Alex Rogers and Zeke Miller of Time magazine dutifully hacked out a 16-paragraph item on President Obama's complaint this afternoon that Republicans were the cause of the government shutdown. It was your typical, garden variety bias-by-stenography.
Only at the very end of their article did Rogers and Miller mention that the Democratic National Committee is having a fundraising field day off the work stoppage. There was, however, no mention that the DNC desperately needs the cash because they're drowning in red ink. Reported Fortune magazine's Tory Newmyer yesterday morning:
There's another budget crisis in Washington, and it's unfolding inside the Democratic party. The Democratic National Committee remains so deeply in the hole from spending in the last election that it is struggling to pay its own vendors.
It is a highly unusual state of affairs for a national party -- especially one that can deploy the President as its fundraiser-in-chief -- and it speaks to the quiet but serious organizational problems the party has yet to address since the last election, obscured in part by the much messier spectacle of GOP infighting.
The Democrats' numbers speak for themselves: Through August, 10 months after helping President Obama secure a second term, the DNC owed its various creditors a total of $18.1 million, compared to the $12.5 million cash cushion the Republican National Committee is holding.
You may recall that liberal media outlets like The Daily Beast have slammed Ted Cruz, saying his filibuster against ObamaCare was all about fundraising, yet there's virtually no consideration of how a government shutdown -- hyped by the liberal media as apocalyptic, natch -- helps give Democratic fundraisers a "crisis" to milk for money heading into next year's midterms.
Also lacking from Rogers and Miller was any mention of the fact that President Obama has repeatedly issued veto threats on the continuing resolutions the House has passed, not just the long-shot one defunding ObamaCare but the much more limited one granting Americans a one-year reprieve from the ObamaCare individual purchase mandate.
What's more, Rogers and Miller failed to note that the Democrat-controlled Senate has not killed House-passed bills on a final-passage vote, which is the impression many Americans may erroneously have. What the Senate has done is table the measures, essentially stuffing the bill in a drawer and refusing to debate House changes to the spending measure on an up-or-down vote.
To their credit, Rogers and Miller did note that Reid refused to appoint senators to a conference committee which could possibly hammer out a compromise bill that both houses could vote on, but they failed to include any criticism of Reid's intransigence there, even as they quoted Reid's protest that forming a conference committee was negotiating "with a gun to our head."
So President Obama threatens vetos on House bills and the Democratic Senate refuses to engage anything the Republican House passes up to it -- unless, of course, it meets Harry Reid's and President Obama's demands. Yet neither of these actions are portrayed as inimical to sensible governance in a deeply-divided country.
That's not journalism, that's deliberately coloring political reporting in a partisan manner to favor the Democrats.
