Ronald Reagan

Thanks for sharing, Rachel, and confirming what we already knew.

The oh-so bright light in MSNBC's nightly firmament could barely contain her revulsion after Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels cited a familiar metaphor for America, that of the shining city on a hill, while delivering the official Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address. (video after page break)

Alex Wagner made an eye-popping remark on her MSNBC program on Wednesday, as she hinted that she agreed with former Obama spokesman Bill Burton's assertion that Ronald Reagan would feel out of place in today's GOP. When Burton claimed that "Reagan wouldn't have a chance in this Republican primary right now," Wagner stunningly replied, "I think he'd be a Democrat probably" [audio available here; video below the jump].

The anchor, a former employee of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, also touted a quote from Thomas Mann of The Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of AEI, who claim in an upcoming book that the Republican Party has become "an insurgent outlier- ideologically extreme...scornful of compromise...and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

Joy Behar, on Wednesday's edition of The View, delivered a rave review for Barack Obama's State of the Union of Speech as she gushed that it was "equivalent to Ronald Reagan's 'Morning in America' speech" and added "Republicans can embrace him" now. Behar then went on to say the President's speech, that was devoted to the kind of class warfare talk The Gipper would have despised, should motivate the Republicans to "start cooperating" and "stop this gridlock because it's not patriotic!" (Video after the jump)

Tuning in Morning Joe today, I half expected to discover on the set some professional mourners imported from North Korea, keening and crying over the political demise of Jon Huntsman.

Huntsman had had the Morning Joe crowd from hello.  The overwhelming winner of the bien-pensant MSM primary was amazingly popular—except with actual Republican voters, who didn't dig his moderate positioning and a tone that some found . . . well, how do you say "supercilious" in Mandarin?  Taking today's cake was Joe Scarborough finding Huntsman's "moderate temperament" Reaganesque, and claiming that in rejecting Huntsman, Republicans have "turned their backs" on Ronald Reagan.  Video after the jump.

During Tuesday's live coverage of the New Hampshire Primary on MSNBC, at about 6:53 p.m., Chris Matthews asked guest Tom Ridge why it is that "crazy neocons" and Republican "chickenhawks" always want to "go to war with other people's children."

As he began the interview, Matthews listed several Republicans who have not served in the military and whose children have not served, and then posed: (Video below)

This week the Today show is celebrating 60 years of being on the air, and for over 20 of those years the MRC has been documenting the NBC morning show’s liberal agenda. From past anchors like Bryant Gumbel blaming “right wing” talk radio for the Oklahoma City bombing and  Katie Couric trashing Ronald Reagan as an “airhead,” up through current anchor Matt Lauer wondering how Barack Obama would “manage the expectations” of being called “The Messiah,”
MRC analysts have been documenting the worst the show has offered.

The following are 10 of the most obnoxiously liberal examples of Today show bias from the MRC’s archive; for even more bias from the Today show anchors please visit the Profile in Bias pages of Gumbel, Couric, Lauer, Meredith Vieira and Ann Curry. (Top 10 Video Countdown after the jump)

Even with recent "improvements" which are still weak when compared to other post-World War II recoveries and which, as shown yesterday (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), are less substantive than December's two major reported numbers (unemployment rate of 8.5% and seasonally adjusted job additions of 200,000) would indicate, it seems fairly likely that the nation's unemployment rate will be higher than it has been on the eve of any presidential election since World War II.

Thus, Paul Wiseman of the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, felt it necessary to show that what matters isn't the unemployment rate, but instead the rate's trend. In the process, he mischaracterized the state of the economy under Ronald Reagan in 1983 and 1984, ignoring the roaring economic growth which occurred during those two years, and gave only one sentence to a statistic -- number of jobs added or lost -- which has become as important as the jobless rate, if not moreso, in the intervening 28 years:

Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, New York magazine's John Heilemann - also an MSNBC analyst and formerly of The New Yorker - made a gay joke about GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum as he described the competitive election in Iowa. (Video below)

After host Stephen Colbert, playing the part of committed conservative wanting to pump up Santorum, asked of the Iowa results, "So, Santorum, this is a victory, right? He may have lost, but it's a victory," Heilemann took a shot at the former Pennsylvania Senator in his response:

In 1984, an Associated Press writer covering the Democratic primaries wrote that "In a presidential contest dominated by concerns over the economy, inflation, and unemployment, the Democratic candidates have been loath to acknowledge the extent to which Carter administration policies contributed to those problems. Democrats have also controlled Congress for most of the past three decades, which made it relatively easy to enact the policies Carter pursued."

Of course, that AP report really never happened. The establishment press never razzed Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, and the other 1984 Democratic presidential candidates about the ruinous Carter-Era inflation, 20%-plus interest rates, and high unemployment against which the Reagan administration was making significant progress in the early 1980s. But on Tuesday morning, Beth Fouhy at the Associated Press felt it necessary to wonder why this year's GOP primary candidates are rarely mentioning George W. Bush, even though the economy under Barack Obama is making relatively scant progress towards a genuine recovery and makes a much more appropriate target for criticism. Here was her comparable paragraph, plus the two which followed:

See-no-evil economic reporting during the Obama years has "somehow" missed a number of developments in the makeup of the American workforce which I believe would not have been missed (or deliberately overlooked, take your pick) if a Republican or conservative were in the White House. One of them relates to full-time employment.

Did you know that seasonally adjusted full-time employment in September 2011 was lower than it was when the recession officially ended in June 2009, and that this was the case for 26 of the first 27 post-recession months? What's more, the economy had over 8.7 million fewer full-time workers in November 2011 than it did when full-time employment peaked four years earlier in November 2007. Proof from the Bureau of Labor Statistics follows the jump.

When it comes to the MSM, it's hard to get more mainstream than Jon Meacham.  Former Newsweek editor. Current Random House editor.  Picked for a Pulitzer Prize.

So when someone of Meacham's genteelly liberal ilk unloads on Barack Obama in such stark terms, it's newsworthy.  On today's Morning Joe, Meacham flatly stated his belief that President Obama "doesn't particularly like people and politicians who don't like people are kind of in the wrong business."  Video and more after the jump.

The New York Times Sunday Review resembles the hard-left New York Review of Books more and more with every passing week. Formerly the Week in Review, the revamped Sunday Review is lighter on news analysis from liberal Times reporters and heavier on outside essays, often with a hard-left outlook. It’s put together by veteran Times man Andrew Rosenthal, who demonstrates his "alarm" about “right-wing” Republicans at his New York Times blog “The Loyal Opposition.” This week’s target: Ronald Reagan.

Yale professor Harold Bloom’s long essay, “Will This Election Be the Mormon Breakthrough?” was devoted mostly to attacking Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion. But he included plenty of insults against the former president.

Listening to liberal talk radio is sometimes like just listening to the world being turned upside down. Liberal hosts make claims that are demonstrably ridiculous, and expect listeners to lap it up.

Case in point: Thom Hartmann praised the Occupy Wall Street protesters for changing the media conversation. He claimed that ever since Reagan was elected, the media has forbidden any discussion of the maldistribution of wealth, as if the words "Decade of Greed" weren't a media favorite, as if the "three million homeless" weren't routinely on the lips of liberal media personalities:

The Los Angeles Times reports "Police are searching for a man who tried to knock down a Ronald Reagan statue Sunday morning. Newport Beach Police received a call about 5:30 a.m. Sunday of a vandalism in progress at Bonita Canyon Sports Park on Bonita Canyon Drive. A witness said a man in dark clothes tried to attach a chain to the base of the statue. The chain was connected to the back of his pickup and he appeared to be trying to pull the statue down."

On the Stephanie Miller radio show on Monday, Miller said this act of vandalism "is one of America's funniest liberal pranks." Yet everyone knows Miller the reflexive partisan would get the vapors if anyone tried to damage the "Little Barry Obama" statue in Indonesia.

PBS's Charlie Rose opened last night’s Bloomberg/Washington Post GOP presidential economic policy debate by noting the round table format was like a “kind of kitchen table where families for generations have come together to talk and solve their problems.”

But through much of the debate it sounded more like Thanksgiving dinner with your liberal aunt and uncle as panelist Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post hammered the candidates from the left and moderator Charlie Rose used a 27-year-old Reagan sound bite to push candidates to come out in favor of tax increases.

Wouldn't it have been wonderful if while Ronald Reagan was President the media gushed and fawned over him the way they do now?

On this weekend's syndicated "Chris Matthews Show," the host actually spent half the program discussing with his guests why Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry is no Reagan (video follows with transcript and commentary):

After last week’s Republican presidential debate at the Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, Calif., reporter Adam Nagourney took advantage of the spotlight to review on Tuesday both the Reagan and Nixon libraries, located some 80 miles apart on opposite sides of Los Angeles: “An Admiring Approach at the Reagan. History, Warts and All, at the Nixon.” His main concern: Not enough critical coverage and mentions of scandal at the Reagan library.

The result at the Reagan library is a decidedly modest accounting of the Iran-contra affair, the major scandal that hit the administration, which avoids laying blame on anyone. There is also a sympathetic accounting of the impact of Reagan’s economic policies that has drawn questions from Democrats and economic historians.

If Time magazine were really interested in what a conservative Reagan family member thinks of the GOP 2012 presidential field as it stands now in terms of living up to his father's political legacy, it could have easily asked conservative commentator Michael Reagan for his thoughts on last night's primary debate at the Reagan Presidential Library.

Instead, the magazine tapped liberal Reagan daughter Patti Davis who, predictably, concluded that none of the candidates, with the possible exception of left-leaning Jon Huntsman, fit the bill:

From "Looking for Ronald Reagan -- and Not Finding Him" (emphasis mine):

If there is a standard liberal line on Ronald Reagan today, it is this bizarre notion that Reagan is so far left of the current Republican contenders that they'd rip him to pieces if he were alive.

Today's case in point: Washington Post columnist/blogger Ezra Klein insists Reagan "would have been destroyed" on the stage last night, since he had such a deep pragmatic streak as president. Yes, that's the same president the media often portrayed during his two terms as an ultra-conservative nut. (Not so much Ezra Klein, who was born in 1984.)

MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Wednesday offered up bizarre, revisionist history, insisting that Ronald Reagan "wasn't a social conservative." In an attempt to denigrate the goals of the Tea Party movement, the Hardball host inaccurately asserted that the 40th president "accepted Roe V. Wade."

Matthews, who fancies himself a presidential historian, appeared on the Martin Bashir show and asserted that Reagan wouldn't be comfortable in the "church tent" of today's GOP. He spun, "Although [Reagan] would address the pro-life rallies every year in Washington, for example, he would do so through public address. He never showed up." Matthews added, "He accepted Roe V. Wade under the Constitution."

[See video below. MP3 audio here.]

Taking advantage of the east coast hurricane displacing all political news this weekend, a chance for me to catch up with something from July 4 when, as part of the Ronald Reagan Centennial celebrations, a ten-foot tall bronze statue of Reagan was unveiled in London.

Only CBS’s Early Show aired a full story on the event, and video of that is below, in which reporter Elizabeth Palmer concluded that in Britain he’ll be remembered “for a rare combination of skill, luck and courage that gave him a giant’s role in modern history.”

Substitute hosting on HLN's The Joy Behar Show, on Tuesday, CNN's Don Lemon prodded Jay Bakker, the son of televangelist Jim Bakker, to accuse Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann of exploiting fears of Christians as he claimed that the GOP presidential hopefuls were: "playing to a group of people who deal a lot with fear and using fear to control folks."

The dismissive Bakker then asserted: "I feel like they've kind of hijacked Christianity," and added that he thinks the Perrys and Bachmanns were advancing "fairy tales" that global warming doesn't exist and claimed they wanted to "ignore" science.

(video after the jump)

To borrow from a certain president's former preacher, the "chickens are coming home to roost" in Social Security's disability program. It's nearly bankrupt, and set to run out of cash by 2017.

In the Associated Press's writeup ("Social Security disability on verge of insolvency") of the situation occasioned by a congressional report repeating the obvious, Stephen Ohlemacher surprisingly and correctly retold a bit of the history which readers should find quite interesting, as it largely explains how the program got out of control (bold is mine):

Just as criticism builds over President Barack Obama’s plan to spend the next week-and-a-half on Martha’s Vineyard while the economy flounders, the CBS Evening News came to his defense, suggesting he’s been a workaholic compared to his Republican predecessors.

While “Obama has taken 61 days of vacation so far,” anchor Scott Pelley noted over a photo montage of those he cited, “at this point in their presidencies, George W. Bush had spent 180 days at his ranch, where staff often joined him for meetings, and Ronald Reagan 112 days at his ranch. Among recent Presidents, Bill Clinton took the least time off -- 28 days.”  

Liberals like Rachel Maddow and former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell often express their deep and abiding concern for the well-being of children. Well, most children anyway. Providing they aren't "hideous".

On her show last night, Maddow was talking about New York Times' columnist Paul Krugman suggesting that Americans should respond to our economic malaise as if threatened by invasion from outer space. Much the same idea has been expressed before, Maddow pointed out, citing an episode of the '60s TV show "The Outer Limits" and the graphic novel and movie "Watchmen" as precedents. (video after page break)

On Election Day 2010, then-CBS Early Show anchor Harry Smith posed a hypothetical question about newly-elected Republicans to Ann Coulter: “There’ll be a routine vote, for instance, to increase the debt ceiling and the Tea Party guys are going to say, ‘Over my dead body,’ and the government comes to a screeching halt. Then what happens?” The conservative author confidently predicted: “Well, the media will blame the Republicans.”

And that’s precisely what has occurred. A Media Research Center study of the Big Three network evening and morning programs finds that, when it came to assigning blame for lack of a debt ceiling resolution, ABC, CBS and NBC’s coverage has placed the overwhelming majority of the blame on Republicans’ doorstep.