Dan Rather and Andrea Mitchell said this weekend that Barack Obama made a huge mistake pushing healthcare reform so soon in his first term.

Appearing on the syndicated program "The Chris Matthews Show," the former "CBS Evening News" anchor said of ObamaCare, "Bad choice. Particularly looking back on it. Jobs should have been the first choice."

A few minutes later, Mitchell concurred, "I agree with Dan and everyone here that this was a big miscalculation to go into it."

Yet, they also both agreed that even if it was a mistake to tackle this issue, Obama has to win (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

The night before NBC’s Today show on Friday had an “exclusive” with Karl Rove to plug his new book, ‘Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight’ in which he assured readers President George W. Bush did not “lie us into war,” the NBC Nightly News led by giving him a brush back, regurgitating the arguments the Bush administration went to war in Iraq for illegitimate reasons. Anchor Brian Williams framed his top story:

It will go down in history among the events that shaped our times, the decision by President George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq after the United States had been attacked on 9/11 with no direct connection between the two. The United States has paid a heavy price for the war, which will be seven years old later this month. That's a year longer than all of World War II....The Iraq war is back in the news tonight because of new violence there, just like the old days, and because of a new take on the war from an old hand in the Bush operation, Karl Rove.”

Andrea Mitchell recounted how Rove “says if not for the threat of weapons of mass destruction, there probably would have been no Iraq war,” but “since no such weapons existed, Rove asks, ‘So, then, did Bush lie us into war?’ His answer: ‘Absolutely not..”

But, she countered, “others say President Bush had decided to go to war long before the U.N. could evaluate the evidence. As early as July 2002, former State Department official Richard Haass writes, Condoleezza Rice ‘brushed away’ his ‘concerns’ about Iraq, ‘saying the President had made up his mind,’” and then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair was told in a memo: “It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin.”

Jon Stewart said Thursday press reporting of President Obama's healthcare summit was so bad that if he had to score it like an Olympic event, he'd disqualify the contestants for sucking.

The comedian devoted a full ten minutes to the bipartisan meeting on Thursday's "Daily Show," and was largely an equal opportunity offender.

After taking what some would consider to be a cheap shot at "Senator Tom 'Killing Abortion Doctors Might Not Be Such A Terrible Idea' Coburn," Stewart quipped moments later, "That's Senator Chuck 'If I Was Any More Liberal and Jewish I'd Have T*ts and Be Barbra Streisand' Schumer." 

But much of his attack was about the media coverage, especially toward the end (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

Chris Matthews Thursday said that if the Senate doesn't use reconciliation -- or what some are calling the "Nuclear Option" -- to pass healthcare reform after it once again clears the House, it will be the end of the Democratic Party.

Speaking with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC during the lunch recess of the President's heathcare summit, Matthews said:

Do you have to get a bill passed before you fix it through reconciliation? Probably yes. Which means Speaker Pelosi is going to have to get 217 votes with the agreement that right after that happens and the President signs the Senate bill passed by the House there is immediately going to be reconciliation in the Senate which rectifies all the problems they have with that bill.

Mitchell replied, "You're asking the House members to vote on something on the bet that the Senate will follow through."

"It's more than a bet," said Matthews. "Because if the Senate doesn't do it it's the end of the Democratic Party" (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript, h/t Story Balloon):

Fox News has a business strategy of seeking to "undermine" the MSM by alleging that it has a liberal bias.   That was Chuck Todd's assertion on Morning Joe today.

Todd, NBC's political director and chief White House correspondent, was reacting to Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon's statement on "Fox News Sunday" that "the mainstream media hates the tea party movement almost as much as it hates Sarah Palin."

From Monday's broadcast network evening newscasts: CBS and NBC found hypocrisy in Sarah Palin scolding President Obama's incessant use of a Teleprompter while she had “crib notes” written on her hand during her Saturday Tea Party convention appearance, CBS followed by giving Obama two-straight minutes to explain why the public will come around to “connect” with him again and, meanwhile, ABC devoted a full story to “whether Republicans want action or are just the 'Party of No'?”

CBS's Nancy Cordes reported, over a helpful graphic showing the words written on Palin's hand, that while Palin “dismissed the President Saturday night as a 'charismatic guy with a Teleprompter,' she may have been relying on some crib notes of her own.” Cordes concluded: “Her supporters called it an endearing sign that Palin's a real person, while detractors argue it's proof she doesn't know her facts.” On NBC, Brian Williams led the Palin story with how “it happened after a speech where she criticized the President for relying too much on a Teleprompter.”  

Next on CBS, Katie Couric highlighted how, in her pre-SuperBowl sit-down with Obama, she had raised with him that “people are not sure who he is or what he stands for.” Viewers were then treated to a two-minute long answer from Obama, ending with his insistance that when the economy improves “we'll do just fine and everybody will be saying what a connection President Obama has with the American people. Which is what they were saying a year ago.” (“They” being journalists?)

Scratching my head, wondering if I can remember a so-called correspondent so openly mocking a major political figure . . .

On Morning Joe, NBC "correspondent" Andrea Mitchell ridiculed Sarah Palin's use of hand notes during her Tea Party Q. and A. by displaying some hand notes of her own . . .

Call it the unkindest Dukakis of all . . .

In the pre-SOTU kibitzing, Game Change co-author Mark Halperin, having read released excerpts of the speech, says it reminds him of the man in the tank, Michael Dukakis.

Halperin, who prefaced his punch by professing his respect for PBO et. al, was reacting to Andrea Mitchell, who claimed to hear echoes, of all people, of Ronald Reagan in PBO's remarks.

NBC's Andrea Mitchell, on the syndicated Chris Matthews Show over the weekend, claimed that the United States' wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have not helped in the fight against terrorism, going as far as to say "They've hurt," and "we have inspired more Jihadis against us." Mitchell also played defense for Barack Obama on his terrorism policy as she hailed the President's recent speeches on the issue have been "strong" and "substantive," and "he's now trying to...take the reins and be the CEO," in the fight against al Qaeda. [audio available here]

The following exchanges were aired on the January 10 edition of The Chris Matthews Show:

Not a surprise, but still noteworthy: a heavy MSM hitter is now strongly suggesting that, post-NWA 253, a senior Obama admin official will be walking the plank.

Say what we will of her, but Andrea Mitchell has her sources.  So when the NBC correspondent declared on Morning Joe today that she suspects "somebody is either going to be resigning or forced to resign," we can pretty much take it to the [Federal Reserve?] bank.

As the lone journalist on Sunday's Meet the Press roundtable (with Newt Gingrich, Michael Bloomberg and Deval Patrick), NBC's Andrea Mitchell insisted the “Obama Doctrine” has “borne fruit,” but “it is not perceived yet” -- though the President has already “united the world behind the United States.”

Citing all those who “camped out” for the Sarah Palin book signings, Mitchell denigrated her appeal as evidence of how “they are so hungry for a symbol for anyone who can give them answers” it shows “there's an anger out there” she hasn't seen since George Wallace in 1968. And that, she maintained, “is the angry populism which is not fact-based, it's just furious at everybody; angry at Democrats, at Republicans.” (Apparently, favoring conservative policies and rejecting liberal big government spending is “not fact-based.”)

Ruing “the tea party has higher numbers in our last NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll than either of the other traditional parties,” Mitchell, NBC's chief foreign affairs correspondent and host of MSNBC's weekday 1 PM EST hour, declared that “does frighten me.” While she acknowledged “this spirit of America is so large and embracing,” she feared “there is an angry subtext because of economic dislocation that is very, very worrisome.”

In keeping with the tradition of the holidays - the minds at MSNBC, the place for politics if you're of the lefty persuasion, decided rate the top 10 political stories of the decade.

And leading this gang of masters of the political journalism universe was "Hardball" host Chris Matthews, who on the broadcast of his Dec. 24 program, announced that conservative activism, mainly the tea party movement was the eighth biggest story of the decade - but labeled "angry white voters" (emphasis added).

"Welcome back to ‘Hardball' - our number eight political story of the decade, angry whites at town hall meetings across the country," Matthews said. "Lawmakers heard the wrath of angry voters."

Showing the sense of humor millions of Americans fell in love with last year, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin said Thursday that critics of her previous day's op-ed in the Washington Post "kind of got all wee-weed up about it and wanted to call me and others deniers."

Palin, chatting with conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham, was obviously poking fun at something President Obama said over the summer: "There's something about August going into September where everybody in Washington gets all wee-weed up."

According to Palin, who might have been referring to derogatory comments from folks like MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell, and Keith Olbermann, such was the reaction to her published views on global warming and the United Nations climate change conference currently taking place in Copenhagen (YouTube audio embedded below the fold courtesy our friend Story Balloon, partial transcript):

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Wednesday used the very loaded term of "denier" to deride global warming skeptics. Talking to liberal host Rachel Maddow, she referenced Sarah Palin’s opposition to the Copenhagen climate conference and chided, "Her Facebook entry says, you know, ‘Mr. President, boycott Copenhagen.’ How do you rationalize the deniers and the impact that they are having?" [Audio available here.]

"Deniers" is a word that climate skeptics find quite offensive, as many liberals equate not believing in man-made global warming to denying that the Holocaust occurred. (In March 2006, CBS reporter Scott Pelley famously compared, "If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?")

A dismissive Maddow moved beyond dictionary-approved words while insulting Republicans. She asserted that conservatives will either accept reality or respond, "'We don't believe the problem is real' and become a denialist [sic] about it." A denialist?

Nobel Laureate Al Gore Wednesday called former Alaska governor Sarah Palin a "global warming denier."

Speaking with MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, Gore also repeated his false claim about ClimateGate e-mail messages obtained from Britain's Climatic Research Unit: "the most recent one is like ten years ago."

As Andrew Bolt reported Wednesday at Australia's Herald Sun, the most recent e-mail message obtained from CRU was sent less than a month ago on November 12.

Unfortunately, much like his appearance on CNN earlier in the day, Gore was playing fast and loose with the facts.

Sadly, his MSNBC interviewer was similarly disinterested in challenging the former Vice President about his mistatements, and also never once asked him about his own financial interests in this matter (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

As part of an ongoing series called Today's Buzziest Stories of the Decade, NBC's Meredith Vieira, on Monday's Today, featured a segment with former Iraq war POW Jessica Lynch, and with it brought back some of the "Buzziest" bias of the decade as Vieira declared Lynch's story was "exaggerated to sell a war hard up for appealing heroes," and described Lynch as a "pawn of the military that was trying to sell, some said, a war to the American public." While the stories of Lynch's ordeal were indeed exaggerated, something Lynch decried in the segment, for Vieira to claim the war was "hard up for appealing heroes," was a gross exaggeration in itself.

As the MRC's Rich Noyes pointed out in his 2005 Special Report, "TV's Bad News Brigade," there were plenty of stories of heroism for the media to tell, that they all too frequently ignored. Interestingly enough Vieira's own colleague, Andrea Mitchell, on April 4, 2005 did mention the story of one "appealing" hero, that of the late Sergeant Paul Smith who earned the Medal of Honor, as Mitchell recounted then:

Two weeks ago, unnamed whistleblowers exposed years of e-mails from scientists working at Britain’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The CRU’s Web site describes it as “one of the world's leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change,” but the e-mails paint the CRU as more of a political “war room” for radical environmentalists.

As Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby observed Wednesday: “Assuming the e-mails are genuine, they are nothing short of scandalous. They reveal celebrated climate scientists apparently conspiring to corrupt the peer-review process, to suppress or finesse temperature data at odds with global-warming alarmism, to silence or discredit climate experts who criticize their work, and to hide or eliminate the raw data on which their own much-trumpeted claims have been based.”

Yet since the story broke, the MRC’s Business & Media Institute (BMI) discovered just one broadcast news reference to the “Climategate” e-mail scandal, on ABC’s This Week November 29; CBS and NBC have yet to inform their viewers.

Looking at Sarah Palin's new book, Going Rogue: An American Life, NBC's Andrea Mitchell caught a passage about herself in which Palin recalled that when she invited some reporters to go fishing with her this past July that “I wanted to see Andrea and her colleagues sporting fish-slimed waders, banging around in a skiff, stuck in the mud,” but, she regretted, the weather was too good so “dang it -- none of them got slimed.”

On Sunday's NBC Nightly News, Mitchell recounted, over video (with the book text over-layed) of Mitchell and Palin on a boat:

"We'll always have Paris. We didn't have, we'd lost it until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night."

So famously said Humphrey Bogart to Ingrid Bergman in the marvelous conclusion of one of the greatest films of all time, "Casablanca."

On Wednesday, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell shamelessly used a version of this line on White House advisor David Axelrod.

During her interview about yesterday's election results, including Bill Owens' victory in New York's 23rd Congressional district, Mitchell asked Axelrod about the Obama campaign documentary aired on HBO Tuesday.

This led to the following exchange that is guaranteed to make Bogie and Bergman roll over in their graves (video embedded below the fold):

"A test that uses a single indicator to prompt a decision."

That's how the American  Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines "litmus test" when it's used as a political metaphor (emphasis mine). 

That makes no difference to MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell and Joe Scarborough, who see a new "litmus test" for the GOP developing out of the New York 23rd Congressional District special election.

Scarborough, appearing with Mitchell on MSNBC shortly after 1:15 p.m. EST, slammed potential 2012 presidential hopeful Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.) for arguing earlier today on his "Morning Joe" program that there's no room in the GOP for what may be called "Dede Scozzafava Republicans" who are far [left] afield from the Republican mainstream.

So much for politics ending at the water's edge . . .

Hillary Clinton has gone to Pakistan and bragged of having opposed Pres. Bush during her entire Senate career. Clinton also depicted the difference between Barack Obama and George W. Bush as being "like daylight and dark."  

For good measure, Clinton played the moral equivalency card, declaring "we cannot let a minority of people in both countries determine our relationship."  The Pakistani minority she had in mind is presumably composed of al Qaeda and its sympathizers.  Clinton didn't specify which Americans she would equate with them.

Slam dunk, or nothing-but-net three-pointer?  Either way, with a line he got off today, Chuck Todd has surely scored some points in the battle over Pres. Obama's all-male White House basketball games.

The NBC News political director/chief WH correspondent took his shot while discussing the issue with Andrea Mitchell—whose sympathies were clearly with the distaff side—during the 1PM hour slot on MSNBC today.

On Wednesday’s NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams made an observation about the United Nations General Assembly meeting one normally does not expect to hear from the mainstream media, as he remarked that the gathering at one point looked like the "bar scene in Star Wars." After a report by Andrea Mitchell which focused on the "bizarre speech" by Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi, and which also mentioned the presence of "international pariahs" like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez, Williams commented on the "circus atmosphere" as he introduced NBC News political director Chuck Todd. Williams:

We’ve seen this kind of a circus atmosphere here inside the U.N. ... And, Chuck, for a while, it did look like the bar scene in Star Wars, except that the stakes are so high.

Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has famously made such a comparison on his show over the years. Below is a complete transcript of the relevant portion of the Wednesday, September 23, NBC Nightly News:

ABC, CBS and NBC all led Wednesday night with President Barack Obama's address at the United Nations, but Katie Couric was the most effusive in trumpeting how Obama marked the end of the Bush era as she teased the CBS Evening News: “Tonight, the President tells the world America's 'go it alone' policy is over.” Her glowing lead:

Good evening, everyone. President Obama says we have reached a “pivotal moment.” In his UN debut today, he challenged the world to work together to solve the problems facing all of us. And in a break with the “go it alone policies” of his predecessor, he said the United States is ready to begin a new chapter of international cooperation.

On NBC, Andrea Mitchell followed a similar script: “It was the President's first speech to the United Nations and it marked a very stark departure from the policies of George W. Bush, as the President called for a new era of engagement with the rest of the world, reaching out to new friends and old foes.”

An evening after trumpeting President Jimmy Carter's racism charge (“An overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man”), NBC led Wednesday night with the “fallout” as Andrea Mitchell proposed that though “many thought” the “racial divisions” were “healed by the election of the first African-American President,” Carter's “blunt comments” have “prompted us to re-examine our assumptions about race” -- as if everyone is like those at NBC who adjust their views based on what Carter says.

Mitchell proceeded to smear the tea party activists, corroborated by just two racist posters the network managed to find:

In a season of angry protests, there are ugly signs that some of it is not rooted in bailout fatigue or suspicion of big government. Mixed in the anti-Obama crowds over recent weeks, racial slurs against the President of the United States. All that, plus an unprecedented interruption of the President's speech to Congress prompting Jimmy Carter's blunt comments first broadcast on Nightly News last night.