Courtland Milloy

Yesterday's "Occupy Congress" push by the Occupy D.C. protesters resulted in four arrests at the U.S. Capitol and a lockdown at the White House after someone lobbed "an object similar to a smoke bomb" over the White House fence.

If such disturbing incidents accompanied a Tea Party protest, the harsh reaction by the Washington Post would be predictable and, indeed, to an extent justifiable. But Washington Post reporters Annie Gowen and Katie Rogers painted the protests in a generally positive light in Metro front page article, "Occupiers confront seats of power."* Indeed, Gowen and Rogers buried deep in their article the fact that one of the four protesters arrested was charged with assaulting a police officer.

Back in June, ABC’s Lara Spencer embarrassed herself by lauding President Obama as a “baby whisperer” that could wondrously calm infants. On Wednesday, Washington Post Metro section columnist Courtland Milloy – yes, the one who’s violent enough in his thought against Tea Partiers to need a whisperer – returned to that obsequious territory.

“Not surprisingly, some hard-core right-wingers resent that Obama is good at baby holding," Milloy insisted. “”The only complaint they can come up with, however, is that he is too soft and maternal. They would like to see one of the babies ruin his photo ops by throwing up on him or soiling their diapers.”

¿Como se dice "useful idiot" en español? Try Courtland Milloy.

The liberal Washington Post columnist today published an item reflecting on his time in Havana with "community activists" who "engage[d] in frank talk about Cuba's social inequities."

Greg Gutfeld on Saturday went after "hacks with an axe to grind" whose "rush to judgment" concerning last Saturday's shootings in Tucsocn "revealed the media's not so secret biases towards certain political personalities and movements."

Offering his opinion at the end of "Fox News Watch," the "Red Eye" host specifically named Jane Fonda, Paul Krugman, and "the creeps at Daily Kos" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

"I know how the "tea party' people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their 'Obama Plan White Slavery' signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads."

That's how leftist Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy calmly and civilly registered his measured disagreement with conservatives in a March 2010 column.

Now that there's a tragedy to be exploited, Milloy today jumped aboard the media's bash-conservatives-for-coarsening-American-political-discussion bandwagon.

In doing so, Milloy didn't disappoint, turning up the nuttiness knob to 11 with his anti-conservative screed, comparing House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other conservative Republicans to bloodthirsty gangbangers who inspire violence without having to explicitly authorize it:

The "recent unpleasantness" at the Washington Post was, to conservatives at least, entirely predictable. What decent left-leaning journalist could live among the remote, primitive tribes known as conservatives and not be driven just a little bit mad? (If the Post's editors were embarrassed, they could at least take comfort that their man hadn't "gone native.")

Predictable, but no less unfortunate. The Washington Post dearly needs someone to explain conservatism to its editors and staff. Why?

A look through the June 30 edition of the Washington Post gives a pretty good indication. No, not the puff piece on Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. (Apparently a photo of the grown man in charge of a vast federal agency wearing a bike helmet is supposed convey competence. The caption reads - really - "Ray LaHood has worked to expand transportation safety, including emphasizing the rights of cyclists in federal transportation policy.)

No, a few columns should suffice. Courtland Milloy began a piece on Justice Clarence Thomas' recent opinion defending the Second Amendment on a promising note. Thomas, Milloy wrote approvingly, "roared to life" in the opinion, citing the legal disarming of blacks in the post-reconstruction south, which left them vulnerable to the KKK and other white supremacists. So far, so good.

When the Republicans shocked the liberal media elite by winning back Congress in 1994, they had been demonized for months. But it took the Oklahoma City bombing on April 19, 1995 for Bill Clinton and all of his "objective" media devotees to really pull the violence card and smear that mass murder all over Newt Gingrich and conservative Republicans, blaming it on their "anti-government" rhetoric.

In 2010, our partisan liberal media aren't waiting for the elections to arrive. An arrest of "Christian militia" activists in southern Michigan led Washington Post columnist (and former reporter) Eugene Robinson to proclaim implausibly on March 30: "The danger of political violence in this country comes overwhelmingly from one direction -- the right, not the left. The vitriolic, anti-government hate speech that is spewed on talk radio every day -- and, quite regularly, at Tea Party rallies -- is calibrated not to inform but to incite."

On Monday morning, the Washington Post decried the "hideous display" of Tea Party protests, but it sounded pretty foam-flecked on Wednesday as Post Metro columnist Courtland Milloy was expressing violent rage on the front of the Wednesday Metro section against the Tea Party protesters:

I know how the "tea party" people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their "Obama Plan White Slavery" signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads.

But wait: when Rep. Emanuel Cleaver describes to Milloy being "spat" on, it sounds not like an intentional loogie, but like overenthusiastic yelling. He described it to Milloy as a man "who allowed saliva to hit my face," which sounds unintentional, if not well-mannered:

In the same vein as Warner’s San Francisco Chronicle example, Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy hailed Barack Obama’s fatherhood in the Monday Metro section. He spoke about being a father at a White House "national conversation on responsible fatherhood" on Friday with a hundred "mostly young black men" and their celebrity mentors. As Obama talked about his daughters being born and his swagger at parent-teacher conferences, Milloy reported:

The young adults in the audience were spellbound. At 47, Obama was younger than many of their dads, as eloquent as any rapper and revered even by the athletes that they hold in highest esteem.

Eloquent as any rapper? You might enjoy rappers for their "flow," but I’m not sure "eloquence" of the Ludacris variety – with fast-flowing F-bombs and talk of casual murders – is what the president needs. But Milloy is trying to say is he is hip and charismatic enough to win over young people. He thumps hard on Obama as "regular guy," including the column’s first sentence: "Barack Obama, regular guy, was telling a gathering of mostly young black men about his experiences as a dad."

After Milloy explained that Obama was as revered as sports stars, he also underlined what a regular guy he was:

Cameron Windham, 16, was seated with Dwyane Wade, star guard for the Miami Heat, when Obama stopped by their table. "He casually asked Dwyane if he wanted to play ball with him and LeBron [James of the Cleveland Cavaliers] in the White House gym," recalled Windham, a student at St. Albans School for Boys. "It was like he was just a regular guy, grabbing some friends for a pickup game."

If Obama and pro athletes can convince young men to be responsible fathers, that would be great. But Obama-loving journalists try to play this game that Obama isn’t either/or, he’s both: he’s both a world-class celebrity who can invite the top NBA stars over for a pickup game and he’s just like a regular guy.

Update/Related Post link added below.

First, it goes without saying that Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy is entitled to his opinion as well, a columnist. So my gripe here isn't so much about liberal bias as it is about Milloy's insistence on projecting a politically correct pall, in the heat of playoff season, over the ONE thing that can unite Washingtonians across party lines. Our beloved Redskins.

Is it asking too much for the liberal Post columnist to refrain from resurrecting a fringe PC issue a mere three days after the Redskins clinched a playoff berth, and that while playing the despised Dallas Cowboys?

I guess it is (see excerpt below fold):

A pro-life pal on the Hill says more people should read black columnist Courtland Milloy in the Washington Post. He responded to the Bennett brouhaha by making the point that blacks who are doing all the aborting (and black men who aren't doing any fathering) are more of a problem than Bennett's talk, which at least focuses on the problem, as he cites data from Planned Parenthood's Alan Guttmacher Institute:  

African American women, who make up only 13 percent of the U.S. female population, accounted for 32 percent of the 1,293,000 abortions performed in the United States in 2002.

That's 413,760 abortions performed on black women in one year -- or 1,133 a day. (In the District, half of all pregnancies ended in abortion, a higher percentage than in any state.) No outcry over that because those were just disposable fetuses, right?

That is, until Bennett spoke of aborting "black babies," and suddenly those fetuses become precious pre-born black people who must be saved from the evil Dr. Bill...

To that end, we might welcome the controversy about abortion and black babies and the long-overdue focus it brings to the black womb -- home to hope unbound as well as unspeakable tragedy. Who is responsible for the protection and care of this amazing uterine environment, where the most wonderful fetal programming can occur just by having a loving husband kiss his pregnant wife? Bennett? Sorry, he ain't in it.