Left-wing PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers, host of "Bill Moyers Journal," interviewed New York Times editor Sam Tanenhaus about his new book "The Death of Conservatism," which Times Watch found intellectually dishonest, unnecessarily hostile, and already dated.

Tanenhaus, who edits two Sunday sections, the Book Review and the Week in Review, insulted today's conservative movement the same way he did in his book, calling it "a politics of vengeance." Tanenhaus, who decries conspiracism on the right, indulged in his own when he declared of the 2000 election between Bush and Al Gore: "... the conservatives on the Supreme Court stopped the democratic process, put their guy into office."

Challenged by Moyers on the book's title, given the huge anti-government rallies opposing Obama's spending and health care schemes, Tanenhaus insisted that "the overt signs of energy and vitality" of today's anti-government protesters notwithstanding, "the rigor mortis I described is still there."

Whatever you say, Sam. Some excerpts from the interview, which aired Friday night:

Moyers: So, if you're right about the decline and death of conservatism, who are all those people we see on television?

Tanenhaus: I'm afraid they're radicals. (Laughter.) Conservatism has been divided for a long time -- this is what my book describes narratively -- between two strains. What I call realism and revanchism. We're seeing the revanchist side.

Who needs to make health care Barack Obama's Waterloo, as Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C. suggested? Why not make it the president's Alamo?

That's the advice PBS host Bill Moyers had for President Barack Obama in an appearance on HBO's August 28 "Real Time with Bill Maher." According to the former press secretary for President Lyndon B. Johnson, a defeat on health care/health insurance reform would do the left more good than crafting some sort of compromise.

"I mean, I would rather see Barack Obama go down fighting for vigorous, strong principled public insurance, than to lose with a bill - look, BusinessWeek had a cover story last week, ‘The Insurers are Winning,'" Moyers said.

With the Obama administration and their friends in the media denouncing the sometimes loud dissent that liberals are facing in town hall meetings on health care, it’s worth recalling how some of those same journalists celebrated the anti-Bush dissenters and denounced what they claimed was the Republican administration’s attempts to stifle dissent.

Back in 2006, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann attacked what he called President Bush’s “portable public chorus” (does President Obama have one of those?) For telling “those who dissent...[that] we are somehow un-American.” PBS’s Bill Moyers in 2003 found it “galling” to see “all those moralistic ideologues in Washington...attacking dissenters as un-American.”

In 2003, Olbermann saluted protests: “It is political dissent that created this country and sustained it and improved it.” But on Friday’s Countdown, Olbermann called the anti-Obama protests “societal sabotage,” determined that the grassroots groups are “fake” and insisted that “the protestors are not interested in hearing any voices other than their own.” (But the anti-Bush protesters were open-minded?)

To see how public radio talk-show hosts in every college town pick up Bill Moyers talking points off PBS like manna falling from Manhattan, there’s this paragraph that appeared on ProfNet, a radio-booking service for political experts, from a Jim Lynch of WUSB 90.1 in Stony Brook, New York:

I'm seeking interviews with individuals with expertise on the increasing call of hate radio and television programs to "kill liberals" -- from the Kansas killing of a physician performing legal women's health services, to the church killings at liberal UU congregation in Tennessee, to the threats against Michael Moore and others. This is for "Everything is Broken," which airs Tuesdays at 1 p.m. This will be conversational and non-confrontational; no call-ins from listeners. Must be available for 30+ minutes.

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers unleashed his anger at Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk radio hosts on Friday night’s Bill Moyers Journal, suggesting they "scream like martyrs being stretched on the rack" about the alleged Fairness Doctrine and they "earn millions inciting riots in the public mind." Limbaugh played a clip and responded that it was laughable that Moyers would pose as a "paragon of virtue on fairness."

MOYERS: Ronald Reagan abolished the [Fairness] doctrine in 1987, but mention it today and the Rush Limbaughs of the world still scream like martyrs being stretched on the rack. These people earn millions inciting riots in the public mind. If they were required to be fair, they would soon be penniless, out on the street, cup in hand. So when we first telecast our report on the killings in Knoxville last year, some of them threw a tantrum, as if our criticism of their malicious rhetoric was a call for government censorship.

Limbaugh replied on Monday:

The Washington Post’s Style section conducted a survey of who could fill the most-trusted void left behind by Walter Cronkite. A series of liberal-media heroes were named: Brian Williams, Bill Moyers, Jim Lehrer, Barbara Walters, Fareed Zakaria, Garrison Keillor, and Jon Stewart. But several people skipped the media stars and selected the Obamas. ABC Nightline correspondent Vicki Mabrey nominated Michelle as a Cronkite replacement: "Rosie the Riveter for our times in a designer gown. You just want to be her best friend forever."

Mabrey rarely covers politics, although she did report on Gov. Sarah Palin’s resignation on July 6, and suggested the governor’s speech was "just plain rambling." Before joining ABC in 2005, she worked for CBS for 13 years. Several media stars were nominated more than once:

Jon Stewart. "He's got no agenda. His agenda is to get to the bottom of everyone's [baloney]. " -- Seth Hurwitz, co-owner of 9:30 club.

Struggling to sell a "public option" of socialized medicine on America, the left needs demons. So here comes, right on time, the focus on all the "lies" that free-market "front groups" are pushing on the failures of nationalized health care in countries like Canada and Great Britain.

These leftists are shameless. Their intellectual dishonesty is boundless. One wonders if socialized medicine might include treatment for this condition.

A man named Wendell Potter was the star of the hour on PBS’s "Bill Moyers Journal" on July 10. Potter used to be a spokesman for the insurance giant Cigna. He painted a picture of gilded excess. "I was served my lunch by a flight attendant who brought my lunch on a gold-rimmed plate. And she handed me gold-plated silverware to eat it with." Sitting in a spacious corporate jet, he said he was overcome by guilt at the gap between his creature comforts and the health struggles of the poor and uninsured.

In addition to disparaging Brian Williams for offering a "candygram" to Barack Obama in prime time, PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers organized another one-sided left-wing discussion on the alleged conservative bias of the news media last Friday, picking up on Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne’s complaint that the media are giving too much time and weight to Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich on the Sotomayor nomination. Former NPR correspondent Brooke Gladstone, who now hosts the weekly show On The Media for WNYC radio (distributed nationally by NPR), denounced the "canard" of liberal media bias and how it causes "overbalance":

Conservative talk-show hosts and bloggers have been hammering away at the gooey NBC News Inside the White House specials with Brian Williams adoring Obama. But Williams also drew fire from the hard-core left. On Friday’s Bill Moyers Journal, the PBS omnipresence and former LBJ press aide said Williams offered a "candygram" to the president:

BILL MOYERS: Meanwhile, NBC News this week delivered a candygram to the president -- two prime time specials called "Inside the Obama White House." President Obama couldn't have asked for a sweeter salute...

BRIAN WILLIAMS: People react strongly to this president. We've seen people moved to tears after just the briefest encounter with him.

MOYERS: As for an exclusive revelation about your government from behind the White House's closed doors, well, hold your breath, here it comes...

WILLIAMS: There are apples everywhere. Orchards worth of them in bowls throughout the building. They are meant of course to promote healthy eating but what we saw more often is this: the West Wing may lead the western world in candy consumption.

WHITE HOUSE STAFFER: These are official White House M&Ms.

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers isn’t proud of his power-lusting service as a White House hatchet man for Lyndon Johnson. But he isn’t doing himself or PBS any favors by misleading reporters who are nosing around into how he helped invade the sexual privacy of the White House staff in the LBJ era. Over at Slate, Jack Shafer first wrote a great piece on how Moyers wanted the press man-handled for Lyndon. (Read the whole thing.)

Then he added a piece that did some sleuthing to demonstrate that Moyers, that scold of Republican truth-mangling, tried to mislead The Washington Post. Shafer, a left-leaning libertarian sort, insisted "my beef with Moyers isn't what he did in the mid-1960s but his refusal to acknowledge in a straightforward manner what he did." Here's how it unfolded:

The Washington Post asked him last week to comment on its discovery that he had directed the FBI to investigate Johnson administration figures who were "suspected as having homosexual tendencies." He confessed to the Post via e-mail of having scant memories of the incidents of four decades ago but volunteered that the inquiries could have been in response to allegations brought to Johnson by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

In an editorial titled "J. Edgar Moyers," the Wall Street Journal picked right up on Thursday’s historical revelations on the front page of The Washington Post about the FBI investigating the sexuality of Lyndon Johnson’s aide Jack Valenti. The Journal noted that PBS host Bill Moyers, a regular lecturer on other people’s depredations of civil liberties, was doing his own work with the snoops in the 1960s:

The dossier also reveals that Mr. Moyers -- then a special assistant to LBJ -- requested in 1964 that Hoover's G-men "investigate two other administration figures who were 'suspected as having homosexual tendencies.'"

This isn't the first time Mr. Moyers's name has come up in connection with Hoover's abuse of office. When Laurence Silberman, now a federal appeals judge, was acting Attorney General in 1975, he was obliged to read Hoover's secret files in their entirety in preparation for testimony before Congress -- and as far as we know remains one of the only living officials to have done so. "It was the single worst experience of my long governmental service," he wrote in these pages in 2005.

On Friday night, PBS star Bill Moyers took up the question of the media’s coverage of President Obama. It was not a liberal vs. conservative debate. His panel was two left-wing bloggers: Glenn Greenwald of Salon and Jay Rosen of PressThink. Unsurprisingly, they felt the media weren’t "progressive" enough.

But Greenwald went far beyond that, making claims that "establishment media venues" forged a political "partnership" with the Republican Party and "the right wing" during the Lewinsky affair that continued and "translated into the media being blindly supportive and reverent of the Bush administration." He also claimed – against all evidence – that massive demonstrations against the Iraq war in 2003 were almost ignored: "the media virtually excluded those demonstrations from the narrative."

These strange theories erupted without Moyers really demanding an attack on the media elite:

MOYERS: The Rasmussen Poll this week shows an eight point drop in support for the stimulus plan, what do you make of that?

GREENWALD: You know, I think if you go back to the 1990s, what you saw is essentially a partnership between the Republican Party, the right wing, and establishment media venues. And this partnership was formed when they were essentially engaged in their lynch mob over the Lewinsky affair.

The absence of liberal outrage over Barack Obama’s decision to reject public financing for his presidential campaign took a jaw-dropping turn on the hard-left Pacifica Radio network and its show "Democracy Now!" Host Amy Goodman, who regularly welcomes long screeds from Bill Moyers and his fervor about our bought-and-sold elections, welcomed two campaign "reformers" on Monday, and both failed to criticize Obama or his decision. Goodman proclaimed: "I have to say, it’s interesting to hear campaign finance groups be so uncritical of this decision when this is the very issue that, for example, you, John Rauh, have set up your organization around, Americans for Campaign Reform, and particularly around the issue of clean money and elections and cutting down the role money plays in elections."

This raises the question: have liberals been touting campaign finance "reform" out of genuine socialist conviction, or has it all just been a cynical pose that only lasts as long as they perceive conservatives and Republicans will have a campaign fundraising advantage? Where is Bill Moyers on this? He skipped the fire-and-brimstone sermonizing about it on his Bill Moyers Journal last Friday, a day after Obama’s announcement.

(Editor's note: this column was syndicated on Friday.)

It’s axiomatic that people who’ve disgraced themselves are the last to realize it, or maybe the first to pretend they don’t know. Take longtime CBS anchorman Dan Rather, who shredded his own reputation by smearing President Bush’s military service with phony documents.

He’s still at it, still in shameless self-denial, raging against the world, still pontificating about that which he has no standing to speak about: Journalism ethics. On June 7, he mounted a soapbox at a far-left event in Minneapolis called the "National Conference for Media Reform," perhaps the last and perhaps the best forum interested in his opinion.

In front of this fervent group of leftists, Rather tried to put on Superman’s cape and pledge to push back against the evil forces "that imperil journalism…and impair democracy itself." In Rather’s vision, blatantly biased reporting is not only what passes for "journalism," it is the lifeblood of democracy. Dismiss Dan Rather for a lack of professionalism, and suddenly, you’re part of the corporate media vast right-wing conspiracy against Jeffersonian ideals.

In America, you need to show identification to buy alcohol, get into a bar, or apply for a job. Yet, for some reason, liberal media members think that Republicans who advocate voter ID laws do so exclusively to prevent Democrats from going to polling booths.

Such was clearly evident Friday evening when Bill Moyers discussed some recent Supreme Court rulings with CNN and New Yorker magazine's legal affairs analyst Jeffrey Toobin.

Better strap yourself in tightly, for the following from "Bill Moyers Journal" on PBS is guaranteed to offend all that actually believe voter identification should be required in every state (video embedded right):

Bill Moyers appeared not only on The Daily Show Tuesday, but on the Tavis Smiley show on PBS, where he repeated all his lines in defense of Jeremiah Wright. Moyers also declared that while "I believe in capitalism...the tension between capitalism and democracy is that capitalism breeds inequality while democracy aims for more equality," and the media serves only the rich. When Smiley asked if were "witnessing the fall of the American empire," Moyers said yes, and that "it's probably a good thing that our empire has reached the extent of it -- has extended itself so far that it's beginning to have to have some second thoughts about it."

The talk of America's "empire," as if America were no different than ancient Rome, came near the end of the segment:

SMILEY: How would you respond if I said to you, Bill Moyers, that we are witnessing the fall of the American empire? You are a student of history. You know that every empire eventually falls. And what if I said to you that our democracy is so dysfunctional that it is irreparable, and that what you and I are witnessing, sad to say, is the fall of the American empire?

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers appeared on Tuesday’s edition of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, and delivered a long-winded defense of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who he said was "assassinated by soundbites." Moyers regurgitated the original, discredited Obama line, that out of 200,000 minutes from the pulpit, "His whole life, his whole ministry, his whole career was being summed up in sound bites that added up to no more than 20 seconds endlessly played through the media grinder of our national press." Wright was just making a few errors, like most of us do, he argued: "All of us have made absurd statements. I know that Rev. Wright, whom I had never met before this, was no doubt, had misspoken and made some erratic statements and all that. Most of us do." [audio available here]

PBS omnipresence Bill Moyers was interviewed on the radical taxpayer-subsidized Pacifica Radio network's Democracy Now program on Wednesday, and declared that Hillary Clinton wishes the worst on Barack Obama -- "she keeps hoping for every day, is that lightning will strike him" and insisted "She can only win in a way that would leave the Democratic Party in shambles." Even so, Moyers complained that all three candidates are failing to correct a "dysfunctional" capitalist system.

Moyers also made excuses for Jeremiah Wright's wild sermons about 9/11 and AIDS, and brushed off suggestions that his interview could have been tougher. "I’m not a very adversarial fellow. I’m not a gotcha kind of journalist," he claimed. "I knew that they were going to be asking all of these questions. I leave that to those people whose job it is for the commercial media." He decried the ABC debate questions to Obama as "a great exercise in irrelevance."

Do my tax dollars really have to support the anti-American vitriol that comes out of the mouth of PBS's Bill Moyers every week?

Before you answer, consider that the host of "Bill Moyers Journal" followed up last week's much publicized sycophantic lovefest with Democrat presidential candidate Barack Obama's America-hating pastor by going on a six minute defense of the junior senator from Illinois and the reverend this Friday which was filled with Democrat talking points.

Readers are warned to proceed with caution before either reviewing the highly-offensive transcript that follows, or clicking on the embedded video in the upper-right (h/t TVNewser):

The Bill Moyers PBS interview of Barack Obama’s long-time minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, underlined once again that our tax dollars don’t fund programs championing racial harmony. They fund programs that celebrate black radicals, militants, and kooks. Moyers came to Rev. Wright’s side not to condemn him or even challenge him, but to praise him and defend him. As he implored Wright to explain his "God damn America" sermon, Wright at least said he was free in America to denounce America. To which Moyers replied: "Well, you can be almost crucified for saying what you've said here in this country."

Bill Moyers wants us to see Jeremiah Wright as the Jesus Christ of our time?