Brit Hume

After President Barack Obama finished his State of the Union address, on NBC Andrea Mitchell set to work to convince viewers of how he had discredited Mitt Romney’s campaign trail criticisms of him. As to how “this President apologizes for America,” she countered: “Any viewer watching this...would look at this speech and it would be very hard to say that he is apologizing for America. This was resoundingly positive and optimistic in every way.”

Mitchell soon saw such an “exquisite contrast” between Obama’s call for “a minimum tax of 30 percent” on millionaires on the very day Romney “finally did release his tax returns. And we saw that his effective rate was under 14 percent for 2010.”

Given his high unfavorable rating, Newt Gingrich “cannot win a national election,” MSNBC’s very liberal host Lawrence O’Donnell insisted early Saturday night when it became clear Gingrich would win the South Carolina primary, “it’s impossible.” O’Donnell’s assessment, however, is held beyond left-wingers animating MSNBC shows.  

Saturday night, Fox News veteran Brit Hume asserted: “Republicans in Congress will be terrified to run with this man for fear they will lose the House and the Senate.” Sunday morning on ABC, George Will imagined “people are waking up who are running for office as Republicans – from dog-catcher to Senate – and they’re saying, ‘good God, Newt Gingrich might be at top of this ticket.’”

 On this past weekend’s Fox News Sunday, panel member Mara Liasson - also of NPR - invoked the name of Winston Churchill as she recommended that House Democrats send off Nancy Pelosi "in a blaze of glory" after having "accomplished historic things," rather than keep her on as party leader in the House. Liasson:

Nancy Pelosi did two things for which she will go down in history. She was an incredibly effective majority leader when, and Speaker, there was an opposition President. She helped make the majority. And when she was in the majority, she was the hammer that got through President Obama’s agenda and sent it to the Senate. However, that is a completely different role than what she wants to do now. For which, I think she’s kind of like Winston Churchill. I mean, she accomplished historic things for the Democrats, and they should be sending her off in a blaze of glory and adjusting for this new regime.

Panel member Brit Hume took exception with Liasson connecting Churchill and Pelosi. After Hume argued that "the difference between her and Winston Churchill is that Winston Churchill was turned out after he led his country to a great victory," leading Liasson to respond that she agreed Pelosi "should be turned out," the exchange continued:

On Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume condemned NPR for its “howling double standard” in firing Juan Williams for expressing an opinion, a standard “manifestly not being applied to other NPR people.” He forwarded the theory that “in the culture of NPR, appearing on Fox is a sin” and “for an African-American man” to “be kind of a Bill Cosby liberal, not a down-the-line liberal, is a sin as well.”
 
Hume’s assessment came after host Chris Wallace read from a column in which Cokie Roberts denounced Glenn Beck as “worse than a clown. He’s more like a terrorist,” showed a clip of her disagreeing with a court ruling on partial birth abortion and ran a soundbite of Nina Totenberg, NPR’s legal correspondent, attacking a Supreme Court decision. Fortune magazine’s Nina Easton recalled how Daniel Schorr “did a biting, acerbic, liberal commentary regularly on NPR” where “he called the 2000 Supreme Court decision, that gave George Bush the right to take office as President, he described that as a ‘junta,’ as ‘a coup.’”

“So much to dislike about NPR, it's hard to know where to begin,” Bill Kristol later quipped.

Brit Hume on Sunday took Juan Williams to task over the Democrats adjourning Congress without voting on extending some or all of the Bush tax cuts.

As host Chris Wallace moved the panel segment of "Fox News Sunday" to last week's decision by legislators to head home to their states and/or districts in preparation for the upcoming elections, he asked Williams for his opinion.

Williams said that he had spoken with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.) on Friday, and she told him she had the votes to get an extension passed for all but the top wage earners.

This led Hume to ask, "Then why didn't she call the vote?"

And that's when the fun started (video follows with transcript and commentary): 

On Saturday’s Fox News Watch, as the panel discussed revelations that Attorney General Eric Holder and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano admitted to not having read the Arizona immigration law even as they criticized it publicly, FNC contributor Jim Pinkerton cited the Media Research Center, parent organization of NewsBusters, and passed on findings contained in the May 18 "Bozell Column," as he informed the panel that ABC, CBS and NBC had all ignored these embarrassing admissions by Obama administration cabinet members. Pinkerton:

And it was interesting, as Brent Bozell at the Media Research Center pointed out, not any of the big networks – ABC, CBS, or NBC – reported that Holder and Napolitano hadn't read it. And the major newspapers, the Post and Times, also didn't report it. By comparison, we could imagine what would have happened if a Democratic Congressman asked Alberto Gonzales, the former Attorney General under President Bush, if he hadn't read something. There would have been a typhoon of, "What a moron." And yet, stone silence from the mainstream media.

Panel member Rich Lowry of the National Review may also have picked up on a NewsBusters item when he recounted FNC veteran Brit Hume’s criticism of the inaccurate media coverage of the Arizona immigration law, and the mistake he admitted to making in initially believing the media misinformation. Lowry:

It’s getting wacky in the air of liberal talk radio about the BP oil spill. On the Randi Rhodes show on Monday, a female caller from Kentucky told Rhodes: “The only people who could basically benefit from all this death, and the cesspool-making down there are the oil companies. So I think they’re doing it deliberately, killing everything so that the only thing that will be worth anything down there is oil.”

Rhodes replied: “You know? That’s not bad.” She talked about a shopping mall going up in the Amazon rainforest, and added “That’s not so far off base, what you’re saying.” She then turned around and suggested Brit Hume was a “moron” for downplaying the aftermath of the oil spill on Fox News Sunday: 

Brit Hume is a moron; I mean, if you -- if you ever suspected that he was a pompous ass, and it was backed up by some wild intellect that he had, you know, I spent the weekend with lots of pompous ass -- assi [plural, like octopi] – right, and they do have the intellect to back it up. So that when you see somebody who's just a pompous ass for no apparent reason, it sort of sticks out now as somebody who's just a pompous ass for no good reason with nothing to back it up.

During Fox News Sunday's "Roundtable" segment, regular panel member Brit Hume chided the news media for spreading misinformation about the new law in Arizona aimed at enforcing federal immigration laws, as he charged that "It's turned out that a lot of the news stories simply flat had it wrong, and a lot of the critics of the bill itself have also got it wrong."

After recounting that the law requires "that there be a legitimate law enforcement incident, a stop, a detention, or arrest," and "reasonable suspicion," he concluded that "all the hysteria about it is grossly overdone, in my judgment."

So we have a health care reform entitlement now, along with various unfunded liabilities, courtesy of the federal government. The next question is - how are we going to pay for all of it?

Last week following the passage of health care legislation, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer predicted a value-added tax (or VAT) could be in the works, which is a consumption tax that is placed on a product whenever value is added at a stage of production and at final sale.

However, former Fox News "Special Report" anchor Brit Hume, now a senior political analyst for network, said there was a possibility the VAT could be pushed into law during a lame-duck session of Congress, if loss for the Democratic Party are steep enough to force them to relinquish their control following the 2008 cycle.

Not exactly going out on a limb, but Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume predicted President Barack Obama’s success in getting his health bill passed and signed will lead to “a wave of gushing coverage” for “the determination of this President to see his signature initiative through.” Hume, during the panel segment on Fox News Sunday:

The early political fallout will be, particularly in the media, there will be a wave of gushing coverage. We already saw some, it's already beginning about the tenacity and the determination of this President to see his signature initiative through. It will be said that this was an act of real leadership and he kept on persisting when all seemed lost and there will be a lot of that.

The media’ enthusiasm, however, will not match the public reaction, the ABC News and Fox News veteran forecast, continuing on the March 21 program:

It's certainly not business as usual in Washington, D.C., but that's probably not what the American people had in mind when they elected President Barack Obama to come to the White House and usher in a new era of change.

And this diversion from business as usual is something former Fox News "Special Report" anchor Brit Hume, now a senior political analyst for network, said he had never seen before. The veteran Washington, D.C. journalist said on the March 16 broadcast of FNC's "America Live" that with the potential of the House invoking the Slaughter Rule and the potential 51-vote reconciliation process in the Senate, the process was far from pure.

"I think the process is well tainted by now," Hume said. "This is a case where in the face of a level of resistance that I have never seen before, in the sense on a bill that the sponsors continue to push, I've never seen anything pushed this far for this long in the face of such resistance of this size. This is unprecedented."

My first instinct when one of my tipsters sent me a link containing a discussion between the astonishingly vile Janeane Garofalo and Rosie O'Donnell on the latter's radio program was to delete the e-mail message and pretend I had never received it.

I had just eaten lunch, and really didn't want to upset my stomach so early in the day, especially given how gorgeous the weather is here in Northern California following so many straight weeks of rain.

But curiosity finally got the best of me, and what I discovered was worse than I could possibly imagine.

From O'Donnell calling Rush Limbaugh a junkie to Garofalo claiming that everyone on Fox News is a liar, I really wish I had gone with my first instinct and ignored this travesty (video embedded below the fold with extremely rough partial transcript as a result of the shooting pains caused by the content, h/t Story Balloon):

Robert Reich must have nightmares about Fox News. Shoot, he must have triple locks on his doors and sleep under his bed out of fear that Roger Ailes will come and take him away.

In a Monday column at Salon.com ("Is the President Panicking?"), Reich excoriated President Obama's proposed discretionary spending "freeze" -- a "freeze" that NewsBuster Julia Seymour noted fails to offset the spending proposals Obama brought up in his State of the Union speech -- for "invok(ing) memories of (Bill) Clinton's shift to the right in 1994," especially because "it could doom the recovery."

That was absurd enough, but in the process of recounting his fevered view of 1990s history, Bill Clinton's former Secretary of Labor threw in this whopper, revealing that for Reich, as Buffalo Springfield told us so many years ago in their 1960s hit song "For What It's Worth," paranoia really does strike deep:

In December 1994, Bill Clinton proposed a so-called middle-class bill of rights including more tax credits for families with children, expanded retirement accounts, and tax-deductible college tuition. Clinton had lost his battle for healthcare reform. Even worse, by that time the Dems had lost the House and Senate. Washington was riding a huge anti-incumbent wave. Right-wing populists were the ascendancy, with Newt Gingrich and Fox News leading the charge. Bill Clinton thought it desperately important to assure Americans he was on their side.

There's one "little" problem:

In this edition of NewsBusters Notable Quotables comedy web show, NBC bids “good riddance” to Sarah Palin, MSNBC’s David Shuster is a defender of the faith, and ABC promotes their boy genius George Stephanopoulos. Enjoy!

To view current and past episodes in a larger screen format visit the NQ Show channel on the Media Research Center’s video sharing website Eyeblast.tv.  

 

Americans love to talk sports. Polite Americans don't talk religion. So when those two things meet, the news media has no idea what to make of it.

Unfortunately for journalists, sports and religion - Christianity in particular - seem to be publicly mingling more often these days. Some star athletes are more outspoken in their faith, while many others regularly find themselves in need of spiritual, if not legal, redemption.

Liberals in the media don't understand religion and religious people, so when they surface on the playing field, the resulting coverage veers wildly from awkwardly respectful to clueless to downright contemptuous.

Fox's Brit Hume caused a firestorm by suggesting on air that Tiger Woods could find "forgiveness and redemption" in Christianity, rather than the casual Buddhism the golfer has said he practices. Woods, whose marriage and career are in melt-down because of his serial infidelities, should "turn to the Christian faith, and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world," Hume said. And in doing so, the former anchorman committed several mortal sins in modern secular America.

The week-old story of Brit Hume's Christianity vs. Buddhism remarks is apparently still fodder for a good laugh, and comedienne Wanda Sykes attempted to squeeze out one more. The late-night talk show host arguably stepped over the line with a skit this week when she jokingly entertained the notion that Jesus was willing to give Tiger Woods crabs.

The Jan. 9 broadcast of Fox's "The Wanda Sykes Show" featured a sketch in which two actors playing Jesus and Buddha appeared as "guests" on the Fox News Channel show "The O'Reilly Factor" during which the former Fox News anchor expounded on his comments.

"This week, Brit Hume went on ‘The O'Reilly Factor' to talk about the statement he made that Tiger Woods should become a Christian," Sykes said. "And I'll say this about the interview - it was really fair and balanced."

Transcript below the fold

The first rule of dinner-table conversation is no hot talk about politics or religion. Apparently there’s a rule regarding the discussion of religion during political talk shows, too.

On "Fox News Sunday" on January 3, the panelists had advanced to that light part of the discussion where they focusing on movies and crime novelists. Venerated news man Brit Hume turned to sports, and predicted Tiger Woods would return to success as a golfer. But if he really wanted to recover as a person, Hume suggested, he should consider Christianity. Woods is a Buddhist, he said, but Christianity offered the forgiveness and redemption that could really make Woods a powerful role model for faith and recovery.

Ka-boom. Oh, what a reaction erupted.

Some in the secular elite acted like Hume had set the national house on fire and broken all the fine china. Some TV talk show hosts quite seriously compared Hume’s comments to those of "Islamic extremists" waging a "holy war."

It’s not very common for one Washington Post columnist to really slam another Post columnist. But former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson certainly brought the pain Friday to TV writer Tom Shales for his "spittle-flinging rage" of "secular fundamentalism" in Tuesday's paper against Brit Hume’s urging Tiger Woods to try Christianity. Gerson concluded:

In this controversy, we are presented with two models of discourse. Hume, in an angry sea of loss and tragedy -- his son's death in 1998 -- found a life preserver in faith. He offered that life preserver to another drowning man. Whatever your view of Hume's beliefs, he could have no motive other than concern for Woods himself.

The other model has come from critics such as Shales, in a spittle-flinging rage at the mention of religion in public, comparing Hume to "Mary Poppins on the joys of a tidy room, or Ron Popeil on the glories of some amazing potato peeler." Shales, of course, is engaged in proselytism of his own -- for a secular fundamentalism that trivializes and banishes all other faiths. He distributes the sacrament of the sneer.

Time TV writer James Poniewozik wrote on his blog Tuned In on Wednesday that he was impressed that Brit Hume wasn’t backing down on his Tiger Woods remarks, but he really wasn’t accepting Hume’s claim that talking about Jesus is much more controversial than talking about Buddha:

If you believe your religion is superior and want to stand by the argument, fine. But crying anti-Christian persecution when you're criticized for making that case on a news show? Get off the cross.

Did Hume literally suggest he was being crucified? No. Poniewozik was responding to an interview Hume granted to D.C. all-news radio station WTOP, in which he suggested "Jesus Christ" could be the two most controversial words in the English language (at the very end of the interview).

Who stole Bonnie Erbe’s chair? U.S. News & World Report writer John Aloysius Farrell (a longtime reporter for The Boston Globe) is the latest media liberal to rip Brit Hume for being "creepy" and saying his incredibly "stupid" piece about how Tiger Woods should try Christianity.

Like many secular progressives, Farrell thinks atheism is safer, more rational, like the Soviets in the Cold War. In his belief that his religion is true, Hume is much more like Islamic zealots who strap bombs to themselves, who we now fight in what he called the Long War:

The Cold War was fought against cruel Commie atheists who—we were warned by our leaders at the time—had no fear of God's wrath because they simply didn't believe in Him. But we survived because, it turned out, the faithless Russians and Red Chinese had no more of an appetite for nuclear incineration than we did.

In the end, the lack of a prospect for celestial paradise made the Communists, despite their weaponry, slightly less scary than our foes in the Long War, who are true believers.

Newsweek religion reporter Lisa Miller, no Bible-thumping fundamentalist she, doesn't understand why the heathen rage against Brit Hume. From her January 5 post at the magazine's The Gaggle blog:

I'm not at all sure why the liberal left is always so shocked that evangelical Christians want other people to become Christians. The outrage that followed Fox News anchor Brit Hume's  plea to Tiger Woods to find Jesus has been totally disproportionate to the statement itself. The usual suspects—MSNBC and The Huffington Post—and indeed the whole liberal left blogosphere leapt all over Hume for his arrogance and conservatism.

[...]

The word "evangelical" comes from the Greek word for gospel, or "good news." Evangelical Christians are those who want to spread the good news. They aren't pretending to believe in salvation through Jesus Christ. They actually do believe that it—and yours, and mine—comes through him. 

On Tuesday’s Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann twice claimed that FNC contributor and former anchor Brit Hume’s public recommendation that Tiger Woods convert to Christianity to help solve his personal problems amounted to trying to "threaten" Woods into conversion. Previewing a segment focusing on Hume’s Monday appearance on The O’Reilly Factor to clarify his words from Fox News Sunday, Olbermann teased the show: "Brit Hume and the attempt to threaten Tiger Woods into converting to Christianity. He does it again."

Olbermann also plugged the segment before a commercial break: "Brit Hume has tried to force Tiger Woods into becoming a Christian again. That in a moment."

The Countdown host introduced the segment, contending again that Hume had tried to "threaten" Woods into becoming a Christian: "Brit Hume of Fox News has not only not apologized for his bizarre on-air attempt to threaten Tiger Woods into converting to Christianity, he`s actually gone further."

Notably, in December 2005, Olbermann distorted the words of former FNC host John Gibson from Gibson's radio interview on the Janet Parshal Show and compared the program to "an Al-Qaeda show on Al-Jazeera talking about infidels."

If you're going to call out someone for hypocrisy, make sure you're not guilty of the same thing. Guest columnist Welton Gaddy, a pastor for preaching and worship at Northminster (Baptist) Church in Monroe, La. and MSNBC regular, apparently had no qualms with calling out former Fox News "Special Report" anchor Brit Hume in a Jan. 4 column, but is committing the same transgression.

Gaddy took issue with the Fox News senior political analyst's 39-second spiritual commentary on redemption for the recently disgraced Tiger Woods. And although Gaddy failed to mention that Hume publicly stepped out of his role as anchor/reporter in 2008, Gaddy revealed his disgust with the apparent preachy hypocrisy emanating from the "reporter" (emphasis added).

"The picture on the television screen and the audio of reporter Brit Hume's words struck me as contradictory," Gaddy wrote. "Just below the image of the reporter's face, the insignia 'Fox News' appeared in three different places. Yet, the content of Mr. Hume's comments was not that of a news reporter so much as that of a televangelist."

Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales grew increasingly nasty in a Tuesday column on Brit Hume’s attempt to suggest Tiger Woods accept Christianity. Shales demanded that Hume apologize. He insisted "the remark will probably rank, even only a few days into January, as one of the most ridiculous of the year." He ended by suggesting that when Hume said he wanted to retire before people said he was fading, "Hume ought to know that what people are saying right now is a whole lot worse than that he's fading."

Shales cracked: "Whom did he sound more like -- Mary Poppins on the joys of a tidy room, or Ron Popeil on the glories of some amazing potato peeler?" (This, from the man who’s shamelessly sold Barack Obama to readers as "every inch President Wonderful." Popeil, heal thyself.)

On Monday's Countdown show, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann slammed FNC's Brit Hume for advising Tiger Woods to convert to Christianity while appearing on yesterday's Fox News Sunday panel, where Hume has regularly appeared for years and contributed his opinions to the discussion in a way that differs from his manner of moderating discussions in a more neutral way when he used to host Special Report with Brit Hume. Although Olbermann later backed away from likening Hume to radical Muslims, during the show's opening teaser, Olbermann did make such a comparison: "An organization proselytizing, trying to force others to convert to its faith alone, you know, just like Islamic extremists."

At one point as the Countdown host plugged a segment in which he discussed Hume with author Dan Savage, the words "Hume's Holy War" were shown at the bottom of the screen as Olbermann spoke: "So Brit Hume tells Tiger Woods he can be forgiven, but only if he converts to Christianity. Fox has given up all pretense, hasn’t it?"

As Olbermann and Savage went on to make fun of Christianity, the MSNBC host at one point quipped: "'WWJDIHS,' which is: What would Jesus do if he strayed?" Savage brought up fringe religious figure Fred Phelps, who has become infamous for holding protests at the funerals of American soldiers, and lumped him in with Hume, Pat Robertson and Gary Bauer. Savage:

During the 3PM ET hour of live coverage on MSNBC, anchor David Shuster claimed that Fox News political analyst Brit Hume "denigrated Christianity" when suggesting that scandal-ridden golfer Tiger Woods convert to the faith.

Shuster made the comments while discussing the issue with MSNBC political analyst Pat Buchanan, asking: "Doesn’t it also denigrate Christianity when you do that on a Sunday political talk show? This isn’t church, this isn’t some sort of holy setting, this is a political talk show....Doesn’t that minimize the significance of Christianity, when you bring a discussion of Christianity into a conversation about politics?"

Buchanan replied: "He’s not denigrating Christianity....A lot of us feel that there ought to be more discussion of religion in politics and religious beliefs and what’s moral and right and wrong." Shuster pressed him: "And you don’t think this diminishes Christianity in any way?" Buchanan shot back: "What do you think, the religion’s dropped a peg or two now?" Shuster sarcastically responded: "I do think it diminishes the discussion of Christianity....This wasn’t the ‘700 Club,’ this wasn’t ‘Theocracy Today.’"

Tolerance is a virtue the Left loves to trumpet, except when the intolerable is set forward. In this instance, the intolerable is a gentle Christian evangelistic overture to a celebrity caught in sexual scandal.

Yesterday, Fox News analyst and professing Christian Brit Hume expressed his spiritual concern for Tiger Woods and urged the golf superstar to turn to Christianity for grace and forgiveness during a segment of the January 3 edition of "Fox News Sunday."

For that, Hume is being lambasted by some liberal bloggers, including Atlanta Jounal-Constitution's Jay Bookman who unleashed this venom in a brief three paragraph blog post yesterday afternoon:

Fox News's Brit Hume Monday said the growing ClimateGate scandal suggests manmade global warming may be a fraud.

As NewsBusters has been reporting since e-mail messages from the British Climatic Research Unit were first revealed ten days ago, the only television news network that has been regularly informing viewers about this matter has been the Fox News Channel.

On Monday, Fox's "Special Report" continued this trend, and brought Hume on to offer his thoughts (video embedded below the fold with transcript, h/t Story Balloon):

On Fox's Nov. 22 "Fox News Sunday," former "Special Report" anchor and Fox News senior political correspondent was dead spot on target in many regards when it came to criticizing the tack President Barack Obama has taken with his foreign policy gestures.

First, Hume reflected on how Obama reacted on his trip to Asia last week. He noted that Obama was in a tough position, having to rely on borrowed Chinese money. However, "embracing weakness" was not the proper way for Obama to represent the country in Hume's view (emphasis added).

"Look, the president is in a weaker position than he might have been, not least because his policies have contributed mightily to the immense amount of new borrowing that's being done, much of it from the Chinese," Hume said. "So now you have the Chinese even worried about the size of the health care plan. That is unfortunate. But this president seems quite willing to embrace weakness as a position for the United States. I mean, the bowing and scraping that we see -- Saudi Arabia we saw it. We saw it on this trip in Japan."