New Yorker

Once again touting the latest cover of New Yorker magazine, NBC Today co-host Matt Lauer lobbed this softball to President Obama in a pre-Super Bowl interview: "...you watching the big game on TV...on screen it's not the Patriots and the Giants. It's Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, same team, and they are pummeling each other. And look at the smile on your face there. Is art imitating life here?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Obama began to answer: "Well, you know, look, I've been through these primaries, they're tough." Lauer quickly followed up: "But does this help you?" In an interview with Mitt Romney on Wednesday, Lauer promoted the same magazine cover and wondered about the ongoing primary race: "How can it not damage you?"

Alex Wagner made an eye-popping remark on her MSNBC program on Wednesday, as she hinted that she agreed with former Obama spokesman Bill Burton's assertion that Ronald Reagan would feel out of place in today's GOP. When Burton claimed that "Reagan wouldn't have a chance in this Republican primary right now," Wagner stunningly replied, "I think he'd be a Democrat probably" [audio available here; video below the jump].

The anchor, a former employee of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, also touted a quote from Thomas Mann of The Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of AEI, who claim in an upcoming book that the Republican Party has become "an insurgent outlier- ideologically extreme...scornful of compromise...and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, New York magazine's John Heilemann - also an MSNBC analyst and formerly of The New Yorker - made a gay joke about GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum as he described the competitive election in Iowa. (Video below)

After host Stephen Colbert, playing the part of committed conservative wanting to pump up Santorum, asked of the Iowa results, "So, Santorum, this is a victory, right? He may have lost, but it's a victory," Heilemann took a shot at the former Pennsylvania Senator in his response:

In an otherwise typically dismal column about President Barack Obama which is one part pity party and another part an attempt at building him a he-man reputation (not kidding), New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd describes an upcoming movie featuring the exploits of Navy SEAL Team 6 in the operation which killed Osama Bin Laden on May 1.

Dowd celebrates the fact that the movie's currently anticipated opening is October 12, 2012, describing it as "perfectly timed" and "just as Obamaland was hoping." She expects that it will "give a home-stretch boost to a campaign that has grown tougher," and "counter Obama’s growing reputation as ineffectual."

Here are the relevant paragraphs from Dowd's column, including reference to a New Yorker column about the operation which has become the subject of considerable controversy (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

On Monday, PBS talk show host Charlie Rose decided to discuss the passage of a "gay marriage" law in New York with two New York Times reporters and a writer for The New Yorker -- not exactly a divided or diverse panel. CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin (also with The New Yorker) predicted to Rose that we're less then ten years out from the Supreme Court proclaiming "gay marriage" must be recognized in all 50 states:

The question I have is, when will the Supreme Court arrest the issue, because I don't think they are in any rush to do it. I think at the end of the day they will say that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right. You can`t have one kind of marriage for straight people and one kind of non-marriage for gay people. But I don't think they are in any rush to do that and I think it will maybe be five years or maybe be ten years, and at that point the whole country will have it.

The Washington Post on Friday took on Seymour Hersh's outlandish conspiracy theory that "neo-conservative" members of Opus Dei and the Knights of Malta inside the military "overthrew the American government" and are waging a "crusade" against Muslims. The newspaper reported that, contrary to Hersh's claims, General Stanley McChrystal was not a member of either organization, and that there was "little evidence of a broad fundamentalist conspiracy within the military."

Writer Paul Farhi began his article, "Hersh rebuked on 'crusaders,'" by stating that the journalist for The New Yorker's "latest revelation is drawing some puzzled reactions and angry denunciations." After recounting Hersh's accusations from his recent speech, that he "advanced the notion that U.S. military forces are directed and dominated by Christian fundamentalist 'crusaders' bent on changing 'mosques into cathedrals'" and his accusations against McChrystal and other members of the special operations community, Farhi continued that there "seem to be a few problems with Hersh's assertions," and quoted from the former general's spokesman:

"Postscript: Sargent Shriver" appears on The New Yorker's Web site today.  In it, senior editor Hendrik Hertzberg writes:

In 1972, when George McGovern’s original running mate, Senator Thomas Eagleton, had to withdraw, Shriver defied the family pecking order by taking Eagleton’s place on the ticket. The Democrats had their problems that year, but Shriver wasn’t one of them. He was a magnificent candidate.

It's doubtful that the late Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill (D-MA), who knew a thing or two about campaigning, would have agreed.

The Tea Parties are driving the liberals crazy. They charged that Tea Partiers were racists but that pretty much backfired on them when they were unable to collect on the $100,000 Breitbart prize offered for any video evidence of racial epithets that were supposedly hurled at congressmen on March 20 at the Capitol. Now it seems that they have gone back to the Nancy Pelosi charge of accusing the grassroots Tea Party of being an "astroturf" organization. And who is suposedly financing them? According to a New Yorker hit piece article written by Jane Mayer, much of the money is coming from businessmen brothers, Charles and David Koch.

Of course, any article complaining about businessmen contributing to conservative causes will have a big elephant in the room in the form of George Soros who pours hundreds of millions into the far left movement. And that elephant is so large that even Mayer can't ignore it. So what to do? Why, portray Soros as saintly. So start plucking your harps as you read the hilarious money quote Mayer employs to explain away this hypocritical matter by presenting the "benevolent" Soros floating upon his heavenly cloud:

Of course, Democrats give money, too. Their most prominent donor, the financier George Soros, runs a foundation, the Open Society Institute, that has spent as much as a hundred million dollars a year in America. Soros has also made generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s. But Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.”

It's one thing for a so-called journalist to claim media members in 2008 were all taken with the historical notion of electing the country's first black President, but it's quite another to say they were right in doing so.

Despite the seeming absurdity, this is exactly what the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the New Yorker magazine told the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz Sunday.

During the "Reliable Sources" interview of David Remnick, Kurtz noted that in his new biography about Barack Obama, Remnick wrote, "[D]uring the campaign...Obama received generally adoring press coverage."

After giving a few examples, Kurtz asked, "What came over the press in 2007 and 2008 when it came to Barack Obama?"

Readers are likely to find some of Remnick's answer quite disturbing (video follows with transcript and commentary): 

Catching up on an item from the first episode of PBS’s Need to Know program, which aired on Friday, May 7, liberal satirist Andrew Borowitz suggested that Sarah Palin and Minnesota Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann are two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse during the show’s regular "Next Week’s News" humor segment: "Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann will announce that they are looking for, quote, ‘two additional horsemen.’" Imagery of fire burning behind Palin and Bachmann was shown as Borowitz read his item.

According to the New Testament’s Book of Revelation, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are four beasts that will arrive before the end of the world, and will represent pestilence, war, famine and death.

As previously documented by NewsBusters, on the May 14 Need to Know, Palin was again targeted by Borowitz as he joked about the intelligence of both Palin and conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Borowitz:

On Friday’s Need to Know program on PBS, during the show’s regular "Next Week’s News" humor segment, as liberal satirist Andrew Borowitz recited four predictions for next week, in two of his items he took shots at the intelligence of prominent conservatives – Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Playing off the upcoming confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, Borowitz predicted:

Blasting Elena Kagan for her lack of judging experience, GOP Senators will propose an alternative: Paula Abdul. As a judge on American Idol, Ms. Abdul often seemed absent and didn’t say anything. But one Senator will argue you could say the same thing about Clarence Thomas.

After poking fun at the idea of people protesting illegal immigration from Canada, and at what leftist Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez may do with his new Twitter account, Borowitz returned to trashing the intelligence of conservatives:

And finally, some news out of Wasilla, Alaska. Sarah Palin will make it official: She has now written more books than she has read. When asked which of her two books is her favorite, Governor Palin will reply, "All of them."

Below is a transcript of the relevant segment from the Friday, May 14, Need to Know on PBS:

Marc Thiessen is perhaps the nation's most prominent advocate of enhanced interrogation. He routinely debunks the left's myths regarding detention and interrogation policy, and has done battle with some of the loudest Bush-bashers of the legacy media along the way.

Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter and author of Courting Disaster, argues that the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques stopped terrorist attacks; saved American lives; and provided our military, intelligence services, and law enforcement officials with vital and actionable intelligence on the enemy.

That is heresy in liberal circles, Old Media chief among them. New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer penned a scathing review of Courting Disaster, in which she accused Thiessen of trying to "rewrite the history of the CIA’s interrogation program." Thiessen responded in National Review, and demonstrated just how desperate the liberal media is to paint Bush-era policies in a negative light.

Unsurprisingly, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham bowed deeply to New Yorker editor David Remnick and his new book on their agreed-upon hero, Barack Obama: "envy gives way to admiration" of Remnick’s skills, he wrote in his "Top of the Week" commentary in the magazine. Meacham hyped the notion that when asked about the "racial component of the opposition," Obama told Remnick "I tend to be fairly forgiving about the anxiety that people feel about change."

Neither Obama or the journalists who adore him seem to grasp that conservatives aren’t anxious about "change" – they’re anxious about crushing debt, and America’s lunge toward European-style socialism. Meacham found Obama’s words to Remnick admirable, where most conservatives would find them patronizing, about our slowness to recognize the greatness of the "evolution" unfolding:

Everyone knows Fox isn't "the most trusted name in news," so who is? You guessed it - and at least one media tycoon agrees. Speaking at the University of Missouri as a guest-lecture, Craig Newmark - Craigslist founder and informal Obama technology-advisor - argued that Comedy Central is the most trustworthy news source.

Invited to discuss the future of journalism - where individuals virtually have an endless amount of resources in today's era of new media - Newark stressed how trust and credibility was paramount, emphasizing the exemplary dedication Comedy Central shows have for investigative reporting and fact-checking.

"[R]ight now I think the most trusted news show in the U.S. is the one that does the best investigative reporting and the most trustworthy reporting - and that's ‘The Daily Show,'" Newark said - and he wasn't joking. "Sounds like a joke - isn't."

On Tuesday’s Morning Joe on MSNBC, on the same show in which host Joe Scarborough had earlier complained about FNC’s Bill Sammon claiming that the media "hate" Sarah Palin, guest David Remnick of the New Yorker magazine -- formerly of the Washington Post--  declared that "Sarah Palin’s entire career would be eliminated" if Americans were influenced by seeing "preposterousness" on public display. Remnick’s comment came during a discussion of the Senate’s adherence to the filibuster rule that makes it easier for the minority party to block the passage of legislation. At about 8:09 a.m., Scarborough contended that he would prefer that filibuster participants be required to actually stand up and speak in televised debate so that Americans might see the "preposterousness" of the practice.

Remnick then took his shot at Palin to dismiss Scarborough’s theory that "preposterousness" could wake up the American public. Remnick: "We see a lot of preposterous things in American politics. That doesn’t seem to convince us otherwise. Sarah Palin’s entire career would be eliminated, would pass out of history if preposterousness were somehow disqualifying, but it’s not."

Below is a transcript of the relevant exchange from the Tuesday, February 9, Morning Joe on MSNBC:

In a Page C1 column in Friday's Washington Post about the National Enquirer's plans to apply for a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter affair and love child, Howard Kurtz delivers a completely inexcusable pass to his fellow alleged journalists in the establishment media (bold is mine, internal link is in original):

When the Enquirer first reported in 2007 that Edwards had had an affair with Hunter, the former North Carolina senator dismissed the account as tabloid trash. The rest of the media, having no independent proof, steered clear of the story, even as Edwards, aided by his cancer-stricken wife Elizabeth, was mounting an aggressive campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

Howard's "no independent proof" statement is a howler on one of two possible levels. It's either false on its face (i.e., one or more establishment media reporters had the proof and suppressed it), or it reflects a complete and journalistically negligent lack of interest in a story about a man who, if things had broken differently, could conceivably have become his party's presidential nominee or even the country's chief executive. Either way, Kurtz is unforgivably easy on his fellow "professionals," especially because I have learned that one of his fellow "professionals" had plenty of clues that something was amiss even before the Enquirer's October 2007 story broke.

On Monday’s The O’Reilly Factor, FNC host Bill O’Reilly seemed to pick up on a NewsBusters posting by the MRC’s Brent Baker which highlighted New Yorker magazine writer Rebecca Mead’s commentary from the January 3 CBS Sunday Morning in which Mead touted President Obama as a "certified intellectual," while accusing President Bush of giving terrorists a "partial victory" by creating "infringements of civil liberties." The FNC host took on Mead during his show’s regular "Reality Check" segment, as he introduced clips of her as evidence that network news organizations "skew left big time," and concluded that her analysis should have been "accompanied by a more conservative point of view."

Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Monday, January 4, The O’Reilly Factor on FNC:

Um...Let me guess. Nancy Franklin is somewhat less than enamored with Glenn Beck. In fact, she downright hates and despises him as you can see in her New Yorker article. Ironically Franklin accuses Beck of spreading venom in her incredibly venomous story which concludes by comparing him to the character of Lonesome Rhodes in the excellent 1957 film, A Face in the Crowd.

A few of the "love notes" tossed in Beck's direction:

Glenn Beck, the energetically hateful, truth-twisting radio and Fox News Channel talk-show host, was absent from the airwaves for a week...

The persona that Beck has cobbled together over the past few years combines a determination to draw attention to himself, because what he has to say is so important, with an outsized, in-your-face show of modesty...

Beck looks cherubic, with his boyish crewcut, his rubbery, expressive face, his wide eyes, and his seemingly innocent smile, but he has a wizened heart and a sulfurous outlook on American life and politics.

Fox News' Glenn Beck isn't catching a break anywhere - from "Saturday Night Live," The New Yorker, Al Gore's Current TV and Comedy Central's "South Park." They have all taken shots at the popular TV host.

On his Nov. 16 program, Beck responded to the "South Park" interpretation of him - that he wasn't making accusations, but phrasing them in the form of a question. The show's character Eric Cartman played a spoof of Beck in which he railed against his school's president, Wendy Testaburger. Beck maintained he wasn't making the "accusations" in the form of a question - but playing the words of the "accused" themselves.

"Have we gotten to a place you can't ask questions?" Beck asked. "What were my crazy accusations or questions? Well, the accusation was that Van Jones was a communist revolutionary," Beck said. "I didn't describe him that way. In his own words he described himself that way. He was a 9/11 Truther. He was forced to step down. Was it that the administration was using NEA as a propaganda arm for the administration? That was a question. We played tapes of the call with Yosi Sargent and Yosi Sargent had to step down."

On last night's "Rachel Maddow Show", the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh commended President Obama for taking the reins in Afghanistan. Hersh stated that Presidents must decide their own war strategies. But in the early stages of the war in Iraq, Hersh was a leading critic of similar actions by the Bush administration. Hersh's hypocrisy suggests he is more concerned with the political implications of military policy than strategic ones.

"Lincoln did not let McClellan write a report on how to win a war against the South," Hersh told Maddow, in reference to Gen. George McClellan, initially the top general for the Union during the Civil War. Hersh was offering a historical perspective on why Presidents should not rely on military commanders to form strategy--McClellan was a disastrous general, after all (video embedded below the fold).

The Magazine Publishers of America's American Society of Magazine Editors has added a category to its annual magazine cover awards: Obama. This new category is the only ASME category focused on a single person, and highlights the reverential attitude for the President widely held in the magazine publishing community.

ASME represents about 850 magazine editors nationwide. According to its website, the organization "works to preserve editorial independence." How they manage to maintain this air of objectivity while devoting an entire awards section to such a polarizing figure is a mystery.

This year's best Obama magazine cover, and recipient of ASME's Cover of the Year award, was published by Rolling Stone. Fawning coverage of president and candidate Barack Obama from the music (and wannabe left-wing politics) magazine appeared on the cover on numerous occasions. The winning cover is at right.

Amy Davidson of the New Yorker should take up bowling or gardening because history doesn't seem to be her thang, if you will.

In the aftermath of Barack Obama's own false historical reference of famed WWII era English Prime Minister Winston Churchill made during Wednesday's press conference, Davidson jumped to her keyboard to further garble history with an April 30 blog post on her Close Read blog at the New Yorker website.

On Wednesday, Obama made a reference to an "article" he was reading "the other day" wherein he discovered that during WWII Prime Minister Winston Churchill supposedly said "We don't torture." (Transcript of Obama's remarks) The following morning, Davidson praised Obama for his sentiment and waxed envious over the "very good" article from which Obama gleaned the tale.

There is only one little problem with the whole thing: Churchill NEVER said the line that Obama claimed he said. And further, the "very good article" that Davidson praised was erroneous to say so.

This means Obama was wrong, the article was wrong and so was Davidson's blog post.

We've seen the Obamacized media call President Obama Lincoln, we've heard him called FDR and Kennedy, we've been informed that he gives newsers a thrill up their leg. The media has even ridiculously called Barack Obama a "light worker." He is The One, their Obammessiah. Well, we can now add another undue adulation to the media's obsession of finding great figures to compare Obama to: Mahatma Gandhi. At least according to the New Yorker's Hendrick Hertzberg he is, anyway.

In a piece from February 23, headlined "Partisanship, by the bye," Hertzberg likened Obama's work on the so-called stimulus bill to a "Gandhian" effort because it is going so swimmingly for The One.

Have you noticed a growing trend in the liberal media lately? A reporter finds an "undecided voter" who can't quite figure out for whom to vote for president. Then after a period of "soul-searching," this "undecided voter" finally decides. And guess who they ultimately decide to vote for? Need I even bother to answer that question? In any event, let us take this New Yorker article by George Packer as a typical example of an "undecided voter" deciding. First the set-up in which the bonafides of the "undecided voter" is established (emphasis mine):

I met Jay Pitchford at a coffee shop in Columbus, Ohio, while reporting my campaign piece “The Hardest Vote.” He was almost fifty, a father of three, and a salesman for Liebert, a company that builds battery back-up systems for information technology. He was a neatly dressed, well-spoken, organized man, who lived in a largely Republican area where the neighborhood dads got together once a month on someone’s deck to eat, drink, and talk. Lately the talk had been about the election. Several of the dads were undecided, including Pitchford.

As everyone knows, conservatives are a distinctly disagreeable bunch. Mean-spirited knuckle-draggers, pretty much.  It's therefore a shock to come across one who's actually likeable.  At least if you're Chris Matthews.

Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, a guest on this evening's Hardball, observed that the Obama campaign hasn't quite decided how to go after Sarah Palin.  The first line of attack was on the experience issue, but "now they're saying, OK, let's define her as a right-winger. You know, we'll talk about her views on creationism and some of these other extreme views." That elicited this from the Hardball host.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: She's got a lot of--they are pretty far over. For a person that seems very likeable and mellow, she doesn't look like a political zealot.

Tom Brokaw had his Pauline Kael moment on MSNBC this morning.  Though the story might be apocryphal, the late New Yorker film critic is famously credited with saying she was shocked by Nixon's 1972 victory, since everybody she knew had voted for McGovern.

Here's Brokaw on today's "Morning Joe," discussing the importance of the upcoming debates.

TOM BROKAW: Debates should be judged on two big counts: tonal and substance. You know, are you comfortable with this person?  Look, everybody believes that on debating points, John Kerry probably beat George Bush, the 43rd, the last time around. But people liked Bush.

Update below.

Vanity Fair magazine thought it amusing to have artist Tim Bower work up a mock magazine cover that lampoons the now-infamous satirical depiction of Sen. Barack Obama as a Muslim and his wife as a gun-slinging leftist radical (h/t Marc Ambinder). In Bower's cartoon, McCain clutches a walker while his wife waits with vials of prescription medicine. A George W. Bush portrait hangs above the fireplace in which the U.S. Constitution is ablaze. Hmm, sounds really familiar for some reason.

I'm not sure if its because leftists lack originality or Vanity Fair doesn't read West Coast publications, but the parody heavily cribs from Seattle Post-Intelligencer David Horsey's July 15 illustration.

Here are the illustrations side by side:

You might think that a tidal wave of denunciation would ensue if a cartoon depicting John McCain being tortured in a bamboo cage by Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and another person (who might be George W. Bush) were to appear in a supposedly respectable or trendy publication.

You might further think that giving McCain's three torturers stereotypically exaggerated Asian features would only further fuel the outrage.

Sorry to disappoint you, but the cartoon involved appeared last month in Rolling Stone. As far as I can tell, what you are about to see has produced not a single ripple of protest (HT Taxman Blog via tip from Weapons of Mass Discussion):

A week has gone by since the "controversy" over the New Yorker cover featuring Barack and Michelle Obama broke and the media is still wringing their hands in excruciating microanalysis over it. The ironic thing is that the true target of the New Yorker wasn't even Obama and his wife. They meant to satirize a "simplistic rightwing" attitude about the Obamas. Or at least how the left thinks the right views the Obamas. At this point, your humble correspondent will cease comment on the New Yorker cover to avoid the risk of falling into the overanalysis of humor trap that the media has fallen into on this topic. Instead, let us now watch as Lee Siegel, writing in today's New York Times, presents an agonizing microanalysis of the Obama New Yorker cover (emphasis mine):