Political Scandals

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had some harsh words Thursday for the Obama administration collecting phone records of millions of Americans. Speaking with Yahoo! News, Paul said, “I think it would be remedial education for those who are doing this. They need to go back and read the Constitution, read the Fourth Amendment, and understand that our records are private.”

Jay Leno continued his string of humorous attacks on the White House Thursday. On NBC’s Tonight Show, the host joked about being worried as a kid about “Big Brother” saying, “Now with Obama, we actually have a brother watching us.”

On Wednesday's NBC Nightly News, chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd cheered President Obama picking Susan Rice to be his new national security advisor and nominating Samantha Power as U.N. ambassador: "They are now among the most powerful women in the American foreign policy community. Behind-the-scenes power players now front and center." Amid sound bites of Obama praising both…

This is some pretty funny stuff. At a Congressional hearing into the Internal Revenue Service scandal Thursday, Farias Fink, the head of the Small Business and Self-Employed Division who played Spock in the IRS's infamous Star Trek parody, apologized for the videos his organization created:

NewsBusters reported Wednesday that MSNBC's Martin Bashir disgracefully accused Republicans of using the acronym "IRS" as the latest racist dog whistle in their "war against the black man in the White House." It turns out that Bashir used a selectively edited quote of former Reagan aide Lee Atwater to make his pathetic case.

MSNBC and Anthony Weiner: made for each other like a frank and a bun? Today's New York Daily News reports that when NYC mayoral candidate Weiner got into an argument on the campaign trail yesterday, he boasted that despite his mistakes, "I am still gonna be out there leaning forward."  "Lean Forward" is of course MSNBC's lefty slogan, featured in many promos that NB has analyzed, as here and…

A Google News search on ["Susan Rice" "executive privilege"] (typed exactly as indicated between brackets) returns two stories. The main one is at Fox News, where K.T. McFarland pointed out that President Obama, now that he has appointed Susan Rice to be his National Security Adviser, can invoke executive privilege to keep her from testifying before Congress. The second is at Mediate, and notes…

Just when you thought the folks at MSNBC couldn't go any lower in defending the current White House resident, someone there stoops to new depths. On the Martin Bashir show Wednesday, the host actually said that Republicans are using the acronym "IRS" as the latest dog whistle in their "war against the black man in the White House" (video follows with fuller transcribed highlights and…

Wednesday's CBS This Morning minimized Susan Rice's refuted claims about the terrorist attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi as they covered her appointment as national security adviser. Charlie Rose and John Dickerson dwelt more on outgoing national security adviser Tom Donilon's term, with Dickerson only vaguely mentioning how Rice was "the focus of so much controversy in the Senate."…

MSNBC continues to disparage the scandals that have plagued the Obama administration the last few weeks. On Sunday’s Weekends with Alex Witt, the host brought on former Democratic staffer Jimmy Williams and former RNC chairman Michael Steele to reluctantly discuss the scandals once again. Of course, rather than focus on the substance of the controversies, Witt fell back on the concern that she…

The patent absurdity of trusting Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate himself is the topic of today's NB ToonsDay:

Media members thinking the Republicans are overplaying their hand with the Internal Revenue Service scandal should pay attention to what happened on NBC’s Tonight Show Monday. When host Jay Leno joked that President Obama should close the IRS rather than the terrorist detention center in Guantanamo Bay, the audience erupted in thunderous applause (video follows with transcript and absolutely…

You can't swing a dead cat these days without hitting some liberal media member cautioning the Republicans to not "overplay their hand" concerning the various scandals now plaguing the White House. Do you remember the press being concerned that the Democrats would overplay 2006's "Republican Culture of Corruption" or last year's "Republican War on Women?"

It's thankfully been a long, long time since we've heard from Keith Olbermann. Unfortunately, he came out of the bathtub long enough on Monday to give a Twitter follower his opinion of Attorney General Eric Holder saying, "He should've resigned or been dismissed after the AP overreach. Instead he made a Fox News figure a martyr":