Columnist.
Once again, we've reached a government shutdown over irresponsible government spending. Once more, the media are proclaiming the world is coming to an end and blaming conservative Republicans for everything. They are working hand in glove with the Never Enough Government lobby that dominates Washington, without a shred of shame. Anchors and editors continue to insist that if the GOP were smart, it would bow to "conventional wisdom" and put its foot on the fiscal accelerator. That's what this is about. The elites fully expected Republicans "led" by McConnell and Boehner to fold and are stunned -- furious, really -- that they are being disobeyed.
Within days of being brutally murdered in Wyoming in 1998, Matthew Shepard became for the Left a Christ figure, a sacrificial savior of the gay-rights cause. They even composed a passion play indicting a bigoted America in the hate crime, "The Laramie Project," that's been performed across the country, even in public schools. Ford's Theatre, the historic site of Abraham Lincoln's murder, has been selected as a natural Washington site for a restaging of this play, as well as a whole slate of panel discussions and other events on preventing hate, with The Washington Post signing as "Official Media Partner."
Why are liberals in so much denial about liberal bias in the news? Why do they think they're bending over backward to be "objective" doing that which Republicans see as partisan activism? Daniel Froomkin of the Huffington Post -- formerly of The Washington Post -- suggests an answer. He is exactly the kind of liberal agitator in the newsroom who wants every news story to be a blazing editorial. Every reporter must divide the world clearly between Liberal Sense and Conservative Nonsense. His latest article is titled, "Writing a Neutral Story About Something So Heartless As the Food Stamp Vote Is Not Good Journalism."
After the Newtown school shooting, commentators on the Left expressed outrage that gun-rights groups were exploiting the attack to build membership in the wake of all the liberal demands for a federal crackdown on gun owners. Nine months later, they're curiously silent as Rupert Murdoch's cable network FX milks a fictional Catholic-school shooting for commercial gain. The Sept. 10 premiere of the violent motorcycle gang drama "Sons of Anarchy" featured the school shooting, as well as two rapes and a man drowning in a bathtub of urine. Then the show's creator Kurt Sutter made a complete fool of himself, claiming "We didn't do it for shock."
President Obama barely noticed, but there was a horrific mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday. In what has become a signature of this administration, a tone-deaf Obama pressed ahead with his plans to attack the tea party Republicans at an event marking five years since the financial crisis erupted. After some perfunctory remarks of condolence, Obama commenced with what the Associated Press described as a "blistering warning to congressional Republicans."
In the era of "warmonger" Republicans in the White House, the Toronto International Film Festival would have been fertile ground for bold, outspoken "dissent" from actors against war in the Middle East. Now with Obama on the brink of missile attacks in Syria, you would expect the same agitation, but this time coupled with a dash of betrayal. Instead, the Hollywood Reporter found nothing there but an icy pile of "no comments" from more than a dozen celebs, including Susan Sarandon, Josh Brolin, Penn Jillette and Tim Robbins.
When we last checked in on Barack Obama discussing Benghazi on the network news, he was reassuring Brian Williams on the Oct. 25 "Rock Center" that "we're going to do a full investigation." It's a year later, and it's still "we are going to." Last fall, Williams and Obama posed as curious for answers on how this disaster happened. Neither of them has demonstrated any noticeable curiosity since. A new Media Research Center study of Benghazi coverage in 2013 on ABC, CBS and NBC shows there are two routine modes of operation: (a) praising Team Obama's public relations and (b) silence.
If you think The Washington Post comes to any Virginia election with an open mind and an objective approach, I have some macaca to sell you. Anyone who runs as a Republican statewide in the Old Dominion has to prepare to be blasted as a troglodyte. And if that Republican is conservative, it's open season.
Barack Obama ran for president as the last of the red-hot pacifists, so it might have sounded preposterous to predict that after a few security briefings at the White House, President Obama would follow in the same policy footsteps of horrid warmonger George Bush, with his anti-terrorist wars and strategies. So where is the anti-war movement now?
The tawdry sexual dancing of Miley Cyrus on the 2013 edition of MTV's Video Music Awards has been denounced by nearly everyone -- conservatives, liberals and libertines (who flunked it for lacking "hotness"). That theme is exhausted. Let's shift the discussion back to where it belongs: the cultural cesspool that is MTV. Every year, MTV prepares sleazy awards show stunts like this to acquire buzz for itself. There's Madonna and Britney Spears having a long onstage kiss, Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis grabbing each other's private parts on stage and Sacha Baron Cohen "accidentally" hanging upside down with his bare buttocks exposed right in the face of the rapper Eminem.
MSNBC obliterated the notion of separating cable-news hosts and their political activism when the network brass gave Rev. Al Sharpton a nightly show two years ago. It was just another day at the office when Sharpton held a rabble-rousing rally for Trayvon Martin in the afternoon and then covered it on his show hours later. But Saturday's rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial celebrating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's March on Washington was the most dramatic conflict of interest yet. Sharpton organized the rally (with Martin Luther King III), and MSNBC aired huge chunks of it live, including all 20 minutes of Sharpton's screaming keynote speech. An MSNBC press release said they'd be promoting the rally from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Network morning "news" shows are aimed directly at women aged 25 to 54. ABC's "Good Morning America" is routinely winning the ratings race by skipping the boring "hard news" and focusing heavily on real-life soap operas, such as the Jodi Arias murder trial or the Ariel Castro kidnapping outrage. It isn't news at all. It's infotainment. But what really caused jaws to drop recently was ABC promoting its latest sex-drenched Sunday night soap opera to those women. Viewers saw a naked man and woman in bed, with a side breast shot and the man's hand grasping the top of the woman's thigh -- on TV at breakfast time. As usual, this eye-grabbing sex scene wasn't between spouses. That's never scandalous enough.
Only those happily trampling on the last vestiges of freedom will deny that our federal government as a constitutional republic has ceased to function. The president can no longer control (nor does this one want to control) the enormous and ever-expanding bureaucracy functioning as a government by fiat. The legislative branch, so corrupted, so drunk by the allure of power, so disdainful of its constituents, is unable to stop its bankrupting ways. The judiciary is perhaps the worst. The Supreme Court is openly rejecting the authority of the Constitution itself.
The Washington Post is a legend in the minds of the Washington elite, so its financial decline has caused quiet panic. As NPR media reporter David Folkenflik put it, "You think of stories like the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, these are all stories where The Washington Post led the nation's understanding, the world's understanding of some major issues." Outside the liberal media, you wonder how long Post fans can wallow in their Nixon-crumbling polyester "glory days" in the early 1970s. But nostalgia ruled as the Graham family sold the Post to Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon.com. "Now he is being credited as a white knight with deep pockets helping to save one of this country's great newspapers," oozed NBC reporter Tom Costello.
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus is doing the right thing. He's making the national media's blatant partisan bias a prominent issue right out of the gate to Campaign 2016. Priebus sent a letter to CNN president Jeff Zucker and NBC Entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt demanding they cease efforts to air promotional Hillary Clinton films on their airwaves, or he'll seek to stop any effort to allow presidential debates on their networks. "It's appalling to know executives at major networks like NBC and CNN who have donated to Democrats and Hillary Clinton have taken it upon themselves to be Hillary Clinton's campaign operatives," the RNC chair declared.
Last year, Entertainment Weekly magazine honored the arrival of a viciously anti-Catholic tilt on the FX show "American Horror Story: Asylum" by promoting how actress "Jessica Lange returns, this time as a terrifying nun." Bigotry sells -- big -- in Tinseltown. This year, after that "Asylum" season aired, Hollywood has honored the show again by showering it with 17 Emmy nominations. There's a reason Hollywood revels in Catholic-bashing. The Catholic Church best represents for them an ancient organization with a creed, which refuses to genuflect before the modern god of La La Land: untrammeled whims of lust and greed.
President Obama is announcing for the umpteenth time he's going to "pivot" to fixing the economy -- as if that's ever worked before, since it is he who broke it. That said, Obama will pivot to tiddlywinks if that's what it takes to get out from under his mountain of scandals. On the White House website, Obama flack Dan Pfeiffer posted a blog post demanding everyone pay attention to Obama's latest speech in Galesburg, Ill., expressing tender concern for the middle class. Meanwhile, he lamented, "Too many in Congress are trying to score political points, refight old battles and trump up phony scandals."
The dwindling number of people still reading Rolling Stone knows that just as MTV no longer is a music station, this is not just a music magazine. Nevertheless, the magazine's covers are almost always rock and pop stars, and sometimes movie and TV actors. In recent months, that list has included glamorizing shots of Jay-Z, Rihanna, Bruno Mars and Justin Bieber (who's now "Hot, Ready, Legal"). But nearly every issue also carries political commentary from fiercely frothing leftist writers like Matt Taibbi. When the editors decided to put Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover, they knew they were courting controversy. They must have known they were chasing notoriety by insulting people who lost relatives or their own limbs in Dzhokhar's terrorist attack.
