S.E. Cupp

MSNBC’s S.E. Cupp is used to being the only conservative on a show. Every day she co-hosts The Cycle where she spars with her three ultra-liberal co-hosts, so her appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher on May 18 was nothing new for Ms. Cupp.

Appearing on Friday night, S.E. confronted ultra-liberal host Bill Maher and his two liberal guests, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore and Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times over her objection to a national gun registry, which she summed up as simply a means to “be able to track me.” [See video afer jump.]

Bill Maher on Friday once again exposed himself as a total hypocrite.

Minutes after telling his HBO Real Time panel "the Second Amendment is bulls--t," he admitted having two firearms in his house - "one upstairs and one down" - claiming, "As long as we live in the gun country, I ain’t giving up my gun" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Ever since MSNBC finally chose to cover the murder trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, the majority of MSNBC hosts have used the case as a disgusting opportunity to slam conservatives who want to regulate abortion clinics. Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough was the first MSNBCer to actually mention the case, expressing disgust and outrage over the abortionist's practices.

Today, which marks the 6th day since the jury entered deliberations, the network’s only other conservative, S.E. Cupp, finally used her daily platform to express similar outrage over the case involving Gosnell.  [See video after jump. MP3 audio here.] 

The recent murders of local prosecutors in a north Texas county -- possibly at the hands of white supremacists -- was the news hook for MSNBC's The Cycle to bring  Heidi Beirich of the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) on to the April 2 program. In introducing the guest and justifying her expertise, co-host Ari Melber merely described the SPLC as "a group that documents that state of hate groups in America."  [video follows page break; MP3 audio here]

It fell to token conservative co-host S.E. Cupp to remind viewers that SPLC leans to the left and has been criticized by conservatives for "smearing religious and far-right groups and ignoring far-left hate groups." "Shouldn't people be aware of your ideological biases before they take seriously [SPLC's] claims of who they should be afraid of?" Cupp argued. A bemused  Beirich insisted she had to "dispute the notion of the question on its premise," adding that:

Updated | Ever since becoming a full-time employee of MSNBC, conservative columnist and pundit S.E. Cupp has seemed to take it upon herself to rebuke the conservative movement from time to time on air, for which, of course, she is rewarded with applause by her liberal colleagues. 

Earlier this week on her program The Cycle, Cupp said that she will no longer speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) due to their policy refusing gay groups GOProud and Log Cabin Republicans from sponsoring the conservative gathering. Cupp had earlier accepted a speaking invitation (see screencapture below page break) for the 2013 event, and Cupp had no such objection last year, when she both spoke at and held a book signing at the conference.  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]

Ten years ago,  then-Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) held together a Democratic filibuster of President Bush's nomination of Miguel Estrada to the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Tom Curry of NBCNews.com notes that Republicans tried to end debate and proceed to an up-or-down vote seven times before eventually giving up. Frustrated with Daschle's obstructionism, President Bush called for filibuster reform, which Daschle dismissed out of hand, insisting,"The Senate is always going to be the Senate."

Fast forward to February 19, 2013. Appearing on MSNBC's The Cycle in part to promote his new book about the U.S. Senate, co-host Krystal Ball dutifully read back to Daschle a line from his new tome about the filibuster being abused. At no point, however, did Ball or anyone else on the panel, including token conservative S.E. Cupp, point out the Center for American Progress fellow’s hypocrisy.

To give you an idea of how much you have to be in the tank for President Obama in order to be the typical host on an MSNBC program, on Tuesday, Krystal Ball and Toure Neblett - two far, far-left commentators! - actually came out in support of the just-released Justice Department memo that made the legal case for drone strikes against Americans.

Be sure to strap yourselves in tightly before you enter the bumpy ride in this bizarre parallel universe (video follows with transcript and commentary):

MSNBC’s Toure has reached a new low in his anti-gun crusade. Speaking on Thursday’s The Cycle, the co-host disgustingly said that the National Rifle Association would "want" shootings like the Newtown, Connecticut massacre of schoolchildren to happen for their benefit.

Toure’s perverse logic is that increased gun sales and NRA membership following the Newtown school shooting aids the gun organization: [Video after the jump; MP3 audio here.]

Barbara Walters is known for asking ridiculous questions during her famous interviews, but this time it appears she has gone too far, annoying even the liberal co-hosts of MSNBC’s The Cycle.

The day after Barbara Walters’ annual Most Fascinating People Special Wednesday night, the cast of The Cycle, most notably co-host Toure, savaged Ms. Walters for her “embarrassing, dereliction of duty” interviews with Hillary Clinton and Chris Christie.  [See video below page break.  MP3 audio here.]

How can someone who garnered nearly 60 million votes in a recent presidential election not be considered the least bit influential? As inexplicable as it sounds, that's what GQ Magazine declared when it selected Mitt Romney to headline its annual list of the 25 most uninspiring and insignificant people of the year. According to the author however, they were ranked in no particular order, "because all zeros are created equal."

Seeing a perfect opportunity to have a little fun at the expense of others, the hosts of MSNBC's The Cycle compiled their own list on Thursday. Token conservative S.E. Cupp appeared to have taken the assignment literally with a clip that introduced the world to a mild-mannered man from Indiana. Krystal Ball and Touré Neblett followed, and having some inkling of where their heads were at -- Cupp pleaded with them not to pick her. Instead they chose Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh respectively, gloating about how wrong they both were about Romney's legitimate chance to emerge victorious. [video below the page break]

Nuns on the Bus tour leader Sister Simone Campbell appeared on MSNBC's The Cycle on Thursday afternoon to discuss her ministry, which predictably led to her left-wing agenda becoming the focal point of the conversation. The only host to take issue with her talking points was token conservative S.E. Cupp, who was armed with facts and figures that the good sister could not rebut except by adamantly insisting they were "really wrong." That's when it started getting a little tense. [ video below, MP3 audio here ]

For adman Donny Deutsch, there's really no difference between pushing a political party or a bag of potato chips: it's all about the branding.  S.E. Cupp, in contrast, is a conservative with bedrock principles.

Seated next to each other on today's Morning Joe set during a discussion on GOP strategy going forward, a blow-up was clearly in the cards.  And clash they did, with Cupp arguing that the GOP doesn't need to re-brand itself, but rather to "spend more time explaining why their policies work for everyone."  Deutsch, repeatedly trying to cut Cupp off, exclaimed that she "couldn't be more wrong" and that her anti-re-branding argument was "absurd." View the animated video after the jump.

A war broke out on the set of HBO’s Real Time Friday when MSNBC’s sole conservative commentator S.E. Cupp had the nerve to say that Barack Obama’s foreign policy was no different than former President George W. Bush’s.

In the midst of the shouting, actor Samuel L. Jackson said to Cupp, “You don’t want to f—k with Dick Cheney" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Stop the presses! Stop the presses!

On HBO's Real Time Friday, Democratic strategist James Carville - yes, I said Democratic strategist James Carville - scolded the Daily Beast's Andrew Sullivan for always blaming Republicans (video follows with transcript and commentary):

For the second time in less than two weeks, Andrew Sullivan's ignorance was revealed on national television.

Following George Will and PBS's Gwen Ifill on ABC's This Week last month, MSNBC's sole conservative commentator S.E. Cupp assisted Sullivan with looking like a total moron on HBO's Real Time Friday (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The liberal panelists of MSNBC's The Cycle did their level best to help University of Pennsylvania religion professor Anthea Butler defend her now infamous tweet that the filmmaker behind the "Innocence of Muslims" video trailer on YouTube should be throw in jail. Co-host Toure Neblett went so far as to denounce the Twitter "mob" that deluged Butler's Twitter account with critical tweets. Only conservative S.E. Cupp pushed back against Butler by insisting that the YouTube video was a fig leaf justification by Islamists for violence.

"We think of this [free speech] as like an absolute right, but in fact there are limits.... So in this global world where a video clip can get spread around like wildfire, is it in fact going too far, is that beyond our constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of speech?" co-host Krystal Ball asked Butler. [MP3 audio here]

The day before the Supreme Court ruled ObamaCare's individual mandate constitutional -- as a tax, not as an exercise of the commerce clause -- the mostly-liberal panel at the brand-new 3 p.m. program The Cycle explored the question of what, in the view of the panelists, that government should consider making Americans do against their will.

For her part, panelist Krystal Ball insisted that America should be more like Australia, which forces its citizens to vote in it federal elections or else to pay a fine. Unsurprisingly, Ball's fellow liberal panelists Toure Neblett, and Steve Kornacki were sympathetic to the proposal, with only conservative panelist S.E. Cupp denouncing it as antithetical to the notion of political liberty.

Alex Schriver, the Chairman of the College Republican National Committee, totally schooled MSNBC's new co-host Touré Neblett Tuesday on why young people in America aren't just Democrats.

Schriver did such a marvelous job that you have to wonder if MSNBC's new program The Cycle will consider inviting him back on (video follows with transcript and commentary):

MSNBC host Alex Wagner has made no secret of her disdain for the Second Amendment, telling Bill Maher last November that if it were up to her, she'd repeal the amendment which enshrines the right of Americans to keep and bear arms, saying the right to own firearms is not "in the grand scheme" of things as important as the rights to speech and assembly. Back in February, Wagner seized on a tragic school shooting to complain about the lack of new gun control legislation.

So it's no surprise that, when turning again to the topic of gun control and gun rights today, Wagner would stack the deck in favor of the former and dismiss concerns about the latter. Regarding legislation in New York State that would require "microstamping" of firearms, Wagner brought on Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence president Dan Gross, who insisted the legislation in question was "a simple case of right versus wrong" that should face no legitimate criticism from gun rights advocates.

Liberal historian and biographer Douglas Brinkley is out with a new book about the late Walter Cronkite and in its pages lie plenty of revelations that damage the late anchor's objective journalist "halo," according to media critic Howard Kurtz, who reviewed the book for the Daily Beast. Among other things, Brinkley wrote about how the allegedly Cronkite bugged a committee room at the 1952 Republican convention, how he literally begged liberal Sen. Robert Kennedy to jump into the 1968 presidential race, and how the avuncular family man figure had a penchant for partying at topless bars.

Yet on the May 31 edition of Now with Alex Wagner, neither Brinkley nor Wagner nor anyone else on the panel brought up any of those interesting revelations, focusing instead on such trivialities as how Cronkite, who got his start in the wire service UPI, perfected his on-air news-reading skills. [MP3 audio here; video follows page break] [Related: Read the MRC's Cronkite "Profile in Bias" here]

Comparing conservatives to Hitler is old-and-busted. The new hotness, if you ask Martin Bashir, is comparing them to Stalin.

A few months ago, you may recall, Bashir compared Rick Santorum to the long-dead Soviet dictator. Now it's the state of Florida, more specifically, the conservative Republican Rick Scott, who is getting the honors. "Why is the Sunshine State in the midst of a purge that even Josef Stalin would admire?" Bashir rhetorically asked on the way out to an ad break on today's program. The "purge," by the way, is one admitted by a Democratic official in Broward County, Florida, to be "very, very microscopic" in nature. [video follows page break]

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):

You "can't blame" President Barack Obama for high gas prices. "Desperate" Republicans are hoping for the scandal-free Obama to have a scandal. When a conservative woman denounces absurd gender politics it's simply "a ventriloquist act" for "patriarchal ideas."

Those were the gems which stumbled out of the mouths, respectively, of conservative columnist S.E. Cupp, Democratic strategist Krystal Ball, and Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson, all panelists on today's edition of the Martin Bashir program on MSNBC. The topic at hand was how Republicans were pressing the Obama administration over the Secret Service prostitution scandal.

On Thursday’s edition of her Now program, MSNBC host Alex Wagner and her colleague Lawrence O’Donnell along with The Nation’s Ari Melber took to the air to smear the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) on the subject of voter ID laws.  ALEC, a liberal blogger bogeyman, has become MSNBC’s new punching bag and the liberal guests took the opportunity to attack the organization from all sides.

In a discussion regarding the merits of showing an ID to vote, Wagner, an alumna of the liberal Center for American Progress, conspiratorially claimed that, “voter ID is cooked up by Republicans to disenfranchise minority voters.” In other words, it's the work of evil, racist Republicans!  [See video below.  MP3 audio here.]

With conservative friends like these, who needs liberals?

Okay, maybe that's a bit harsh, but token conservative S.E. Cupp on today's Now with Alex Wagner blurted out on air, unprompted, the sort of ignorant, bigoted view of conservative evangelicals that you'd expect from a liberal panelist.

Conservative author S.E. Cupp didn't take kindly to Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson calling Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum a zealot on CNN's Reliable Sources Sunday.

"Rick Santorum is not a zealot," scolded Cupp. "He happens to be a Christian and a conservative. That's it, end of story" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Feminist author Naomi Wolf insisted on today's Now with Alex Wagner that New Yorkers were not really all that inconvenienced by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

"Yesterday, commuters and small business owners couldn't get to work the Occupiers were blocking subway entrances, you [also] had the Brooklyn Bridge" pedestrian walkway crammed with Occupiers, conservative columnist S.E. Cupp complained in a panel segment on Occupy Wall Street's political objectives, if any.

"I didn't see any of that. There's no reporting about that, I follow the reporting very carefully," Wolf retorted (see video below page break).

On Thursday’s edition of The View on ABC, the panel discussed a suburban Pittsburgh restaurant – McDain’s Restaurant & Golf Center in Monroeville – creating a policy to ban children under six from the property. The owner claimed E-mailers have run 11 to 1 in favor of the new ban.

But Joy Behar took this story as an opportunity to pounce on those pro-lifers for only being pro-child until birth: “There seems to be a war against children going on. Except when they’re in utero! Then everyone seems to care!” Here’s how it unfolded:

Appearing on Martin Bashir's eponymous 3 p.m. program, conservative columnist S.E. Cupp took the MSNBC anchor to task for his and his network's most recent attacks on Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) regarding her husband's views on homosexual orientation being a choice that one can change through therapy, not a deterministically-imposed genetic trait.

When Cupp agreed that it was "valid to call it junk science" that one's sexuality can be changed by counseling and therapy, Bashir seized on Cupp's statement to insist that Michele Bachmann was held captive by junk science, thus calling into question her judgment.

Cupp protested that Michele Bachmann herself may not share her husband's views and that the media's fixation on the matter is part and parcel of an attack on religious Americans:

With apologies to King Solomon, as a dog returns to its vomit, so a biased MSNBC anchor repeats his tired talking points. [video follows page break]

On the June 14 edition of his eponymous program, conservative New York Daily News columnist S.E. Cupp hit Martin Bashir for marveling at Rep. Michele Bachmann's (R-Minn.) June 13 debate performance, given her history of gaffes.

At the time, Cupp reminded Bashir of President Obama's "corpseman" gaffe and two of Vice President Biden's gaffes. Today, Bashir had Cupp back on to discuss the 2012 Republican presidential primary race and again raised the issue of Bachmann's gaffes. Once again, Cupp defended Bachmann by noting that all politicians make gaffes on the campaign trail.