Cokie Roberts

There was a rather telling moment on ABC's This Week Sunday.

When during the Roundtable segment the Washington Post's Michael Gerson criticized Barack Obama for his lack of leadership involving the now failed Super Committee, Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts quickly came to the President's defense (video follows with transcript and commentary):

President Barack Obama's nicknaming his new tax increases on the wealthy the "Warren Buffett rule" is fitting since the billionaire has spent a decade campaigning for a tax hike, a campaign his friends in the liberal media have been more than willing to join. For over 10 years the media promoted Buffett's complaint that the wealthy in America don't pay enough in taxes, spurred on by a Buffett's anecdote that he pays less in taxes than his receptionist. 

But even the AP has pointed out, the idea that secretaries pay more in taxes than their bosses is inaccurate. A review of IRS 2009 tax tables (Link to Excel spreadsheet) shows that those making under $100,000/year pay an average of no more than 12.3% of their income in taxes, while those making above $500,000 pay an average of no less than 26.3% of their income in taxes. However, this fact hasn't stopped the liberal media from happily advancing Buffett's call to soak his fellow rich.

ABC's Cokie Roberts said something on national television Sunday that made her colleague George Will shake his head on camera.

During a "This Week" discussion about the recent credit rating downgrade by Standard and Poor's Roberts said, 'The problem that we have here is the Constitution of the United States of America which actually does require people to come together from different perspectives" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As NewsBusters previously reported, former Obama administration car czar Steve Rattner last month called Tea Partiers terrorists on national television.

On Sunday's "This Week," George Will took Rattner on for making such an inflammatory statement (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Cokie Roberts got quite a lesson Sunday on why compromise can be a dirty word in politics.

When she asked Congressman Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) why compromise isn't a "message that you hear," the Tea Partier responded, "Why is it that compromise always means increasing taxes today and doing cuts in ten years from now?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Yet another case study in how the liberal media never stop pushing their own interpretation of events: In a May 22 This Week roundtable about the arrest of IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn for the alleged sexual assault of a female hotel worker, two journalists endorsed it as France’s “Anita Hill moment,” referring to the last-minute claims raised against conservative Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas nearly 20 years ago.

But Hill never alleged that Thomas did anything either violent or criminal —  and polls taken at the time (USA Today, October 14, 1991) showed the public sided with Clarence Thomas over Hill by a nearly two-to-one margin (47% to 24%). Despite the public’s verdict, journalists have never cast the Hill case as that of a politically-motivated accuser engaged in a high-profile act of character assassination.

On Monday and Tuesday, NPR played up how Osama Bin Laden's death might translate into a political win for President Obama. Mara Liasson trumpeted the "huge victory" for the President and spotlighted a scholar who gushed how Obama now looked "strong and competent and decisive." Cokie Roberts boasted how the military operation was a "score" for the Democrat and that it was a "game changer politically."

At the beginning of her report which lead Tuesday's Morning Edition, Liasson gushed that "every president benefits from moments of national unity, but none so much as Barack Obama, who ran for office promising to bridge partisan divides." Later, the journalist noted that, with the raid against Bin Laden, "he [Obama] made good on his repeated promise to act unilaterally if he had actionable intelligence."

ABC devoted its entire "This Week" on Easter Sunday to "God and Government," and not surprisingly the question of President Obama's faith prominently entered the discussion.

When it did, Cokie Roberts said, "The bad part about this is that it's acceptable to say that he's a Muslim because the same people won't say, 'I don't like him cause he's black'" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

NPR's Cokie Roberts hinted congressional Republicans were going to resort to extreme tactics regarding the debt ceiling on Monday's Morning Edition. Roberts noted the "rough votes" on the horizon in Congress, specifying the "debt ceiling that has to be increased, where Republicans have promised Armageddon."

Host Renee Montagne brought on the journalist to talk mainly about the recent proposed agreement on the budget between the Democrats and Republicans. Near the end of the segment, however, Montagne raised the other budget-related battles that are expected later in the year. Roberts dropped the biblical reference in her answer:

George Will on Sunday's "This Week" said what likely has been on the minds of right-thinking Americans for many decades.

"NPR is run by people who don't like people like me" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

You don’t find many “gems” on a Saturday morning. It’s a lazy day, getting ready for football and a late breakfast---then Cokie Roberts, speaking on ABC’s Good Morning America, dropped the bomb.

Roberts has apparently bought into the far-left's conspiracy theory that Republicans simply do not want to see Americans get jobs. Yep. Republicans are more interested in defeating old media’s Dear Leader than they are in Americans' well-being. ABC's Dan Harris sounded off in agreement.

Harris set it up this way: “In the modern era no President has won re-election with the unemployment rate higher than 7.2%” (transcript below the fold - video to be added shortly):

 Appearing on Thursday’s Good Morning America to discuss the recent legislative activity in Congress, ABC’s Cokie Roberts managed to avoid using the word "illegal" as she recounted the failure by Senate Democrats to pass the Dream Act to provide a mechanism for the children of illegal immigrants to obtain citizenship. Framing the Senate vote as a "disappointment" for Obama, she went on to contend that the loss "certainly bodes badly for immigration."

After agreeing with host George Stephanopoulos that President Obama should be "pretty pleased" by the "incredible" lame duck session, she continued:

The disappointment, as [President Obama] said yesterday, was the Dream Act, that piece of legislation for immigrant children who have come to this country, not by their own volition, but allowing them to go to school and the military as a path to citizenship. That failed, which certainly bodes badly for immigration, in general, because that was considered the easy one.

As she and Stephanopoulos discussed the likely difficulty of President Obama and Congress reaching a budget agreement next year, Roberts also referred to cutting taxes as "giving something away." She then seemed to convey some wishful thinking as she suggested that Republicans may decide not to be "obstructionist" if voters lavish praise on recent bipartisan "cooperation":

Liberal internet publisher Arianna Huffington on Sunday went on ABC's "This Week" to spout some of her typical left-wing nonsense about the significance of the previous day's Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally in Washington as well as what a Republican victory on Election Day means.

Fortunately, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and ABC's Cokie Roberts were there to refute her inanities (videos follow with transcripts and commentary):

Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos and Cokie Roberts on Monday downplayed the potential bad PR Michelle Obama might suffer for taking a Spanish vacation costing $250,000

Roberts justified, "But in the grand scheme of things, what real difference does it make? I would guess that Sasha is probably learning some Spanish."

Continuing to spin the First Lady's vacation, she argued, "And we need Spain to be stronger economically than it is in the Euro zone. I mean, you can make the case if you- if you really need to."

The networks Monday night skipped lightly over the late Senator Robert Byrd's segregationist and racist record, devoting as much time to the Democrat's fiddle-playing prowess as his years in the Ku Klux Klan, which CBS's Chip Reid excused as “an effort to help his political career.”

Leading into file video of Byrd playing his fiddle, ABC anchor Diane Sawyer declared “Byrd was a powerhouse and old-fashioned crowd-pleaser on the stump, whipping out his fiddle.” Though Byrd is the only Senator to have voted against both Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas, Cokie Roberts asserted that “as the country changed, Robert Byrd changed with it. He readily endorsed Barack Obama for President.”

After touting how by “writing several volumes of Senate history” Byrd had followed in Caesar's “footsteps,” she concluded: “Like the Constitution and the bible, Robert Byrd will be a permanent fixture of the Senate.”

On Monday’s The O’Reilly Factor, during the show’s regular "Reality Check" segment, FNC host O’Reilly seemed to pick up on a NewsBusters item which highlighted ABC’s Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts defending Mexican President Felipe Calderon using his speech in Congress as a forum to criticize Arizona’s effort to enforce laws against illegal immigration. In their defense of Calderon on Sunday's This Week show's Roundtable segment, the the two ABC News veterans brought up past American Presidents criticizing communist dictators in China and the Soviet Union.

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the "Reality Check" from the Monday, May 24, The O’Reilly Factor on FNC:

Forwarding moral equivalence, ABC News veteran Sam Donaldson, on This Week, defended Mexican President Felipe Calderon for using a speech before Congress to criticize Arizona, by reminding viewers: “President Bill Clinton went to the Great Hall of the People and when Jiang Zemin was President of China. I heard President Clinton say, ‘what you did in Tiananmen Square was wrong.’ He lectured. We all said, that's terrific because it was the ox being gored on the other side.” After all, Donaldson contended, “he said what a lot of Americans are also saying, that that Arizona law is discriminatory.”

Host Jake Tapper pointed out “that law is actually supported by a majority of Americans” and expressed bewilderment at Donaldson’s reasoning: “I can't believe that you're actually comparing it to Tiananmen Square, right? I mean, you’re not?” Donaldson assured Tapper “I’m not comparing a massacre in Tiananmen Square to what’s happening in Arizona. But you raised the subject of having someone come to another country and lecture them.”

Instead of backing off, fellow ABC News vet Cokie Roberts, who used to co-host This Week with Donaldson, reaffirmed his point: “Our Presidents certainly do it. Israel about settlements. You know, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’”

Although Sam Donaldson wouldn't go so far as calling senatorial candidate Rand Paul a racist, he did say that he'd be shocked if enough people in Kentucky voted for the Tea Party candidate in November to send him to Congress.

As the Roundtable discussion of Sunday's "This Week" moved to Paul's primary victory on Tuesday, Donaldson said that comments the Tea Partier made about the Civil Rights Act on "The Rachel Maddow Show" were "stupid."

"So who is going to win in Kentucky? I can't predict," he said adding, "But I would be shocked -- I'll say that now -- if Rand Paul gets most of Kentucky's votes and becomes the senator" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Painting conservatives as racists is a favorite pastime of the mainstream media and a recent move by Republican Virginia governor Bob McDonnell gave them more ammunition to do just that.

McDonnell issued a proclamation on April 2 stating April would be Confederate History Month, but failed to note the role slavery played in the U.S. Civil War that lasted from 1861-1865. Commentators and journalists seized upon McDonnell's omission as proof that conservatives are inherent racists, despite an apology and later inclusion in the proclamation of a strong statement condemning slavery.

In his apology, McDonnell called slavery an "abomination" and explained that the proclamation was "solely intended to promote the study of our history, encourage tourism in our state in advance of the 150th Anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, and recognize Virginia's unique role in the story of America."

These allegations of racism against conservatives have percolated in the media since Barack Obama's election in 2008. "Confederate" or "Confederacy" has been used 60 times in news reports on ABC, CBS and NBC since November 4, 2008, but it's this proclamation, coupled with the anger over the recently passed health care reform, that had some in the media wondering if conservatives were ready to wage Civil War Redux.

On ABC’s This Week, when retired ABC newsman Sam Donaldson recommended that President Barack Obama nominate, to replace Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, someone who “is going to stand up for the principles – on the left, if you will – that he believes in,” Cokie Roberts jumped in: “I’m not so sure he is so far to the left.” Donaldson agreed: “Well, I’m not sure either.”

Minutes later, Roberts contended the efforts of state attorneys general, to get a federal court to rule unconstitutional ObamaCare’s requirement every citizen get health insurance, reminded her of the “nullification” which led to the Civil War:

You have these fourteen states attorneys general saying that they want to have the court overturn the recently passed health care law. I must say, I was just with my grand kids at Fort Sumter, and the notion of nullification made me extremely nervous because it was, of course, the first step toward the Civil War.

For the second time in six days, liberal publisher Arianna Huffington stuck her foot in her mouth on national television only to get corrected by numerous others on camera.

Appearing on Sunday's "This Week" on ABC, Huffington foolishly claimed that Supreme Court justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter would never be appointed by a Republican President today due to "how far the Party has traveled," obviously meaning to the Right.

All three of her fellow Roundtable panelists were quick to correct her flawed logic beginning with Sam Donaldson (video follows with partial transcript, relevant section at 9:20):

It might seem a little shocking to hear two NPR women standing up for Sarah Palin. But on Wednesday's Tell Me More talk show, host Michel Martin and analyst Cokie Roberts took offense at a weeks-old joke on the Imus show on Fox Business about Palin's first Sunday-show interview on Fox News Sunday:

DON IMUS: When you interview her, will she be sitting on your lap?

CHRIS WALLACE: One can only hope.

Roberts was "appalled" and Martin saw in this ribbing a "tool of social control" to put Palin in her place:

Journalists love the marketplace of ideas until people start selling ideas they find objectionable. The liberal media somehow manages to shout about its right to speak freely while demanding others be silenced.

Glenn Beck is probably the most popular target for the left's demands for censorship. Cokie Roberts and her husband Steve picked up that ball and ran with it today in their joint syndicated column. They dubbed Beck "a traitor to the American values he professes so loudly to defend" and claimed he is "corrupting the very essence of democracy." And all this just by speaking.

Unsurprisingly, the immense damage Beck is doing to the American political process can only be demonstrated anecdotally:

ABC’s Cokie Roberts, who last December asserted that a "lot of people are going to like a whole lot once they see what's in" ObamaCare, during today’s Roundtable discussion on ABC’s This Week defended the "substance" of the health care bill Democrats in the House are being pressured to vote for, as she referred to civil rights legislation that cost some Democrats their seats and argued that this year some Democrats will "lose their seats over process, but they will take the chance because of the substance."

Before dismissing Republican criticisms of Democrats as inevitable, she argued that parts of the bill are popular and recommended that Democrats push ahead: "The truth is the public is divided on this bill, and when you go into questions about how they feel about particular aspects of it, there's a lot they like. The Democrats have calculated, I think correctly, that they have nothing more to lose on the host of process questions. ... Democrats might as well get the substance and go to the American people and say we've brought about a change in health care because the status quo is unacceptable."

After conservative panel member George Will argued that it is "not good politics" for Democrats to vote for a bill they do not support while depending on a promise by Senate leaders that elements they disagree with will be changed later, Roberts continued to defend the bill:

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman says Congressman Charles Rangel's (D-N.Y.) ethics scandal has absolutely no national significance.

As the Roundtable segment of ABC's "This Week" turned to new revelations concerning the powerful Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Sunday, the New York Times columnist was all by himself in making the case that Rangel hasn't really done anything wrong.

"I'm unhappy with this," he said. "I wish Rangel would go away, but it's, it really has no national significance."

Krugman actually said this after everyone on the panel, including host Elizabeth Vargas, Cokie Roberts, and Sam Donaldson, discussed how egregious Rangel's ethics violations were (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

With the exception of George Will, the panel on ABC’s This Week (hosted by Terry Moran) roundtable insisted Scott Brown’s Massachusetts Senate seat victory was less an anti-liberal or anti-Obama vote than simply a “pox on both your houses “and “throw the bums” out choice when Democrats happened to be in power. (On Face the Nation, Nancy Cordes described Brown as a “true Republican moderate” and dreamed he “could make being a moderate cool again.”)

Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson also contended people really want ObamaCare and so the White House, Donaldson asserted, should have pushed it more “vigorously” and he despaired that “Republicans were able the make the idea that being on a government health program is terrible. How absurd.”

ABC News veteran Roberts declared of Brown’s win: “I think it's much more the process than the substance” as voters said “‘a pox on both your houses. You know, we don't like any of you guys’” since “when you ask which party do you trust more with various issues, the Republicans do worse than the Democrats. So it's not a Republican tide, but it is a ‘throw the bums out’ tide.”
 
The retired ABC newsman Sam Donaldson echoed it was “throw the bums out” and “the bums at the moment happen to be in. They're the Democrats. And, therefore, I don't care what your name is, or how much experience you have or don't have, or what your positions are even. You're the other guy.” Former George W. Bush campaign chief Matthew Dowd agreed “it wasn't a Republican victory. It was a victory for an outsider.”

“There's a lot in” the health care bill as it now stands -- even without the “public option” or expanded Medicare -- “that people are going to like” and a “lot of people are going to like a whole lot once they see what's in it,” ABC News veteran Cokie Roberts contended on Sunday's This Week as she blamed Democratic messaging, not the substance, for declining support: “I think the Democrats lost control of the argument – the message – and that's why the polls are as they are.”

If the public just understood all the great things in it, she scolded, they'd realize the Christmas gift they're getting from those Democrats: “It's just a question of understanding it and the Democrats should have been getting that out there more.” As if hey haven't had the news media on their side. Amongst the wonderful benefits: “For he first time” there will be “totally paid-for long term care insurance.” Totally paid for by whom?

Roberts soon praised Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's deal-making and payoffs: “The person that I have really new-found respect for is Harry Reid, who just has this Senate in session relentlessly until they do this.”

ABC's George Stephanopoulos actually brought up the ClimateGate scandal as a topic for discussion during the Roundtable segment on Sunday's "This Week."

As NewsBusters has been reporting since this story broke more than a week ago, television news outlets have been quite disinterested in the controversy now growing with each passing day.

Breaking this trend, Stephanopoulos aggressively waded into this seemingly verboten subject by mentioning how it complicates President Obama's trip to "Copenhagen to deal with climate change."

George Will of course agreed saying that the release of these e-mail messages raises a serious question about why America should "wager trillions of dollars and substantially curtail freedom on climate models that are imperfect and unproven."

Not surprisingly, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman found "not a single smoking gun" in those e-mail messages (video in two parts embedded below the fold with transcript and commentary by myself and others involved in this debate):

Good Morning America on Monday began a week of coverage on Sarah Palin’s new book by repeatedly fact checking claims from the Republican and highlighting a attack by the liberals’ favorite "conservative," New York Times columnist David Brooks. Reporter Kate Snow asserted that "even conservatives are on the attack" against Palin.

She then played a clip of Brooks, who has previously gone after Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others: "Yeah, she's a joke. I mean I just can't take her seriously. The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the Republican nomination, believe me, it'll never happen."

Longtime ABC journalist Cokie Roberts on Sunday harshly criticized fugitive director Roman Polanski, going so far as to joke, "As far as I’m concerned, just take him out and shoot him." Appearing on the internet-only segment of This Week, she bluntly stated, "But, Roman Polanski is a criminal. You know, he raped and drugged and raped and sodomized a child. And then was a fugitive from justice." She followed up with her "shoot him" quip.

Roberts’ comments were in stark contrast to the cautious remarks coming from many other journalists. On Monday’s Good Morning America, host Diane Sawyer referred to the director's arrest for the 1977 rape of a 13-year old as an "international incident." On Tuesday, Sawyer described the capture of Polanski in Switzerland as the culmination of "a 31 year-old prosecutorial obsession."