Tea Parties

Tina Brown, the founder and editor of the online publication the "Daily Beast," said Sunday that conservative talk show host Glenn Beck "has become sort of the white Malcolm X."Chatting with Howard Kurtz on CNN's "Reliable Sources," Brown said of Beck, "I think that he's a fascinating demagogue, actually."She continued, "It's white racial politics, in a sense, because he's really saying -- a lot…

On Wednesday, CBS’s Bob Schieffer contended the rise of Tea Party candidates “is very much like 1964” when the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater who “was far to the right of most of the people in his party, and they lost in a landslide.” On Sunday morning, another liberal media thinker moved ahead eight years to forward George McGovern’s 1972 Democratic debacle as the proper analogy: “…

Charles Krauthammer on Friday had a heated debate with the Washington Post's Colby King over what the Tea Party stands for as well as who its leader is.As the panel on PBS's "Inside Washington" discussed Delaware Republican senatorial nominee Christine O'Donnell's surprising victory Tuesday, the conversation naturally gravitated towards the conservative movement reshaping the face of politics.  "…

New York Times political reporter Kate Zernike's thin new book "Boiling Mad -- Inside Tea Party America," is among the first of what will surely be a flood of related books by journalists.Like her reporting for the Times, "Boiling Mad" covers the movement from a mostly hostile perspective that only intermittently becomes something like empathy when she's talking to one of the invariably pleasant…

Bill Maher on Friday said Barack Obama's problem is "he's only half black." He'd be a better president "if he was fully black."In the season premiere of HBO's "Real Time," while chatting with former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich, the host said, "Isn't Obama's big problem is that he does everything half-assed? Maybe it's because he's only half black."Maher continued, "If he was fully black…

CNN's Suzanne Malveaux led Friday's Situation Room by labeling the social conservative Value Voters Summit a "traditional showcase for hardcore conservatives." Later in the same segment, senior political analyst Gloria Borger stated that the Tea Party movement was "anti-health care" and bizarrely referred to Ronald Reagan as "the most secular president we've known in our lifetime."Malveaux used…

Closing out the "Media Mash" segment on the September 16 edition of his eponymous "Hannity" program, the Fox News host asked for NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell's reaction to NBC's Meredith Vieira telling House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) that the Bush tax cuts "didn't succeed" and asking him "what's so good about them?":Memo to Meredith [Vieira]: You can have a debate about what future…

New York Times columnist David Brooks on Friday defended the Tea Party from many of the criticisms commonly uttered by mainstream media members.In so doing, he took a couple of slaps at the conservative movement that continues to usher in surprising election results across the fruited plain.By the end of "The Backlash Myth," Brooks went so far as to say "the Tea Party doesn't matter."But prior to…

New York Times "Tea Party" correspondent Kate Zernike again insisted that the main victims of Tea Party enthusiasm will be, not Democrats, but mainstream Republicans, in Thursday's "G.O.P. Gets a Partner, But Who Will Lead?" It's basically a snapshot of the growing conflict between Sen. Jim DeMint, who has pushed conservative Tea Party candidates, and Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National…

The panic over a looming conservative takeover of Congress in November is becoming palpable in today's liberal media. Take Thursday's editorial in the New York Times for example:For both parties and certainly the broad swath of independent voters, defeating this new crop of Tea Party nominees has become imperative to avoid the sense of national embarrassment from each divisive and offensive…

[Update, Wednesday, 11:15 pm Eastern: The Tweet by O'Brien apparently "doesn't exist" any more. A screen cap of the Tweet in question can be seen after the jump.] Former CNN anchor Miles O'Brien (no relation to current CNN special correspondent Soledad O'Brien) slammed Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell as a "Tea Party nutbag" in a Tweet on Wednesday evening. O'Brien continued that he…

CNN's Rick Sanchez thinks that Ronald Reagan wouldn't even be conservative enough for certain members of the Tea Party. Sanchez discussed Tuesday's Republican Senate Primary in Delaware on his Monday news hour. He criticized the Tea Party's opposition to GOP establishment candidate Congressman Mike Castle as over-the-top, and claimed Castle is "respectable" and "conservative enough" for the…