Rosie O'Donnell

CNN's Piers Morgan never even tried to conceal his support for gay marriage while he hosted "special guest" Rosie O'Donnell for the one-year anniversary of his prime-time CNN show. The Tuesday interview morphed into a GOP-bashing festival as the two liberals derided some Republicans for their "anti-gay" remarks. Morgan never pressed O'Donnell about her past espousal of 9/11 "truther" conspiracies.

O'Donnell slammed America as a "backward nation in many ways" after being egged on by her interviewer on the topic of homosexuality. Morgan had branded certain GOP presidential candidates as "anti-homosexuals" and expressed his dismay at "the virulence of their rhetoric." [Video below the break.]

Rosie O'Donnell, possibly one of the most uninformed people to ever be given a television program, actually ridiculed the intellectual capacity of Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich Thursday.

Appearing with fellow brainiac Joy Behar on the HLN program thankfully in its final shows, O'Donnell called the former Speaker of the House a "joke" saying, "Perhaps he should read a history book" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Perhaps you've seen it, the video of former Marine Corps sergeant Shamar Thomas accusing New York City police of brutality against Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Since the footage was posted Oct. 16 on YouTube, left-wing media have embraced Thomas as their one of their own, showering him with attention while avoiding potentially awkward questions about his background, such as Thomas's claim that his mother fought in Iraq and his father was deployed to Afghanistan. (video and audio clips after page break)

Ten years after the attacks of September 11, it’s worth recalling how the immediate reaction of some on the far Left was to blame the United States foreign policy for instigating the attacks, and how various Hollywood celebrities spent the remainder of the decade trashing the War on Terror and likening the United States to some sort of Nazi regime or police state. Some even promoted wild conspiracies that the United States government had participated in the attacks themselves, or was sheltering terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.

Here, culled from the MRC’s vast archives, are 25 blood-boiling quotes showcasing the Hollywood Left’s outrageous take on the War on Terror over the past ten years, with links to several videos:

On Wednesday's edition of the Rosie O'Donnell show, Rosie went after Sarah Palin as an ignoramus as she lamented that Obama had to go through hoops to produce a birth certificate: "[Obama] has just released his actual birth certificate...He asked [Hawaii] to break their law and release it to shut all these idiots up."

But when you start attacking other people as ignorant, it's probably a bad idea to start mangling words and getting things wrong: "Sarah Palin has ushered in a whole new level of ignorance as a consumerable quantity." Consumerable? If Palin said "consumerable," how many reporters and comedians would rejoice? (See "refudiate.")

From the Making Mischief Department, NB reader Thomas Stewart sent in a NB link to Rosie O'Donnell's "Ask Ro" feature on Rosie.com. My headline on a February 27 blog post was "Rosie O'Donnell Offers 'Giant Hug' to Helen Thomas: A Summit of Role Models?" When faced with this link, O'Donnell simply answered "yes that is true".

Some think this could mean she was again complimenting Helen as a "role model," as she did when they met up at CNN. But the question was whether this was a "summit" of role models, meaning both women were stellar human beings. 

America was horrified by the story that erupted in the national news, that Rutgers college freshman Tyler Clementi threw himself off a bridge because his new roommate used a webcam to tape a homosexual encounter in which he’d engaged. Media outlets quickly dispatched their cavalry to find the experts to explain why America is a land of incessant bullying.

Theif is no longer debatable. We’re on to the why.

This could have been a moment of national unity. Almost everyone can tell a story of being the target of bullying or mean-spirited ridicule about being too tall, too short, too fat, too skinny, too dumb, too smart, you name it. But others found this tragedy offered too rich a rhetorical opportunity. It was not a suicide to them. It was a murder.

CNN's “Larry King Live” brought on the antonym of human dignity, Kathy Griffin, who quickly inflamed the Clementi moment by charging “the blood's on their hands” of our “so-called leaders.” She insisted, “I think that the way that we had trickle-down economics in the '80s, this is trickle-down homophobia. And I really want people to connect the dots. And that's why I believe there's a connection between Prop 8, Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and now the string of teen suicides.”

Brian Maloney at the Radio Equalizer blog reports what should have been expected: Rosie O'Donnell hates Christine O'Donnell. "So she apparently has said some pretty crazy s--t," Rosie announced on her XM/Sirius satellite radio show Thursday. "Apparently, there's no chance a candidate like this can win. Is that what they're saying? I have a fear that the opposite may be true."

(Wild-eyed liberal radio host Mike Malloy denounced O'Donnell as only he can: "And then this freakish, Barbie-doll-looking-woman from Delaware -- where do these people come from?...These are robots, obviously. These are huge walking, farting dolls of some sort I guess.")

For "crazy" crap, Rosie's producers found a clip they said was "much more recent" than O'Donnell's chats with Bill Maher in 1996 -- but actually, it was from a C-SPAN interview on AIDS prevention programs from 1997. As summarized by the left-wingers at Talking Points Memo:

As part of the 5th anniversary celebration of NewsBusters we have started a weekly Five for Five feature to list the blog's top twenty five posts. Last time, we looked at the top five posts on journalistic Obamagasms. On Friday we concluded with the top five posts of outrageous media outbursts.

We have picked out a couple posts from each of the five categories and asked the authors to reflect back on writing them up. In this series of short videos, they share their thoughts on how they caught the particular media moment and describe the impact their post had.

We finish our video look back by reflecting on two of top posts of outrageous media outbursts: "Rosie O'Donnell Spouts 9/11 Conspiracies: 'First Time in History Fire Has Ever Melted Steel'" by Justin McCarthy (reflection by Rich Noyes) and "Maher Buys Into Claim Sarah Palin's Baby Son Really Her Grandson" by Brent Baker.

Check out the last video of NewsBusters' Tim Graham and Kyle Drennen remembering some of the top posts on journalistic Obamagasms.

Editor's Note: For the list of NewsBusters T-shirt contest winners, skip to the end of this post. 

All good things must come to an end, and so it is with Five for Five.

In our final installment, we look at the Top Five Outrageous Outbursts by liberal media journalists and/or celebrities over the past five years. We start with an honorable mention we just couldn't let pass without notice: Ted Turner from April 2008 predicting that global warming would lead to mass cannibalism.

You can view that video below the page break.

On Wednesday's edition of Rosie Radio on Sirius/XM satellite radio, Rosie O'Donnell's staffers sounded more radical than Rosie on the topic of the Ground Zero mosque proposal:

"GOOGLE PETE" MELE (staffer): I get very angry at [opposition to the mosque]...It is beyond un-American.  

BOBBY PEARCE (staffer): Right. I agree.

MELE: ...This sort of persecution, blindly, of one group is what was going on in Germany in the 1930s...You can't say because [Muslims were behind the 9/11 attacks], we can't have them doing anything in our country.

DEIRDRE DOD (staffer): I don't think that's what [opponents of the mosque are] saying...They're saying [that they] want this as a sacred site...They're not saying, 'We hate [Muslims].'

Into this fracas came O'Donnell, with the peace offering that radical Islam and radical Christianity are very similar:

Rosie O'Donnell was in the news this week when she signed to do another TV talk show on the forthcoming Oprah cable network. But she's still serving up leftist political goodies on her satellite radio show. Brian Maloney at Radio Equalizer found her declaring her "wedding" ceremony in San Francisco to former girlfriend Kelli Carpenter was a political protest stunt:

George Bush, in the middle of a war, had an all-station news conference to announce how horrible it was for the safety of America that gay people were getting married in San Francisco, which pissed me off enough to get on a plane and go get married.

Okay, first of all, on February 24, 2004, President Bush didn't call "an all-station news conference." He made a rather routine statement (not a press conference) in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. And he didn't say it was "horribly for the safety of America" that gays would marry. He did say the people had voted to endorse the traditional definition of marriage, and some activist judges in Massachusetts and city officials in San Francisco were overturning the will of the people of California. But to Rosie, everything she hears is exaggerated into hate, even as Bush called for civility and calm. She was making it sound like the Nazis were rounding people up:

The rumor mill concerning Rosie O'Donnell landing a new daytime show heated up Monday when Gossip Cop reported the comedienne is in talks with NBC.

Apparently, the stumbling block is that the broadcasting company wants an out clause in case Rosie implodes like she did on ABC's "The View" three years ago.

As NewsBusters reported on May 23, 2007, O'Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck got into quite a fight about the war in Iraq that was so caustic it ended up being Rosie's last day on the show. She and ABC agreed to terminate her contract days later.

With this in mind, according to Gossip Cop, NBC isn't taking any chances:

The media reaction to the Obama administration's handling of the BP Gulf oil spill crisis has been a mixed bag. But it hasn't been good.

Some are arguing President Barack Obama has gone too far and overstepped his legal authority and some are arguing he hasn't gone far enough with the "boot on the throat" mentality. And on his June 17 Fox News Channel program, Glenn Beck played three separate examples of these differences you normally wouldn't associate with one another - CNBC's Matt Nesto, liberal flame-thrower and comedian Rosie O'Donnell and MSNBC's Ed Schultz.

"Even the people at NBC are noticing maybe something is not right," Beck said.

Beck was referring to comments made by Nesto on CNBC's June 16 "Closing Bell," which Nesto emphasized his concerned over the President's action.

On her satellite radio show on Monday, Rosie O'Donnell accused BP of "willful homicide, willful mass murder" and demanded BP be nationalized immediately: "I say seize their assets. Right now. Seize their assets today. Take over the [company]. I don't care [how]. Issue an executive order...Call it socialism, call it communism, call it anything you want. Let's watch Rush Limbaugh explode on TV...Seize the assets. Take over BP."

From there, she ripped on piggish Americans in general: "We're all culpable in America. We all fill up our gas-guzzler cars. We all don't have solar power on our window[s]. We have been sold the drugs by the dealer, which is our own government, of oil, and we've been shootin' up and we're addicted to it...It's making all of us sick, just as if we were shootin' heroin...This time, we've screwed with Mother Earth. We broke the freakin' womb of Mother Earth...We split it open, and she's hemorrhaging."

O'Donnell's executive producer Janette Barber offered a solution: "Let's pay $20 a gallon rather than kill thousands of innocent people, 'cause that's what we're talking about."

An emerging defense of Helen Thomas's "Jews go home" comment is that either what she said really was not that bad, or that others occasionally say worse things without the same level of reproach.

Richard Greener, writing at the Huffington Post on Monday, was so close to making a good point. He noted that a number of other public figures have said things that could reasonably be interpreted as more offensive than Helen Thomas's comment, and have not been forced into retirement.

Though Greener neglected to note the higher standard to which White House correspondents are inevitably held, his credibility was instantly reduced to ashes when the only example of vitriol from the left he could come up with was Keith Olbermann saying Sarah Palin is "an idiot." And he even followed it up with a pathetic attempt to satiate his readership's intense hatred for Palin (and Olby affection) by noting that "perhaps truth is an absolute defense."

On her April 5 satellite radio show, Rosie O'Donnell took her anti-Catholicism to a new level by likening the Catholic Church to the Jonestown cult. As Brian Maloney of The Radio Equalizer put it, "in Rosie's twisted world, there's really no distinction to be made between the Pope and Jim Jones, murderous cult leader responsible for the deaths of more than 900 people in the Guyanese jungle."

O'Donnell certainly has a past of Catholic/Christian bashing. On the April 19, 2007 edition of ABC's The View, she expressed her concern that having five Catholic Supreme Court justice somehow violated the separation of church and state (Barbara Walters actually defended these justices in response). Later in 2007, the Catholic League placed an ad in the New York Times complaining about O'Donnell and her then-colleague Joy Behar's anti-Catholic remarks on the ABC daytime program.

I must have missed the groundswell of support and the public clamor for the return of Rosie O'Donnell to the daytime airwaves. It seemed that her time in the cultural spotlight had passed following her notorious 2008 variety show failure (It was hailed by one merciful critic as "dead on arrival") and her exile to a daily Sirius XM radio show that caters to creepy shut-ins and those unlucky listeners who can't figure out how to tune-in to Howard Stern. But like some sort of loudmouthed, frumpy, left-wing vampire who just won't stay in the ground, she is threatening to rise again with a terrifying plan to replace Oprah once the Queen of Daytime TV retires in 2011. Someone in Hollywood, please - break out the garlic.

Of course, I'm hardly Rosie's daily television show target demographic. I work for a living instead of sitting at home staring slack-jawed at the succession of Sham-Wow commercials and ads for shyster lawyers promising big payouts for the imaginary injuries of their deadbeat clients that fill the time between inane segments of mindless yak. And while the social parasite demographic seems to grow larger after every freebie, hand-out and pay-off the Administration and its Congressional flunkies issue in favor of their employment-averse constituents, Rosie O'Donnell still seems like a bad economic bet.

For general discussion and debate. Possible talking point: Is someone REALLY going to give this thing its own show?

My sources say that Rosie will fill the void left by Oprah Winfrey starting in the fall of 2011. Rosie was overheard telling pals at Joe Allen’s restaurant in New York last night that deal is almost done to restore her to her place as Queen of DaytimeTalk.

Advertisers may welcome her return, but will the public? 

Rosie O'Donnell made two things clear yesterday: an article written by the Culture & Media Institute's Colleen Raezler got under her skin, and Rosie is clueless about NewsBusters. [Audio available here.]

Raezler penned a piece on O'Donnell's recent comments on the "QuiverFull" movement, in which the radio host called the movement "even scarier" because it is made up of conservative Christians. O'Donnell noticed the article, and had this to say on her March 18 XM "Rosie Radio" show:

There's a lot of posts about the QuiverFull movement. Remember ... I was saying how [girlfriend] Tracy loves the Duggars? ...This is this crazy woman, Colleen Razier [sic], some Christian something. [Rosie reads from the NewsBusters post.] Oh, God ... I just wanna say, Colleen, why don't you come on the show and chat with me face to face, little Colleen Razier [sic] from the NewsBusters evangelical Christian media blog [sic] ... Those people are weird.  

NewsBusters is evangelical Christian? Who knew?

Given recent liberal statements disparaging having children, it's easier to understand left-wing opposition to a pro-life amendment to the health care reform bill. Just one day after Rosie O'Donnell essentially stated that public funding of abortion would solve the problem of paying for "all of the unwanted kids and the half-million of them in foster care," she disparaged the QuiverFull movement as "even scarier" when she found it was made up of conservative evangelical Christians.

QuiverFull became a topic of discussion on O'Donnell's March 16 Sirius XM "Rosie Radio" after she mentioned that her new girlfriend enjoyed watching the TLC program "19 and Counting," about the Duggar family. [Audio available here .]

The Duggars have 19 children and are part of the movement, in which married couples forgo birth control to give God complete control over how many children they will have.

"That's their religion. It's a movement among [stated in a fake-Southern accent] conservative evangelical Christians," explained Pete Mele, a staff member.

"Oh. Uh-huh. Even scarier," O'Donnell interrupted.

Professional conspiracy theorist (and former independent Minnesota Governor) Jesse Ventura hawked his book American Conspiracies on ABC’s The View on Wednesday. Barbara Walters plays a journalist on TV, so why would she spread horrific and unproven conspiracy theories on ABC? Just for the ratings?

The View began with this promo: "Jesse Ventura’s blowing the lid off American conspiracies. Why he says you were lied to about the 9-11 attacks. How both George W. Bush elections were rigged, and why assassinations from JFK to Abe Lincoln were government coverups."

The actual interview never turned to rigged Bush elections, but Walters (and Elisabeth Hasselbeck) objected to the notion that George W. Bush allowed or participated in 3,000 American deaths. But Walters ended by spreading the Ventura book free to the audience:

March is Women's History Month, in which we acknowledge the accomplishments and contributions of women in history and in society today.

But for a select group of women - conservative women - their accomplishments and contributions are rarely celebrated but often demeaned and mocked in sexist - and crassly sexual - ways.

The Culture & Media Insitute looked back at what the media had to say over the past year about some of today's most prominent conservative women, including Michelle Malkin, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Sarah Palin and Liz Cheney, and compiled a list of the 10 worst attacks on these women who dare to speak out in favor of conservative values.

Much of the criticism was the worst sort of misogyny with a dose of violence and disgusting adolescent sex references thrown in for good measure. The media outlets in question ranged from Playboy magazine to MSNBC to Sirius XM radio and included comments from both men and women.

The message that rang through loud and clear was that perspectives from conservative women were not appreciated or welcomed, and if a woman stepped out of line, she deserved whatever treatment she received.

Greg Gutfeld and the "Red Eye" gang struck back at comediennes Janeane Garofalo and Rosie O'Donnell Wednesday for their attack on Fox News hosts last week. 

As NewsBusters reported, the pair were on O'Donnell's radio show last Tuesday bashing Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Sustern, and Brit Hume just to name a few.

With this in mind, Gutfeld and Company decided to use Robot Theater to demonstrate what Garofalo and O'Donnell must have discussed that evening after the interview.

Making it even more delicious, the Robots shared their infatuation with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann (video embedded below the fold with transcript):