Columnist.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, demonstrating how Vladimir Putin has zero fear of President Barack Obama, Fox News anchor Bret Baier reran a snippet from the third presidential debate in 2012, showing who felt Russia was a geopolitical threat, and who thought that sounded silly. Obama mocked Mitt Romney for being concerned about Russia. "When you were asked, 'What's the biggest geopolitical threat facing America?' you said Russia. Not al-Qaida. You said Russia, and the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War has been over for 20 years." A clever quip from the man whose foreign policy is a joke.
The Obamas have had few more obsequious media allies than NBC's Jimmy Fallon. Now that he's taking over the hallowed ground of "The Tonight Show," Fallon's proven ability to spread his reach into viral videos on YouTube promises to become even more politically potent. Fallon's Obama-friendly sketches and interviews have become immediate "news" grist for the Comcast corps at NBC and MSNBC. The same sensation happens when Fallon is ripping into a Republican. Just as NBC and MSNBC were tearing Gov. Chris Christie apart over "Bridgegate," Fallon joined this political crusade by bringing on liberal rock star Bruce Springsteen for a jokey version of the hit "Born to Run."
Media liberals are howling at the apparent injustice of the "anti-Clinton" Washington Free Beacon website, which has dared to paw through old Hillary Clinton history. The hypocrisy is stunning. Let us recall the avalanche of mean-spirited and sleazy "fair game" the networks assembled for us just a few years ago in the last election cycle. Sarah Palin? She didn't even run, but NBC and Savannah Guthrie needed no documentary evidence to repeat every scurrilous accusation of leftist author Joe McGinniss: She was a horrible mother who used her children as props. Her marriage was a mess of incessant fighting on the verge of divorce. Both Palins used cocaine. And Sarah Palin once slept with pro basketball player Glen Rice.
The angels cried for Caroline today. How could they not, looking down from the heavens, watching the mourners pack Blessed Sacrament Church. The funeral service was attended by hundreds, those closest to her, those who knew her, and those who knew of her. Those who could not attend found time to pray for her soul. One found the time to write about her. Her closest friends were there, and they, too, cried for Caroline. A number of them had been with her just days before, on Super Bowl Sunday, both to watch the game and to celebrate the 36th birthday of one of their own. These were friends who had met in high school or college, and 15, 20 years later were still close, most of them now married, and with children of their own.
Hidden just below the surface of the liberal media is a barely noticed trend of patronizing contempt: Joe Biden is the Democrats' Dan Quayle, but because he is a Democrat, they'll do anything to avoid treating him like they treated Quayle. The Washington Post recently trumpeted a new poll that showed Hillary Clinton was cleaning Biden's clock in an early poll among Democrats, 73 percent to 12 percent. The Post saw this as great news for Clinton but not as disastrous news for the man who's currently in his second term as vice president. Try to imagine Al Gore pulling 12 percent in a presidential poll during Clinton's second term.
The nastiest corners of popular culture in Hollywood and Manhattan usually love nothing better than denying their filthiness by hectoring orthodox Christians for the sex scandals lurking behind their "judgmental" ways. But the last few weeks have shown that the current aura around Pope Francis, and the false hope that he'll "go native" with the permissive crowd, is exploited in a different way. Rolling Stone put Pope Francis on the cover, which hardly puts a practicing Catholic's mind at ease. But perhaps it was only natural that this weed-and-leftist-screed magazine would try to absolve itself for its horrendous James Dean-like cover of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
As our liberal media continue to obsess over whether Gov. Chris Christie lied about knowing his aides were plotting to cause Bergen County traffic jams, it's worth remembering that our national networks don't care when Democrats lie -- even about their own life stories. Two weeks ago, reporter Wayne Slater of The Dallas Morning News -- the author of two books bashing Karl Rove for being "Bush's Brain" -- wrote an expose on liberal, abortion-loving Democrat Wendy Davis, who's been hyped from coast to coast as "single mom to political phenom." Lots of details aren't true. Even the Dallas paper's headline soft-pedaled it as "key facts blurred."
Everyone proposes drinking games for the State of the Union speech. But it's not just the president that can drive you to drink; it's the opportunistic media elites deciding which branches of government have too much power, depending on which branches the Democrats presently control. After a lot of stalemate in 2013, the partisan media think it's high time for the executive branch to go completely around the legislative branch. They think that now that Congress has proven itself unwilling to provide President Barack Obama with the historical greatness he deserves, they should and must be driven around like roadkill. They'll have no talk of an imperial presidency, let alone autocracy.
CNN anchor Jake Tapper blandly admitted the obvious in a radio interview with conservative host Hugh Hewitt. The same reporters that insist their former Republican Party favorite Chris Christie is ruined for 2016 by traffic jams on a bridge are letting Hillary Clinton skate for embassy-security neglect that led to four dead government employees at Benghazi. Why would so-called watchdogs of government suggest Clinton is a shoo-in in 2016 as if Benghazi never happened? Tapper strangely suggested that Benghazi always seemed like more of a White House scandal than a State Department scandal, and I don't blame him, because Clinton didn't grant him an interview.
What happens when a teenager who came into the world as an unplanned teenage pregnancy ends up with an unplanned pregnancy of her own? Will she bend to all the "helpful" insistence that she needs to exercise her "right to choose" before she is, as one callous presidential contender put it, "punished with a baby"? This is the plot of "Gimme Shelter," a new movie that departs from the feminist pack mentality of Hollywood. Agnes "Apple" Bailey -- played in a breakout role by "High School Musical" star Vanessa Hudgens -- looks like a poster child for Planned Parenthood at the film's beginning: 16 years old, down and out after living in a series of foster homes, and now living with a drug-addicted mother who sometimes beats her.
A few years back, during the Media Research Center's annual gala, I was honored to pay tribute to the family of a real American hero, Michael Murphy, the Navy SEAL posthumously awarded the first Congressional Medal of Honor for service in Afghanistan, and the first since the Vietnam War. Few in the room knew the story because only Fox and a handful of other outlets told it. When the medal was announced in 2007, William Kristol noted on "Fox News Sunday" that the news received a tiny fraction of the coverage given to the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel that year was awarded to Al Gore and the U.N. "climate change" alarmists. That award received endless accolades from the sycophantic press. Kristol joked about the fans oozing over "what sacrifices he made" to make a scary documentary (while making fortunes of money off the issue as well).
During the 2012 presidential campaign, somehow each and every Republican presidential contender had a sink thrown at him (or her) via what reporters call "investigative journalism." Every time a Republican rose in the polls, the media tried to knock him or her down, like a game of Whac-A-Mole. The very last man standing was Mitt Romney, who didn't receive the official "Gotcha!" from The Washington Post until May, with a 5,000-word opus on "Teenage Haircutgate." That's why it's so strange the national media would decide so early it was time for journalistic carpet bombing of the Great Squishy Northeastern Hope of 2016, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
Inside twisted Tinseltown, Martin Scorsese has marked a new career achievement. His latest film, "The Wolf of Wall Street," includes a mighty 506 uses of the F-bomb in its three-hour running time. That's almost three curse words a minute. Someone has proclaimed this the new record for F-bombs. Another Hollywood high mark. Scorsese often has hundreds of F-bombs in his films about crooks. But this takes the cake.
Liberals are angry President Barack Obama won a second term, and yet, they didn't get the liberal agenda items they wanted passed in 2013, including gun control and amnesty for illegal aliens. The complaint at the end of the year is that this was the "least productive Congress" in 66 years, with production always being measured by the amount of legislation passed. But the media complaint here isn't about just any legislation; it's about a liberal wish list. Washington Post reporter Paul Kane laments the "shrunken ambitions" of congressional Democrats in a front-page story: "Back in 2009, during the heady days of hope and change, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) introduced 90 pieces of legislation. In 2013, amid gridlock and dysfunction, he sponsored just 35 bills. None of them became law."
Sarah Silverman celebrated Christmas in her usual mode: mocking Christians and religion in general. On Twitter, she wrote "Happy Birthday, Jesus! I'm sorry (you) were murdered by people afraid of new ideas!" Her last HBO special in 2002 was even mockingly titled "Jesus Is Magic." Her new special is called "We Are Miracles." Once again, in the new show, she makes fun of the death of Jesus, as a Jew: "You're welcome. If we hadn't killed him, he wouldn't even be famous."
I've not read the official obituaries because they are predictable. "Billionaire." "Reclusive." "GOP donor." "Swift Boat Vets." "Industrialist." "Controversial." "Dallas." And there you have it: the death of a sinister figure driven by greed, the puppeteer manipulating the political process, a 21st century J.R. Ewing. (Or is it Mr. Burns?) If this is what you've read, it's written by someone who didn't know Harold Clark Simmons. I never knew a man quite like him.
Let's assess the winners and losers in American culture for 2013. Our first obvious winner is "Duck Dynasty" and its Phil Robertson. He's a winner for standing by his Christian principles after some offensive remarks about homosexuality. A&E suspended him and put out the usual statement that they are "champions" of the gay agenda -- and proceeded to start running "Duck Dynasty" marathons. Mark Steyn put it just right: The gay-left blacklisters insist "espousing conventional Christian morality, even off air, is incompatible with American celebrity." Robertson has successfully shattered intolerance of the anti-Christian left.
The New York Times published an unintentionally humorous headline on Dec. 23: "When '60 Minutes' Checks Its Journalistic Skepticism at the Door." The Times media columnist David Carr is suddenly stunned that "60 Minutes" has aired a puff piece on a serious political matter. In his article, Carr doesn't breathe a word about Steve Kroft's long history of servile interviews with President Barack Obama, the most recent one in January when, at the president's request, he threw softballs at both Obama and Hillary Clinton. Carr's never written about Kroft.
What's been called the "War on Christmas" is often a case of secular liberals wanting to engage in Christmas denial. In the name of not wanting to offend people of minority faiths (or no faith), they remove the C-word from department store catalogs and Christmas songs from public school concerts, leaving us with lame messages about snow. But there's another kind of Christmas denial: the kind that simply stomps on Christianity as ridiculous and kicks over the nativity set. Take the atheist punk band Bad Religion and its new record of Christmas songs they found "hilarious" to record.
Liberal journalists were glowing and full of hope after President Barack Obama won a second term. As 2012 drew to a close, there was the traditional hour of ABC's Barbara Walters fawning: "Mr. President, Mrs. Obama. There is a photograph of you (hugging) that went viral, became the most shared photograph in the history of Twitter. How do you keep the fire going?" As the second inauguration neared, Newsweek put out a cover image even though it had stopped printing magazines. Over a picture of Obama, it read: "The Second Coming. America Expects. Can He Deliver?" He laid an egg.
