CNS Commenters Still Piling Up the Anti-Obama Racism Topic: CNSNews.com
We've detailed how the comment thread for a March 23 CNSNews.com article about President Obama's remark that "if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” Martin, the teenager killed by a neighborhood watch captain in Florida, has brought out the kind of racist and homophobic Obama-haters CNS appears to be catering to these days.
Well, the parade of hate and racism among CNS readers has been continuing:
Are Brent Bozell and Terry Jeffrey proud to attract such people as CNS readers? Apparently so.
WND's Ethics-Challenged Pollster: Obama Is An 'Apparent Imposter' Topic: WorldNetDaily
We already know that Fritz Wenzel, WorldNetDaily's favorite pollster, is more than a little ethically challenged. Now he's even more clearly demonstrating his right-wing bias.
In a March 18 WND article detailing the results of a birther-related Wenzel poll, Bob Unruh quotes Wenzel thusly:
“Politically, the findings on this subject spell potential disaster for the Obama re-election campaign in that one in three independent voters does not believe Obama has provided enough documentation to prove he is legally eligible to hold the presidency,” Wenzel said. “These people will not be voting for him.
“This is a substantial bloc of what we think to be swing voters to have taken off the table right from the beginning, and it spells political disaster for the White House.”
However, he said that Obama is not the only one at fault.
“That no serious action has been taken in Washington to confront this issue paints a sad picture of the impotence or spinelessness of the president’s political opponents and a pathetic portrait of a nation’s citizens who are mostly content to sit idly by while an apparent imposter raids their national treasury and runs their once-great nation into the ground,” Wenzel said.
So, apparently, Wenzel is a birther, and an Obama-hater to boot. Such blatant bias on Wenzel's part is all the more reason not to trust the results of his polling, since it appears he's putting a political message over accurate, impartial polling.
You Reap What You Sow: CNS Article on Obama Bring Out Racist, Homophobic Obama-Haters Topic: CNSNews.com
When your editorial content is increasingly centered around Obama-hating, as CNSNews.com's content hasbecome, it should be no surprise when your readership is increasingly made up of Obama-haters.
A relatively unbiased March 23 CNS article by Susan Jones on President Obama's remark that "if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” Martin, the teenager killed by a neighborhood watch captain in Florida, has brought out the kind of haters that you'd expect to see trolling around websites not operated by a multimillion-dollar nonprofit group.
Here's a sampling of comments in the article's comment thread:
This is apparently the kind of audience CNS wants, and that's exactly what it's getting.
Newsmax's Kessler Fawns Over Karl Rove's Anti-Obama PAC Topic: Newsmax
Ronald Kessler devotes his March 19 Newsmax article to touting "the powerful political action committee American Crossroads." Kessler promotes the role it intends to play in the election:
American Crossroads and its affiliate, Crossroads GPS, which focuses on issues, will be major players in the November election. Together, they expect to raise and spend $300 million to defeat President Obama and congressional Democrats.
What Kessler doesn't do, of course, is explain where that money will be coming from. In the 2010 cycle, a large chunk of American Crossroads' funding came from Wall Street hedge fund and private equity moguls, as well as other corporate donations who can hide behind the 501(c)4 nonprofit status of one American Crossroads division, which is not required to disclose its donors.
Kessler is too locked into hagiography mode, however, to concern himself with such things. He'd rather fawn over the "tremendous amount of research" that goes into American Crossroads' messaging and push the idea that "Americans reject Obama’s negative view of America and embrace Republicans’ positive view."
MRC Can't Stop Whining About 'GCB,' But Still Won't Back Up Attacks Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Lauren Thompson is still incensed about the existence of the TV show "GCB."
IN a March 19 MRC Culture & Media Institute post, Thompson complained yet again about how the show is "attacking Christianity." Thompson's outrage meter has been working overtime: "In just three episodes, the anything-but-Christian show has chalked up more than 100 anti-Christian remarks, gags and plot twists, in a calculated attempt to offend believers."
But as before, Thompson fails to make this list of "anti-Christian" events on the show available to her readers. What is she afraid of?
WND Pretends It Doesn't Know What Arpaio Birther Posse Will Dig Up Next Topic: WorldNetDaily
A March 21 WorldNetDaily article by Joe Kovacs quotes Sheriff Joe Arpaio as claiming that "there is 'tons' more potentially shocking information on Barack Obama in connection with his probe into the president’s eligibility."
It's kinda cute how Kovacs pretends he doesn't know what Arpaio will come up with next. Can't he just holler at his co-worker and de facto posse member Jerome Corsi for the scoop? Heck, all the evidence indicates that WND is coordinating information releases with Arpaio and the posse. Kovacs is simply playing dumb.
He goes on to quote Arpaio calling "the media’s suppression of his findings of a likely forged presidential birth certificate and Selective Service Card 'probably the biggest censorship blackout in the history of the United States.'" Bigger than Arpaio's own blackout on the secret relationship between him and WND?
Of course, we can't count on Kovacs to suss out that information -- he's too busy being a useful idiot.
AIM Fearmongers About Obama Executive Order Topic: Accuracy in Media
Alan Caruba joins in the fearmongering over an executive order by President Obama in his March 19 Accuracy in Media column:
The President of the United States of America, Barack Hussein Obama, has generated so much fear that the most common theme of posted comments and private communications is that he will refuse to relinquish power if defeated in November or that, under some pretext, he will declare a state of martial law.
[...]
The new EO evokes fear because it is occurring in peacetime and, more specifically, when the United States remains the strongest military power on Earth. There is no indication that an attack by any other nation is anticipated, so the implementation of the EO raises concerns that its purpose is not what it says.
In effect, the EO allows the federal government, directed by the President, to commandeer and control all aspects of the economy and the lives of all Americans. It centralizes control to an astonishing and frightening degree.
[...]
The obvious question is why should the President of the United States, in the run-up to a national election, feel that this is the time to issue such an EO?
As we noted, even the normally paranoid WorldNetDaily has pointed out that this executive order is nothing but an update of earlier executive orders delineating emergency powers dating back to Dwight Eisenhower, done to refect changes in government agency structure.
CNS Article on Fluke Omits Limbaugh's Denigration of Her Topic: CNSNews.com
A March 21 CNSNews.com article by Elizabeth Harrington details part of an ambush interview CNS did with Sandra Fluke, in which she "declined to comment on Bill Maher's used of vulgar terms to describe former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin."
Missing from Harrington's article: Any mention of the vulgar terms Rush Limbaugh used to describe Fluke. That's a crucial context for Harrington's question, yet Harrington didn't feel the need to include it in her article.
This seems to be yet another example of how CNS' parent organzation, the Media Research Center, is giving Limbaugh a pass on his three-day tirade of misogyny against Fluke, to the point ofessentially denying that Limbaugh calling Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute" is in any way offensive.
NEW ARTICLE -- Birther Bribery, Part 2: Joe Arpaio's WorldNetDaily Posse Topic: WorldNetDaily
Sheriff Joe Arpaio's cold case posse "investigation" of President Obama's "eligibility" may as well have been written by WND. Jerome Corsi's unusually close relationship with Arpaio and the posse and WND's financial ties to them seem to prove it was. Read more >>
CNS Still Pushing Baseless Suggestion That Obama's Grandmother Was Never Discriminated Against Topic: CNSNews.com
A March 20 CNSNews.com article by Fred Lucas essentially calls Michelle Obama a liar for claiming that Barack Obama's grandmother suffered discrimination while working in the banking industry. Lucas' evidence to back this up? The grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, "was the first female vice president of the Bank of Hawaii," and the Obamas "inherited almost $500,000 worth of the bank’s stock from the president’s grandmother."
As we pointed out last October when CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey made this exact same argument, Dunham's ultimate success in the banking industry does not disprove the claim that she was discriminated against earlier in her career.
This bogus talking point appears to be something CNS won't let go, further indicating that Jeffrey and Co. care only about attacking Obama at every opportunity, not actual journalism.
Bozell Ramps Up Dishonesty in War Against MSNBC Topic: Media Research Center
Can Brent Bozell get more dishonest in his attacks on MSNBC hosts and defense of Rush Limbaugh? Yes, he can.
In a March 16 NewsBusters post, Bozell responds to Bill O'Reilly's criticism of his Media Research Center demanding that MSNBC fire Ed Schultz and other hosts whose existence offends him. In doing so, Bozell references only his plans to target MSNBC advertisers and not his demands for firings, something his despised liberal rival, Media Matters, has not even called for. (Media Matters has publicized Limbaugh advertisers; the only targeting the MRC has done to date, meanwhile, is to advertisers who dropped Limbaugh's show in reaction to his three-day tirade of sleaze against Sandra Fluke.)
Meanwhile, in a March 19 letter to MSNBC president Phil Griffin making the additional demand that the network fire Al Sharpton, Bozell makes this statement:
I have also made known the fact that your network is the mouthpiece for the George Soros funded Media Matters, a radical group whose mission is to slander everyone who disagrees with its fringe leftwing ideology. I also pointed out these assaults by MSNBC have nothing to do with what Rush Limbaugh said about Sandra Fluke, and everything to do with censoring prominent voices on the right. Instead of reporting on the woeful state of our economy and the catastrophic debt crisis, MSNBC goes after Limbaugh with entirely unmerited and phony moral righteousness.
Of course, for Bozell, his crusade against MSNBC has everything to do with "what Rush Limbaugh said about Sandra Fluke" -- specifically, his increasingly desperate efforts to get people talking about anything else. It's become all too clear that Bozell is not offended by the denigration of a woman when a conservative is doing the denigrating. And it's laughable that Bozell insists that any criticism of Limbaugh's blatant misogyny is about "censoring prominent voices on the right" while he tries to keep up the charade that he's not trying to censor prominent voices on the left. He has demanded that people be fired from appearing on TV over things he refuses to criticize Limbaugh for -- it's hard to be more censorious than that!
(Plus, he seems more than a little jealous that Media Matters is a much more effective organization than the MRC. No wonder he tries to pretend they don't exist.)
If Bozell wants to see "entirely unmerited and phony moral righteousness," all he needs to do is look in the mirror.
P.S. In his letter demanding Sharpton be fired, Bozell cites as one of his offenses "denigrating homosexuals." Really? One of the main reasons for existence for Bozell's own organization is to denigrate homosexuals, so it's hard to imagine he's genuinely upset at all by Sharpton doing it.
Newsmax Peddles Bogus Obama 'Martial Law' Conspiracy -- And WND Is the Voice of Reason Topic: Newsmax
Well, here's a switch -- Newsmax goes into paranoid fearmongering mode about President Obama wanting to establish martial law, and WorldNetDaily is the voice of reason on the issue.
Paul Scicchitano writes in a March 19 Newsmax article:
Some conservatives fear that a mysterious executive order from President Barack Obama regarding disaster preparedness is a troubling hint at the possibility of martial law in advance of a war with Iran.
White House press secretary Jay Carney dismisses the notion, saying at a press briefing on Monday: “Well, I cannot explain that reaction to it. I think it was a fairly standard and routine piece of business. The president's approach to our dealings with Iran, I think, has been made clear. He has made it clear, most recently, when he discussed it at length a couple of weeks ago.”
Some conservative groups are concerned that the order, which Obama signed on Friday, gives the president absolute control over all the country’s natural resources in case of a natural disaster or during a time of war, fueling speculation that the Obama administration is making preparations for war with Iran.
That's normally the kind of thing you expect from WND, which has promoted the idea that Obama will round up his conservative critics and detain them in FEMA concentration camps. But a March 18 WND article by Drew Zahn, despite opening with its usual paranoia, shockingly puts things into perspective:
But are the cries of martial law and expanding executive power justified?
No, says William A. Jacobson, associate clinical professor at Cornell Law School.
“If someone wants to make the argument that this is an expansion of presidential powers, then do so based on actual language,” warns Jacobson. “There is enough that Obama actually does wrong without creating claims which do not hold up to scrutiny.”
As it turns out, Obama’s executive order is nearly identical to EO 12919, issued by President Clinton on June 7, 1994, which itself was an amendment to EO 10789, issued in 1958 by President Eisenhower, and which in fact, was later amended by EO 13286, issued in 2003 by George W. Bush.
[...]
A side-by-side analysis of Obama’s order compared to Clinton’s, conducted by Ed Morrissey of HotAir.com, reveals Obama’s order is essentially just an update to reflect changes in government agency structure.
In other words, nothing to see here -- which must have been a bitter pill for WND to swallow, given its seething hatred of everything Obama. Scicchitano, meanwhile, waited until the end of his article to mention Morrissey's debunking.
Fox's Muslim Defense Not As Good As Noel Sheppard Thinks It Is Topic: NewsBusters
In a March 20 NewsBusters post, Noel Sheppard touts how Fox News' Bret Baier "struck back" at a statement in a new book by David Corn that President Obama complained that Fox News pushes the idea that "Obama is a Muslim 24/7" by stating, "we found no examples of a host saying President Obama is a Muslim."
Sheppard apparently thinks this was a brilliant response:
Yeah, but that doesn't matter, Bret.
Corn wrote it, Politico cited it, and now it's going to be blast all over the Obama-loving media until large portions of the nation believe it.
Makes you proud to be an American, doesn't it?
In fact, Baier's response is very specific and parsed. It may be factually accurate that no Fox host specifically stated that Obama is a Muslim, but as Media matters details, Fox has clearly and repeatedly questioned and promoted falsehoods about Obama's faith, including pushing the false claim that Obama attended a madrassa. And as Corn himself points out, Fox has made little effort to shoot down claims by others that Obama is a Muslim.
Is anybody proud that Sheppard is such a mindless shill for Fox News? We can't imagine how.
WND Pushes New Evidence-Free Obama-Ayers Claim Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily is continuing to milk its unusually close relationship with Joe Arpaio's birther posse with a March 19 article by de facto posse member Jerome Corsi detailing how "A retired U.S. Postal Service carrier who delivered mail to Tom and Mary Ayers in a Chicago suburb in the late 1980s and early 1990s [who] claims to have met Obama in front of the Ayers home."
From this, Corsi goes on to extrapolate that "the parents of former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers help[ed] finance Barack Obama’s Harvard education," that "Ayers’ mother believe[d] Obama was a foreign student," and that "the young Obama [was] convinced at the time – long before he even entered politics – that he was going to become president of the United States."
Corsi downplays the fact that the postal carrier has no actual evidence whatsoever to back up his claim -- he can't even prove that the man in question was actually Obama. As Dr. Conspiracy sums up: "Whether the elderly mail character is trying to save his country with a lie, or more likely just telling a true story embellished to be interesting, the details don’t hang together and there is no corroboration."
Nevertheless, Corsi's boss, Joseph Farah, thinks this is something like the biggest story ever despite the fact that there's no there there, and he can't imagine why nobody else is covering it:
Why didn’t they touch it?
We have more insight than ever before.
It’s not that the facts aren’t compelling. It’s not that the story is not of interest. It’s not that the story is not being talked about at water coolers across America.
So what is it?
Very simple. This isn’t just your average Bill Ayers story. This one touches on a raw nerve for the media. It touches on the increasing possibility that Obama is not really constitutionally eligible for the presidency after all – a story pooh-poohed by virtually everyone in the media establishment for the last four years.
Actually, this story has nothing to do with eligibility. There is no "insight" here -- just the ramblings of an elderly man trying to remember what he saw 20 years ago, things for which he has absolutely no proof and which wouldn't even pass for hearsay evidence in a court of law.
If the media is ignoring this, as Farah claims it "ignored the first report by the first law-enforcement investigation into the eligibility issue," it's doing sojustifiably. It looks more and more that the Arpaio posse did nothing more than crib from WND's birther conspiracies and conducted no independent research of its own, so the posse has no credibility.
Still, WND plans to flog this story. A follow-up article complained that "Media Matters and other pro-Obama outlets such as the Democratic Underground are reacting in full mock-and-ridicule mode" to the story, positively giddy over the Drudge Report link and how "At one point today, the Web information company Alexa ranked the story as the fifth hottest page on the Internet." But WND will never admit that it's nothing but unproven hearsay.
Farah harrumphed in his column: "We’re watching the Big Media implode like the old Soviet Union – becoming less relevant by the day." As long as WND stays silent about its backroom dealings with Arpaio and the posse, the only person heading for an implosion is Farah.
Bozell Takes Kochs' Side on Cato, Doesn't Disclose MRC's Koch Money Topic: Media Research Center
Brent Bozell has weighed in on the epic battle going on over control of the libertarian Cato Institute, between Cato's current establishment and the Koch brothers.
IN a March 19 CNSNews.com post, Bozell notes that he has "great appreciation and admiration for the Koch family and all it has done over the decades to champion liberty, free enterprise and a free society. They have invested their money in causes they believe in and every day take hits for having the courage and conviction to stand up for freedom and liberty." But he states that the Kochs are in the right over the establishment led by Ed Crane:
Anyone who reviews the complaint filed on behalf of the Kochs, which also includes copies of the shareholder agreement, can plainly see that the Kochs are unequivocally in the right. This is not a debate about who has the best vision for the libertarian movement. If libertarians and conservatives have any regard for the law and for shareholder agreements, there is just no way you take up sides against the Kochs.
In fact, what is most ironic is that Mr. Crane and some of his allies are so heated in their opposition to the Kochs they seem to be suggesting they have some entitlement to Cato and the shareholder agreement be damned. In the end, the Kochs and Ed Crane signed an agreement. If we as conservatives or libertarians do not honor our word and commitments, we will cease to be a movement built upon the principles of law so necessary in a free society.
Bozell didn't mention that one of the Kochs' "causes they believe in" is his Media Research Center. Through Koch-controlled charities like the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundationand the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, the MRC has received at least $15,000.
