Rick Perry

Oscar-winning actor and filmmaker Clint Eastwood has come under some heat for appearing in a Chrysler commercial on Super Bowl Sunday that some feel was pro-Obama.

Eastwood spoke with Ron Mitchell, the producer of Fox's O'Reilly Factor, Monday to set the record straight:

It's only January and the vitriol being spewed at Republicans by the Obama-loving media is starting to crest.

On Tuesday, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen went after almost every high-profile right-leaning politician in the land in a piece that disgracefully ended "The GOP is brain-dead":

After Rick Perry ended his presidential bid on Thursday, the Associated Press's Chris Tomlinson opened his dispatch about the announcement thusly: "Gov. Rick Perry dropped out of the presidential race on Thursday, endorsed his old friend Newt Gingrich and returned home to Texas, where the failed White House candidate has three years left to serve as the chief executive."

Based on much of his prior reportage, Tomlinson appears have a particular animus towards the Texas Governor. But tagging GOP presidential candidates or their candidacies as "failed" is not an aberration at the AP, while the wire service's omission of such tags on wildly unsuccessful Democratic candidates pointedly betrays the presence of obvious bias.

Comedienne Wanda Sykes speculated Thursday that Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry had to drop out of the race because "he was one more debate away from saying the N-word." 

Appearing on NBC’s Tonight Show to bash all the GOP candidates, she also told the host that Newt Gingrich might have wanted an open marriage with his ex-wife because she said he had a "tiny penis" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

A South Carolina State Senator on Tuesday put MSNBC’s Martin Bashir in his rightful place.

As the host attacked Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry’s lack of knowledge about world events, Sen. Larry Grooms (R-S.C.) marvelously replied, “I think he’s got a better understanding than maybe you” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

ABC's George Stephanopoulos on Sunday proved once and for all what a joke he is.

Not only did the This Week host give twice the airtime to faux political candidate Stephen Colbert as Texas governor Rick Perry, he did so after the Comedy Central star called him "a political operative" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Joe Scarborough said it about Rick Perry, but it could perhaps have applied to other Republican presidential contenders who are going after Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital.

On Morning Joe today, discussing Perry's depiction of venture capitalists like Romney as "vultures," Scarborough said that the Texas governor: "sounds like a stoned NYU grad student in Zuccotti Park."  Video after the jump.

After suggesting that Republicans had done a better job of "enunciating" an anti-capitalist attack on Mitt Romney than "the Democrats have to date," NBC correspondent told fellow panelists on the January 11 Daily Rundown, "I hope the Democrats are furiously taking notes if this is the line of attack they plan to pursue against Mitt Romney."

Perhaps trying to evince a sense of fairness or balance, Guthrie then added (MP3 audio available here; video posted below page break):

Sitting through the Republican debate on Saturday night with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos was just painful, from beginning to end. Some of it was just political Ambien.  But when it was finally over, there was just one question. Who in the GOP in his/her right mind invites a historically shameless Democratic spin controller like Stephanopoulos to “moderate” a primary debate like this – ever?

The only thing that can be said in defense of that horrible decision was turning to NBC the next morning and seeing “moderator” David Gregory be even more slanted in his questioning. ABC slanted the ideological questions in their debate by a ratio of six questions from the left to each one from the right. The NBC ratio was eight to one.

Twenty-four years ago, Los Angeles Dodgers VP Al Campanis was forced to resign his position for saying on national TV that blacks lack "the necessities" to be baseball managers and executives.  

On today's Hardball, Chris Matthews was so enjoying himself mocking Rick Perry's intelligence, that he decided to use a slightly mangled version of the same line on the Texas governor. Video after the jump.

Nightline co-anchor Terry Moran on Tuesday huffed that Rick Perry's "controversial" ad, combined with a presidential campaign that could be seen as "denigrat[ing]" "non-Christians" and "gay veterans," might spell doom for the Republican candidate. [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

The program's other anchor, Cynthia McFadden, teased the segment by proclaiming, "Plus, God and country. Who would Jesus vote for? Rick Perry's on the campaign trail casting himself as the populist Christian candidate."

MSNBC's supposedly conservative host Joe Scarborough on Tuesday continued his months-long attack on the Republican presidential candidates.

After telling his Morning Joe viewers that he would consider voting for potential third party candidate Ron Paul if Newt Gingrich won the nomination, Scarborough said he could "in five minutes write a list of 200 Republican members of the House of Representatives" more qualified than "the presidential candidates that are running right now" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

All three morning shows on Monday hyped Mitt Romney's $10,000 wager from Saturday's Republican debate. "Good Morning America's" George Stephanopoulos wondered just how "damaging" Romney's "bad bet" would be.

Stephanopoulos, who previously gloated over whether his interview would "spell the end" of Herman Cain, offered a similar take, Monday. He teased, "How damaging was Mitt Romney's $10,000 bet at our ABC News debate. He's shrugging off all the critics calling him out of touch. But, will this memorable moment shake up the race one more time?"

After ABC's Republican presidential debate on Saturday night, several members of the ABC team spoke of Mitt Romney's attempt to make a bet with Rick Perry about whether Perry was correct in asserting that Romney had advocated Massachusetts-style Romneycare as a model for the nation, with predictions that the $10,000 bet comment would hurt Romney with voters.

After arguing that Perry appeared to be the one who was factually incorrect in the dispute with Romney, ABC's Jake Tapper went on to predict Romney would still be harmed by the exchange. Tapper:

ABC's Good Morning America and CBS's the The Early Show on Saturday, as well as Friday's World News on ABC, seized on GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry forgetting the name of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor as the Texas governor criticized President Obama's tendency to appoint activist judges. As he teased Saturday's The Early Show, CBS anchor Russ Mitchell even asked, "How long can his presidential candidacy survive?"

As CBS correspondent Jan Crawford appeared on the show, Mitchell posed to her:

The GOP presidential candidates, at the upcoming ABC News debate in Iowa, should brace themselves to be splattered with tough questions from the left from moderator George Stephanopoulos. The good news for them is that most should be well-prepared for the left-leaning sliders, as many have already been subjected to Stephanopoulos’s liberal questioning on Good Morning America. In 20 interview segments this year with the GOP candidates, totaling nearly two hours (110 minutes), an MRC review has documented Stephanopoulos has consistently pressed his guests from the left. Of questions with an ideological bent 75 percent (36) were from the left with just 25 percent (12) of them coming from the right.  

When current GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich showed up on the January 18 edition of Good Morning America, Stephanopoulos prodded the former Speaker of the House if he was prepared to put 129 million Americans at “risk” with his opposition to Obamacare. (video after the jump)

Washington Post "On Faith" editor and religious agnostic Sally Quinn took time yesterday morning to hack out a blog post offending people of faith entitled, "What will God whisper in Herman Cain's ear next?":

With the 2012 elections less than a year away, the liberal media are attacking President Obama's potential opponents on a number of fronts, but especially on religion. ABC, CBS and NBC have used religion in two ways, either painting the field of GOP primary challengers as a God Squad of religious zealots or playing up differences in their faith. Whether they're letting viewers know that "Rick Perry's gonna have to answer some questions about the people" he prays with, fretting that God "told Michele Bachmann," to enter politics, or devoting no less than 40 segments to the question of whether Mormonism is "a cult" or if "Mitt Romney is a Christian," the networks have repeatedly used faith against the GOP field.

Media preoccupation with the GOP candidates' faith is the exact opposite of how they covered (or didn't) candidate Obama's 20-year attendance at the church of a racist, anti-American pastor who subscribed to "black liberation theology," or Obama's half-Muslim heritage. The MRC's Culture and Media Institute studied network news reporting on the GOP candidates and religion from Jan. 1-Oct. 31, 2011, and compared it to coverage of the Democratic presidential primary candidates over the same period in 2007. The discrepancy, in both the amount and tone of the coverage, was striking. Network reporters, so disinterested in the beliefs of Obama and his rivals for the 2008 nomination, took every opportunity to inject religion into their coverage of the GOP field. (CMI's key findings after the jump)

To Alex Wagner, "the rhetoric around immigration in this country is as strident and as divisive as it has [ever] been." But immediately after saying that on the December 2 edition of Now with Alex Wagner, the MSNBC host's British-born colleague Martin Bashir went off the deep end, lumping Rick Perry and Herman Cain in with German neo-Nazis suspected in a string of immigrant murders (MP3 audio here; video update to be posted later):

The Washington Post selected Jennifer Rubin as their “Right Turn” blogger, which to many has seemed like the wrong title. It should be “Romney’s Turn.” But when the Post publishes her blogs in excerpted form in the newspaper, they’re making her even sharper in attacking the “hard right” of the Republican Party.

In Monday’s paper, Rubin lashed out at the New Hampshire Union Leader’s endorsement of Newt Gingrich by slamming the entire conservative media as “embarrassingly bad.” The Post's gleeful headline is "Conservative media blow another story." But any nuance she placed in this attack on her blog was edited out by the Posties. Check out how harsh Rubin sounds on the page:

Are there no limits to where leftwing media members will go to bash Republicans?

On Monday, the Huffington Post actually published a front page article with the headline, "Michele Bachmann Pours Water For Men At GOP Primary Forum In Iowa":

When Gov. Rick Perry attacked President Obama as an elitist, New York Times reporter Richard Oppel Jr. didn’t just quibble with or criticize the attacks as overboard, but banished them to the “realm of falsehood," in Friday's “Perry’s Latest Attacks Distort Obama’s Words and Past.”

As you've probably heard by now, Bill Maher got quite an unfriendly welcome from Elisabeth Hasselbeck on Tuesday's The View.

The best part that largely went overlooked was when the host of HBO's Real Time predictably disparaged the intelligence of Republicans only to be quickly mocked by the female foe to his left who countered, "You’re so brilliant. Wow, I actually feel smarter sitting next to you" (video follows with transcript and commentary):