — and open your minds. The party's future might be at stake.

Such warnings about the GOP's right wing, along with finger wagging about a "shrill" and "judgmental" tone, marked the moderate response in the latest back-and-forth within the Republican Party.

Those words turned out to be former governor Tom Ridge’s on CNN’s State of the Union. (That's funny -- they were also Barack Obama's words to congressional Republicans.) Daniel also quoted Obamacan Colin Powell, Newt Gingrich, and Karl Rove, but led his story with the Ridge attack on Rush Limbaugh:

CNN anchor Rick Sanchez and Dallas Morning News political writer Wayne Slater agreed on Tuesday’s Newsroom program that former President George W. Bush appeared to be “controlled by a bunch of bullies,” or that he was “presiding over a reign of bullies, with [Dick] Cheney and [Donald] Rumsfeld and Karl Rove pushing a partisan agenda.” Later, as President Obama was getting ready to speak at a meeting with small business owners, Slater sought to correct the conservative critics of the administration’s economic policy: “You have the right wing pounding on him day after day for the...bail-outs...a liberal, a socialist -- and yet, here you have a guy who really is tracking a fairly moderate line.”

Sanchez first had the Dallas Morning News writer on just after the bottom half of the 3 pm Eastern hour of the CNN program to discuss a recent article in GQ magazine which alleged that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “held up military aid to New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina.” The CNN anchor first asked, “Why would Donald Rumsfeld not want to help the people of New Orleans in this situation, given that he had his finger on the military relief?”

For over two and a half months, MSNBC host David Shuster featured a segment called "Hypocrisy Watch" on his program "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" that overwhelmingly singled out conservatives and Republicans as hypocrites, while ignoring Democratic offenders. An analysis by the Media Research Center finds that of the 48 "Hypocrisy Watch" segments, 34 went after conservatives or Republicans. Only four (or just under nine percent) attacked liberals or Democrats. (Only two editions could be described as bipartisan. Another wasn't political. The remaining seven segments all hit business and corporate-related targets.)

Amazingly, despite the fact that Republicans are completely out of power in Washington, 20 (or 40 percent) of the "Hypocrisy Watch" designations were given to congressional Republicans, either individually or to the GOP minority in general. The daily feature began on January 14 and Shuster asserted on that day, "...We will focus on an organization or person who clearly seems to be doing something that makes the term appropriate." Liberal hypocrisies, such as President Barack Obama signing a $410 billion spending bill loaded with thousands of earmarks despite decrying them during the campaign, have gone unnoticed. More often, the targets are conservatives such as Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, Karl Rove or Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.

"1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" host David Shuster on Thursday intensified his obsession with former top Bush aide Karl Rove and made, for the fourth time, the political operative the subject of his "Hypocrisy Watch" segment. He also continued his habit of pointing out that Rove is now a paid contributor of Fox News. After noting that the ex-White House aide attacked Barack Obama in an op-ed for the "extremely conservative" Wall Street Journal, the MSNBC host attacked, "Karl, I appreciate that it may be difficult for you to wake up each day, given what you and your Bush administration colleagues did to this country." (Rove earned Shuster's ire for suggesting in the WSJ piece that Obama has been disingenuous in how he's argued for his economic policies. The MSNBC host mostly ignored the context of Rove's article.)

Shuster once was a serious, supposedly straight journalist who, from 2002 through 2008, reported for the "NBC Nightly News" and "Today," among other programs. However, since taking over hosting duties for "1600" in December, his tone has morphed into that of almost every other extremely liberal host on MSNBC. On March 6, he lashed out at Rove for criticizing the Obama administration over the Rush Limbaugh controversy. Placing Rove in the "Hypocrisy Watch," a segment supposedly designed to go after any hypocritical politician or public figure, Shuster derided, "Karl, you've spent your entire career putting politics ahead of everything else. When you now complain about the Obama White House playing politics with the GOP, your whining is hypocrisy and it's wrong."

"1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" host David Shuster continued to obsess over and taunt Karl Rove on Tuesday's program, even taking the fight to Twitter. Shuster, who has named Rove a hypocrite three times so far in his daily "Hypocrisy Watch" segment, appeared gleeful that "Bush's Brain finally did respond via Twitter." The political operative told Shuster, through the social networking site, simply to "wait until the book. You're in there."

Shuster retorted on his Twitter page by sarcastically instructing Rove, "Next time, try defending yourself 'like a man,' - mano y mano as I've repeatedly invited you to do." It's odd that Shuster would expect Rove to come on the MSNBC program, considering that he has heaped nothing but invective on the former Bush aide.

Karl Rove was invited on Tuesday's "Today" show to discuss Obama's stimulus plan and NBC's Matt Lauer pressed the former Bush senior adviser about the one-sidedness of the vote on the bill by the GOP as he pressed Rove: "219, if you add up the House and the Senate we have what, 219 Republicans. All but three of them voted against this plan...do those 216 Republicans run the risk of being on the outside looking in, if this starts to work?" Lauer also went on to cite Obama's senior adviser David Axelrod ridiculing any member of Bush administration for offering economic advice as Lauer doubted: "Do you have credibility on this subject... would you say that the eight years of the Bush administration were lax on regulation?"

However this prompted Rove to hit back, in the following exchange, as he noted Democrats like Barack Obama were the ones who stood in the way of the Bush administration regulating some of the main culprits behind the mortgage mess - Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

Here's the relative tempest in a teapot that happened on Thursday:

Former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe made an unusual request for his speech today at the National Press Club: he wanted it off the record.

..... Politico editor-in-chief John Harris said that after hearing of Plouffe’s request, and decision not to reverse course, he backed out from moderating the lunch-time event.

Harris said that as a news organization, he doesn't want Politico "being in the the business of sponsoring, or co-sponsoring, an off the record talk with a newsworthy person.”

Here's a much more relevant issue: How is David Plouffe (picture above is at Media Bistro) a "former" campaign manager?

Based on this e-mail I received on Friday, I'd say he's still in that role (bold is mine):

Maybe it's because the election is over. Or perhaps the fact that Bush is no longer President. It also might simply be because Miami Hurricane news editor, Chelsea Isaacs, hasn't been sufficiently indoctrinated yet.

Whatever the reason, her recent article about Karl Rove's visit to the University of Miami was surprisingly fair and quoted students who were quite impressed by the erstwhile Evil Genius.

The “campaign architect,” as he is commonly called, built a case against President Barack Obama’s order to close Guantanamo, an overseas CIA detention center where terrorists and other “enemy combatants” are held. Obama’s order could enable terrorists to be tried in U.S. courts, to be given undeserved rights afforded American citizens and could cause damaging long-term effects, Rove said.

“One year from now, Gitmo won’t be closed,” Rove said. “If it is, there will be an uproar in the U.S. about where to put these people.”

In addition to his regular pundit responsibilities at Fox News and sometime column in the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove has taken it upon himself to do the job of the MSM--reporting the news.

Yesterday, my colleague, Noel Sheppard, noted the lack of coverage of President George W. Bush's homecoming in Texas. Only Fox News was present to cover what was, in Sheppard's words (and I agree), "one of his finest speeches ever." Thanks to Fox News, we have documentary evidence of this speech.

Were it not for Karl Rove, we might not have any similar evidence of President Bush's hearty farewell at Andrews Air Force Base. From Greg Pallowitz at NRO's Media Blog, video after the jump.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow used the occasion of President George W. Bush's final address to suggest that he was to blame for the destruction of New Orleans as well as the felling of the World Trade Center.

In her Thursday program after the President's farewell to the nation, with a photograph of Bush in the right of the screen that included the disgusting caption "Goodbye, Good Riddance," Maddow continued with the attacks that have made MSNBC a journalistic disgrace for years.

At one point, she even scolded the President for not doing an exit interview with either her or Keith Olbermann (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

Rachel Maddow is on a mission -- to stop what she perceives as egregious revisionism when it comes to the war in Iraq. And if Maddow has to engage in the real thing to indulge her outrage, all while airbrushing away the ominous decade between the Persian Gulf war and 9/11, so be it.

The media's fave lefty mouthpiece of the moment has been in high dudgeon, her indignation initiated by Stephen Hayes of The Weekly Standard describing the so-called "Bush Legacy Project."

On her MSNBC show Dec. 3, Maddow showed a clip of Bush's interview with Charles Gibson of ABC News where Bush said "the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq." Many people "put their reputations on the line" that Saddam Hussein's suspected possession of WMD justified an invasion, Bush said, and "it wasn't just people in my administration." This is "not a do-over," Bush added, but "I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess."

After much mocking by Ellen Degeneres about Chris Matthews' dancing abilities on his last appearance on her syndicated show, the "Hardball" host chatted with Degeneres, on Thursday's show, about the election of Barack Obama and actually grabbed a shot glass to toast his win with Ellen (audio excerpt here):

ELLEN DEGENERES: Amazing! And you must be thrilled? I mean what, what a moment.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well I am thrilled!

DEGENERES: Yeah.

MATTHEWS, picking up shot glass: To Barack Obama!

DEGENERES, toasting: Yeah. To Barack Obama!

A little later in his interview segment, Matthews also took a different kind of shot, the verbal kind, against the outgoing administration:

Before Monday's House vote on the largest government bailout in American history, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.), in potentially one of the most poorly-timed displays of partisanship in recent memory, blamed President Bush and Republicans for the turmoil in the financial services industry (video embedded right).

Such ill-advised finger pointing seemed to surprise press members of all shapes and sizes as some prominent print media outlets including the Washington Post and the New York Times quickly published articles quoting Republicans who blamed the bill's failure on Pelosi's hyper-partisan speech.

On the television side, CNN aired Republican reaction to the Speaker's comments moments after the votes were counted (partial transcript and embedded video follow):

It certainly isn't surprising that Barack Obama and his surrogates are going to need to exaggerate his scant accomplishments in the Senate in order to create the appearance that he's actually qualified for the most important job in the world.

However, an impartial media should be at the ready to point out to viewers and readers whenever claims are made that clearly stretch the truth.

If press members had been listening closely to Joe Biden's speech in Denver Wednesday evening, as well as to what he has said since being tapped as Obama's running mate, they would have found several juicy misrepresentations.

A number of these were pointed out by former Bush advisor Karl Rove in an article published in Thursday's Weekly Standard (emphasis added, photo courtesy AP):

Not that it counts for much but who are the most influential political media figures? It's an interesting question, one that for the most part is hardly a provable assertion. How can one measure influence, after all?

You probably can't but you can at least measure how famous (or infamous) a pundit is. New York Magazine attempted to do just that by creating an index that looks at a given commentator's mentions in Google, blogs, newspapers/magazines, TV shows and then computes a "popularity score" based on the rankings for each category.

The top figure in the survey? Former Bush top aide Karl Rove with a score of 67.79. He's followed very closely by radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh with 67.35.

On Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS, host Bob Schieffer talked about John McCain’s latest campaign ads with Republican strategist Karl Rove and quoted previous guest Tim Kaine, the Democratic Governor of Virginia: "But what about John McCain? At this point, as Governor Kaine said, Obama's running positive ads and John McCain is running ads about...Paris Hilton and that sort of thing...What he called the same old Karl Rove ads...Can you get elected president that way?"

In response, Rove argued that Obama started the negative trend: "I would make the argument that part of the reason why Senator Obama is in the shape he is in today is because he's failed to run a positive campaign. He's run a negative campaign." Schieffer immediately brushed that charge aside: "What do you think John McCain ought to do -- I want to get back to my question, can you get elected when the thrust of your campaign seems to be comparing the other guy to sort of an empty suit, Paris Hilton-type celebrity? Doesn't it have to go beyond that?"

Now that Congress has recessed, and since the conventions aren’t for a couple of weeks, Thursday’s The Situation Room turned back to the "hot" issue of what many liberals are calling on congressional Democrats to do: arrest and lock-up Karl Rove for his failure to testify on the issue of the firing of U.S. attorneys in late 2006.

CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, as part of a report on this possible move by the Democrats, conducted a search for the supposed jail inside the U.S. Capitol. He also addressed the little-used power of the legislature to arrest and try government officials for contempt of Congress.

Acosta began by describing the liberals’ fantasy: "Just think, some on the Left say: Karl Rove and the Capitol slammer." During the segment, he interviewed George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley (who links to Daily Kos and ProgressiveDem.com on his personal website and is lead counsel for convicted terror financier Sami al-Arian) and Associate Senate Historian Don Ritchie for the segment. When asked about contempt of Congress charges, Turley quipped, "The defendant is brought forth by the Sergeant-of-Arms, and in the case of Mr. Rove, it shouldn't be difficult. He's a consultant of Fox News a block away from the House floor."