Fred Barnes

Barack Obama’s bumbling of Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics is a test for the Washington press corps, the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes argues. Liberal reporters may refuse to see the controversy in Obama’s far-left agenda, but the President’s high-profile Olympic flub offers a non-ideological story of White House incompetence.

Excerpts:

Now is the time for the mainstream media to show it’s not totally in President Obama’s pocket. The Washington press corps will never fault Obama for pushing hyper-liberal policies in a moderate-to-conservative country. Ideological criticism by the press is reserved for Republican presidents.

But the media is faced with three facts as a result of Obama’s embarrassing failure in Copenhagen. 1) The failure itself. 2) The incompetence. 3) The lack of persuasive ability. There’s nothing ideological about any of these items....

Friday's Special Report with Bret Baier on FNC gave attention to Vice President Biden's tendency to commit gaffes, with the notably centrist Morton Kondracke of Roll Call commenting that "I say little prayers every day for the health of Barack Obama, who is a lot more intelligent than Joe Biden." Kondracke went on to give a negative assessment of the Vice President's Senate career: "For all the time that Joe Biden was in the Senate, he was wrong about practically every foreign policy issue that there was."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Fox All Stars segment from the Friday, May 22, Special Report with Bret Baier on FNC:

On Monday’s Special Report with Bret Baier on FNC, during the Fox All Stars panel discussion, liberal FNC analyst Kirsten Powers, also a columnist for the New York Post, characterized Barack Obama's recent decision to allow federal funding of embryonic stem cell research as merely a political move designed to please members of his base who blame President Bush for the plight of those who suffer from paralysis or Alzheimer’s, as she also brought up the progress made in stem cell research using adult stem cells. Powers: "He also talks about, you know, putting science before politics, whereas this actually seems to be a very political decision from where I'm sitting. It's something that the base is very excited about."

After noting the advances made in non-embryo destroying adult stem cell research, she continued: "So this is, really, sort of, to me, a political move to satisfy people who really wanted this to happen and blame George Bush, essentially, for people who are paralyzed or suffering from Alzheimer's."

The roundtable on Monday night's Special Report with Brit Hume on FNC was not kind to the New York Times's hit piece on Sunday's front page that blamed President Bush and only Bush for the mortgage meltdown, ignoring the Democrats in Congress who protected the irresponsible push for more "affordable housing" by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (as Times Watch noted yesterday).

Nina Easton, Washington bureau chief of Fortune magazine, pronounced herself "flabbergasted when I read this story, flabbergasted....You cannot write a story about affordable housing policies and blame it on George Bush instead of the Democrats. I mean, it’s just, it’s outrageous."

From the Monday night Special Report with Brit Hume:

Television journalists were nearly uniformly enthralled with Barack Obama's Thursday night acceptance speech, relieved he showed the toughness to take on John McCain directly, unlike, in their world view, all too-soft past Democratic nominees. Only FNC offered a contrarian view or mentioned the word “liberal” while David Gergen on CNN trumpeted the address as a “symphony” and a “masterpiece” with elements of Lincoln, MLK and Reagan.

ABC's Charles Gibson insisted that “four years ago John Kerry” was “held accountable for not being tough enough on George Bush,” and “Obama was obviously not going to make that mistake.”

On CNN, Gloria Borger decided: “If anybody ever thought that Barack Obama was not tough enough to run against John McCain, this speech should really put an end to that.”

It seems Barack Obama had a "senior moment" on Wednesday during his trip to Israel regarding which Senate committees he is a member of. On the same day's Special Report with Brit Hume, during the "Fox All Stars" segment, the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes called out Obama for his claim, which the Illinois Senator made while trying to impress Israeli reporters, that he is a member of the Senate Banking Committee, as he took credit for the passage of legislation regarding Iran. Barnes: "[Obama] was trying to brag about how tough he was on the Iranians, and he said his committee, the Senate Banking Committee, had passed a resolution ... that would have caused American firms to divest of Iranian interests. And the trouble is, he's not on that committee. ... And he didn't vote for it. That would be a senior moment if McCain did it."

Indeed, the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs membership roster does not list Obama's name. But during a news conference, which aired live Wednesday morning during CNN Newsroom, Obama seemed to embellish his resume: "Now, in terms of knowing my commitments, you don't have to just look at my words, you can look at my deeds. Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran, as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don't obtain a nuclear weapon." (Transcripts follow)

Fred Barnes has a new article out in The Weekly Standard on the origins of the surge in Iraq, but controversy has erupted in left-wing circles over an aside: "Rather than a turning point, the events of June prompted a fleeting moment of optimism. The week before Camp David, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the al Qaeda leader in Iraq, had been killed. (Cheney has a piece of the house where Zarqawi died on display at his residence.)"

On Wednesday night, mad-dog radio host Mike Malloy referred to the Standard article by "truly certifiable maniac" Fred Barnes. "This guy is beyond crazy," charged Malloy."I'm sure he eats children's arms and legs for afternoon snacks. This guy is insane." As he described the Barnes passage that that Cheney has a Zarqawi-house souvenir, Malloy added: "I'm surprised that Cheney doesn't have a piece of Zarqawi's body."

Catching up with an article in last week's Weekly Standard (but with Mitt Romney making his last stand in Tuesday's Michigan primary it remains topical), veteran Washington journalist Fred Barnes, a regular panelist on FNC's Special Report, asserted that the press corps “loathes Romney for moving to the right on social issues.” In “The All-Too-Resistible Romney: He has everything going for him but voters,” Barnes, Executive Editor of the magazine, marveled:

I've been amazed at the raw antipathy that so many otherwise reasonable people in the media feel toward Romney. The word they use is "inauthentic." But all presidential candidates are inauthentic to one degree or another. Even Mr. Straight Talk, Senator John McCain, talks differently today about tax cuts and immigration than he used to, but the press doesn't hector him about it. There's something unique about Romney that repels the press...

Describing the agenda of questions CNN chose to pose, during its Wednesday night Republican presidential debate with YouTube, as “completely different” from those forwarded to Democrats in July, Fred Barnes, on Thursday's Special Report on FNC, cited the contrast in questions about the military and Iraq as demonstrating how CNN picked the questioners to “screw Republicans” and “boost Democrats.” Mara Liasson of NPR echoed the sentiment, recalling that the questions put to Democrats “were about global warming and health care and education, all kind of Democratic issues” and so they “weren't challenging the basic principles of the Democratic Party,” but “there were lots of questions last night that were” meant to undermine GOP principles.

Earlier in the day, on The Weekly Standard's Web site, Barnes, Executive Editor of the magazine, hypothesized: “I don't know if the folks who put the debate together were purposely trying to make the Republican candidates look bad, but they certainly succeeded.” He asserted that the YouTube video submission questions CNN decided to air reflected “the issues, in the view of liberals and many in the media, on which Republicans look particularly unattractive.”

This should certainly raise the eyebrows of folks around the country who believe Fox News is too conservative.

On "Fox News Sunday," Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson told a somewhat stunned Chris Wallace that FNC is biased against his campaign.

I kid you not.

As reported hours ago by TheHill.com (video available here):