WND Ambushes Donna Brazile With Conspiracy Theories About Seth Rich
Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily reporter Alicia Powe begins her Dec. 17 article this way: "Former DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile appeared incoherent and agitated when WND approached her at a Tuesday book signing to ask her questions about murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich."

Unmentioned by Powe: That is likely a logical reaction to a writer for a fringe-right-wing website invading a book signing to pester her with conspiracy theories over Rich's death.

Indeed, that's exactly what Powe did, trying to pin Brazile down on arcane details on her book regarding Rich, which Powe framed as "conflicting statements about Rich's murder." She then mocks Brazile -- and demonstrates the malicious intent of her ambushh of her -- by whining that Brazile "appeared lost for words and made bizarre and rambling statements."

Powe included Brazile's answer, which doesn't sound rambling at all. Perhaps Powe found it bizarre when Brazile called out soulless conspiracy theorists like herself: "I don’t practice the conspiracy theories that people have used to scar Seth’s memory, to hurt his family. I have been to Omaha. I have been to his synagogue. I have cried because of him. I love that boy."

Of course, Powe and WND only love Seth Rich to the extent that they can cynically exploit his death to further their near-pathological hatred of Hillary Clinton. Powe has never been to Omaha, where Rich is from, nor has she been to his synagogue. Rich is not a person to anyone at WND -- just a tool.

Powe's article also includes the requisite reference to WND's dishonest crowdfunding effort to investigate (read: perpetuate conspiracy theories about) Rich's death. That effort continues to be a failure, having raised only $4,630 after nearly seven months.

MRC Wrongly Calls Wash. Post Reporter 'Liberal'
Topic: Media Research Center

Ex-Media Research Center researcher Brad Wilmouth huffs in a Dec. 15 NewsBusters post:

Some liberal journalists just can't get the notion out of their minds that George Wallace was a Republican, even though the former segregationist governor of Alabama was a lifelong Democrat. On Friday's Washington Week on PBS, host Robert Costa -- also a Washington Postreporter -- suggested that Wallace was a part of the Republican party's "past" as he recalled that some black voters in Alabama are worried about the direction the GOP is taking. Costa:

I spoke to a lot of African-American voters when I was down there, Jeff, and they said that they're worried that the Republican Party -- broadly speaking -- is turning back to its past. They cited the former governor of Alabama, George Wallace, a segregationist, and they say, in Roy Moore -- sometimes even in President Trump -- they hear echoes of a past that makes them uncomfortable.

Not one of the four panel members jumped in to correct the suggestion that Wallace was ever a Republican as CNN's Jeff Zeleny, CBS's Nancy Cordes, NBC's Kristen Welker, and Vice News's Shawna Thomas got their turns to speak.

In fact, Costa is not a "liberal journalist." He came to the Washington Post from National Review, and the MRC regarded his work so well at the time that a 2013 NewsBusters post celebrated Costa's hiring by crediting Post owner Jeff Bezos for "encouraging his staff to think outside the box" by hiring someone from "a right-leaning publication."

How quickly the MRC forgets that Costa was once their guy.

Further, Wilmouth's freaking out about the mere suggestion that Wallace was a Republican seems rather silly given that both Wallace and Trump share certain traits in exploiting peope's fears and promoting racially tinged populism.

Newsmax Columnist: Trump's No Hitler, Obama Is!
Topic: Newsmax

Right-wing radio host Chuck Morse has been preoccupied with portraying President Obama as a Hitler-like figure. While writing a column and serving as a source for WorldNetDaily, Morse regularly pushed this meme. Morse is over at Newsmax now, and he's still doing the same thing.

In his Dec. 11 Newsmax column, Morse does some mind-reading by taking a vague allusion from an Obama speech and turning it into a specific allegation that Obama likened President Trump to Hitler:

Echoing a meme that has become a worldwide article of faith for the authoritarian-oriented, Trump-hating left, former President Barack Obama has compared his successor, President Donald J. Trump, to Hitler.

Speaking at the Economic Club of Chicago, Obama noted that the U.S. has survived tough times before and will again, offering as an example of tough times the days of communist fighter Joseph McCarthy.

“The danger is grow[ing] complacent,” Obama said. “We have to tend to this garden of democracy or else things could fall apart quickly.”

“That's what happened in Germany in the 1930s,” Obama opined. “Sixty million people died. So, you've got to pay attention. And vote.”

In a major case of projection, Obama deflected from the unprecedented economic success of President Trump’s first year in office, hardly tough times for working people, while he avoided the stark contrast between Trump’s tremendous first year and his lackluster and economically torpid previous eight years. Obama’s reference to Senator McCarthy, juxtaposed with his comparing Trump to Hitler, is ironic given the fact that the main work of Senator McCarthy was to investigate the real agents of Hitler, secret communists working within the FDR Administration who were pro-Nazi during the Hitler-Stalin Pact years, 1939-1941, the first 2 years of World War II.

Morse doesn't provide any support for that latter claim, let alone explain how one could be both communist and pro-Nazi, given that Hitler declared war on the communist Soviet Union. But then, he's back on his old smear that Obama -- and, really, any liberal -- is the real Hitler:

We should recall that it was Barack Obama who, in 2008, developed a cult of personality that was unprecedented in American history.

Reminiscent of the cult that developed around such socialist leaders as Hitler, Fidel Castro, V.I. Lenin, and Mao tse Tung, Obama, in a subtler context made palatable to an American audience, was worshipped by the liberal establishment, by the press, academia, and various cultural institutions. I recall, for example, a second grader that I knew informing me that her teacher had the students keep a diary of each day of Obama’s presidency starting on the first day. Women were reported to have fainted at his rallies.

Obama’s style of speaking, as illustrated by these recent remarks to the Economic Club of Chicago, is classic demagoguery, what French historian and former communist Alain Besancon described as “the language of ideology…the official language.” Obama speaks with indirection, innuendo, double-speak, and sophistry. His style is almost a form of code for the liberal establishment. His dishonest attempt to manipulate emotions without naming the target of his ire is a classic form of socialist agit-prop. Indeed, an English translation of a Hitler speech is filled with such innuendo and if the word “Jew” in one of those vile speeches were to be replaced with a word like “corporate interest” the speech would almost resemble the type that might be delivered by the likes of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

Has Morse never noticed the cult of personality around Trump? Apparently not, since he seems to be a full-fledged member. Writing like a full-fledged sycophant, Morse then unironically writes:

President Donald Trump, in contrast, speaks plainly, perhaps a bit too plainly at times, and honestly. Trump’s speeches contain no guile or hidden agendas. He says it like he sees it, warts and all. It may not always be pretty, like the suave Obama, and it may make us cringe from time to time, but Trump is honest and he is who he is. And that is, unlike Obama and his ilk, a man who supports and who seeks to advance genuine American ideals and principles. Trump, unlike the socialist demagogues of history like Hitler, speaks plainly because he has nothing to hide.

Trump has nothing to hide? Two words for Morse: tax returns.

At CNS, Winning Trumps Conservative Beliefs
Topic: CNSNews.com

Surprisingly, the Trump stenographers at CNSNews.com found something to dislike about the Republican tax bill: it lowers the maximum age a child is eligible to be counted for the child tax credit from 18 to 17. CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey laid this out in an overly dramatic way in a Dec. 17 article, using language and a headline -- "Republican Tax Bill Says Your 16-Year-Old Won’t Be Your Child Next Year" to bizarrely suggest that the government was going to actually take custody of your children:

The final version of the Republican tax bill released by a congressional conference committee on Friday holds that your 16-year-old child who is living in your home this year and attending high school will no longer be your child next year—even if they continue living in your home and attending high school.

That is because they will turn 17--the age at which the Republican congressional leadership has decided American parents should no longer be able to claim a child tax credit for their child.

This is in contrast to the version of the bill that passed the Senate, which, through 2024 at least, would have allowed parents to claim the child tax credit for their children until they turned 18.

Your newborn, who will be eligible under the final Republican bill for an increased “child” tax credit next year, will no longer be eligible for that increased credit when he or she is 9 years old--because the increased credit will disappear after 2025.

Jeffrey's concern over this provision didn't stop CNS from enthusiastically promoting the tax bill -- as Trump stenographers, they are highly invested in helping Trump score a legislative victory. It touted a (unsubstantiated) claim that the bill had bipartisan input, gave Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin a platform to promote the bill, and promoted a Republican congressman's promotion of the bill, as well as Paul Ryan's shilling for it.

Interestingly, none of those articles mentioned Jeffrey's concern about the child tax credit change, even though they were all written after Jeffrey's article was published.

When the tax bill did pass, Jeffrey's article on it curiously failed to mention his own previous concerns about the child tax credit, instead cheering about how the bill "kills that individual mandate to buy health insurance" under the Affordable Care Act. So much for principled outrage.

And after the bill fully passed Congress, Susan Jones gushed about the "vintage Trump press conference" held afterward, with a headline that summed things up: "Trump: 'It's Always a Lot of Fun When You Win'." She also didn't mention the child tax credit her boss was worked up about just a few days earlier.

Winning is all that matters, apparently, and Jeffrey and CNS ultimately care more about making sure Trump wins than holding to any conservative convictions they may have claimed to have.

Roy Moore Dead-Enders Hang On At WND
Topic: WorldNetDaily

The pro-Roy Moore dead-enders at WorldNetDaily are clinging to their failed candidate.

We've already noted how WND columnist Mychal Massie baselessly claimed that "credible accusations of voter fraud" exist in the election that Moore lost, but he's far from the only one desperately trying to de-legitimize the election because Democrat Doug Jones won.

Foreigner Trevor Loudon complained that "A coalition of Muslim and Marxist-led groups won the Dec. 12, 2017, Alabama U.S. Senate election for Doug Jones." He's also very unhappy that people whose politics he doesn't agree with are allowed to vote (not that he has a say in the matter, being a resident of New Zealand):

The real lesson is that the left is pouring big resources into registering hundreds of thousands of black and Latino voters in Southern states – especially North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Texas and Arizona. They have already flipped Colorado and Virginia; if they can push over two or three more Southern dominoes, the Republicans will be in deep trouble.

If Alabama’s Muslim and Marxist communities had not rallied thousands of black, Latino and Muslim voters behind Doug Jones, President Trump would be sitting on a safer Senate majority today.

Alan Keyes, meanwhile, asserted that the Washington Post story on Moore's history of perving on teenage girls was "deceitfully contrived" (though he identifies no factual error in it) and lashed out (albeit floridly, as usual) at fellow right-winger Michael Savage for getting it right for once by pointing out that Alabama voters saw Moore as a hypocrite:

But Christ, to the contrary, repeatedly and harshly condemns as hypocrites the Scribes and Pharisees who rejected and condemned him despite the contrary evidence of his actions. As for the truthfulness of witnesses, Christ did not say his followers should trust in their words alone, however plausible they may appear. He directed us to look for their fruits. In the case of the witnesses against Roy Moore, the plainly intended fruit of their testimony was to discredit someone who has borne self-sacrificial witness to God’s written and Incarnate Word, in order to prefer to a position of authority in government someone who insists that the force of law should be abused to enforce acceptance of actions the Bible repeatedly makes clear that God hates.

[...]

So, unlike Mr. Savage, I cannot pretend that a deceit-corrupted election, bearing fruit that God abhors and condemns, must be taken as a true sign of anything at all about the quality of Christian faith in Alabama. But if the irrational conclusions Mr. Savage draws from that fallacious election are any indication, I am willing, as one Doctor to another who claims that title, to question whether, in his judgment about the late election, he is speaking as a Doctor, or as one who, in departing from the path of rational knowledge that title implies, acts without benefit of the learning that substantiates its worth.

Keyes concluded that "The people who engineered the deceitful election in Alabama induced an outcome that exactly corresponds to such mob rule." Apparently, Keyes thinks it's"mob rule" whenever a conservative loses an election.

MRC Indignant NY Times Reporter Keeps Job Despite Harassment Claims, Silent On Fox Host Doing The Same
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's Curtis Houck waxes indignant in a Dec. 20 post:

The New York Times decided that it would not fire Glenn Thrush following an investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct, citing “dozens of interviews with people both inside and outside the newsroom” and that Thrush will seek workplace “training” to supplement his “counseling and substance abuse rehabilitation.”

The befuddling decision by executive editor Dean Baquet came exactly one month after Vox.com detailed disturbing claims of sexual misbehavior by Thrush from his tenure at Politico. The paper suspended Thrush that same day while MSNBC took him off the airwaves (where he’s a political analyst).

Baquet announced in a memo that Thrush will remain at The Times despite losing his title as one of the paper’s White House correspondents and moved to “a new beat upon his return.” In other words, Al Franken should consider sending his resume over when he leaves the Senate on January 2. Who knows, maybe Charlie Rose should do that too.

This is a good time to remind people that, as we've noted, the MRC has been completely silent about someone else who still has a job despite being accused of sexual harassment: Charles Payne, a host on Fox Business and a commentator on Fox News. Like Thrush, Payne was suspended after the allegations surfaced and, like Thrush, was allowed to return to his job a couple months later -- though, unlike Thrush, he appears to have suffered no penalty in the process.

Also unlike Thrush, Payne is currently being sued over allegations of sexual assault and defamation by Scottie Nell Hughes, a female former Fox News commentator who says he coerced her into having sexual relationship with him and that her appearances on Fox News were drastically curtailed after the relationship ended.

A search of NewsBusters' archive shows that MRC chief Brent Bozell has appeared as a guest on Payne-hosted shows on Fox Business five times since the beginning of 2016, while the MRC's Rich Noyes has appeared once. We've also noted that the last mention of Hughes at NewsBusters was back in December 2016, which seems to back up Hughes' stated inability to make a living as a pundit after being blackballed from Fox.

Consider this just another Fox News-shaped blind spot at the MRC.

WND's Massie Kills Larry Sinclair, And Pretty Much The Entire Idea of Truth
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Mychal Massie is turning into a parody of himself. We always knew he was a depraved liar with an unusually large thesaurus, but he managed to outdo himself in his Dec. 18 WorldNetDaily column in slinging discredited, conspiratorial claims.

He starts off by noting "credible accusations of voter fraud" in the Alabama Senate race (not so much) and the "fallacious “allegations” of sexual impropriety" made against Roy Moore (even the Moore defenders at Breitbart now concede they were credible).He then quickly moved onto the claim that Bill Clinton "fathered an out-of-wedlock son with an illiterate black woman. That accusation haunts him today as 31-year-old Danny Williams continues his fight to force Clinton to take a DNA test for purposes of proving he is his father." Actually, Williams is more a victim of opportunistic right-wing charlatans like Joel Gilbert, who are disturbingly eager to feed Williams conspiracy theories and exploit him to try and sate their own lingering Clinton Derangement Syndrome. (Oh, yeah, there was a DNA test conducted by a tabloid back in the 1990s; not a match.)

Since Massie is just throwing whatever at the wall despite the fact that none of ever stuck before, he moves on to discredited attacks on Barack Obama:

Or perhaps it would have been better if Judge Moore had been an Obama. The allegations that Obama had frequented homosexual bathhouses in Chicago persist until today. Larry Sinclair wrote an expose on Obama titled, “Barack Obama and Larry Sinclair: Cocaine, Sex, Lies.” The book was published in 2009, and approaching Obama’s bid for re-election in 2012 a description at Google Books read: “The allegations Larry Sinclair makes in this book about our current president should be sending shock-waves through our national media. Consider that on Nov. 6.”

A description at Amazon noted: “The biggest untold story of the 2008 U.S. presidential election … Finally, the no-holds-barred, 100 percent true story of Barack Obama’s use and sale of cocaine; his homosexual affairs and the Dec. 23, 2007, murder of Barack Obama’s former lover and choir director of Obama’s Chicago church of 20 years, Donald Young, just days before the 2008 Iowa Caucus. This searing, candid story begins with Barack Obama meeting Larry Sinclair in November 1999, and subsequently procuring and selling cocaine, and then engaging in consensual, homosexual sex with Sinclair on Nov. 6 and again on Nov. 7, 1999.

“You’ll read in riveting detail how Sinclair, in 2007, repeatedly contacted and requested that the Obama campaign simply come clean about their candidate’s 1999 drug use and sales. You learn how the Obama campaign, David Axelrod and Barack Obama used Donald Young (the homosexual lover of Barack Obama) to contact and seek out information from Sinclair about who he had told of Obama’s crimes and actions. You’ll read how the Obama campaign used Internet porn king Dan Parisi and Ph.D. fraud Edward I. Gelb to conduct a rigged polygraph exam in an attempt to make the Sinclair story go away.

[...]

Larry Sinclair was killed in what no few concluded was a very suspicious car accident in November 2011. His allegations of interracial homosexual sex and cocaine abuse involving Obama went uninvestigated by the mainstream media.

One: Larry Sinclair, a convicted criminal, discredited himself in a bizarre, evidence-free press conference starring his kilt-wearing lawyer who couldn't stop talking about his junk.

Two: Larry Sinclair died in a 2011 car accident? We were unable to find any credible reference to such an incident. Had it actually happened, WND would have undoubtedly tried to exploit the hell out of it as the basis of its own "Obama death list" in order to blame Obama himself for orchestrating it. But that never happened.

Indeed, one of the people who would be most surprised to learn that Larry Sinclair died in 2011 is, um, Larry Sinclair. In a May 2017 column -- just seven months ago --  WND's Jack Cashill complained about how he and other fringe Obama-haters weren't contacted for a new book on the president, pondering that "I thought for sure [author David Garrow] would have interviewed Larry Sinclair," given how he had "reportedly discussed Obama’s alleged bisexuality." Cashill added: "I reached out to Sinclair through Facebook. 'I just don’t know any David Garrow,' he told me, 'nor have I given any interviews in last couple of years as I have been restoring a neglected community.'"

This is how little regard Massie has for facts. But then, apparently nobody at WND ever told him he was limited to using facts in his column.

For CNS Managing Editor, It's Homophobia For the Holidays
Topic: CNSNews.com

Michael W. Chapman, the rabidly anti-gay managing editor of CNSNews.com, has struck again. He devotes a Dec. 20 blog post to whining about a new book that "tells the story of a black Santa, his white husband, and their life in the North Pole," complaining that it arrives "just in time to further sexualize (and homosexualize) children."

After quoting the book's author stating how its aim is to mock the "war on Christmas" meme promoted every year by conservatives, Chapman huffs: "Apparently, depicting two 'married' male Santas who presumably anally sodomize each other as pretend-love -- and deliver gifts to children! -- is in no way an attack on Christmas." Looks like someone isn't getting the joke. (And how does Chapman know that gay relationships are "pretend-love"? Has he ever talked to a gay person in his life?)

Chapman concludes his tirade by huffing, "Maybe next Christmas the publisher Harper Collins can gift the world with a transgender Santa." Given that such a book will most certainly set off humorless homophobes like Chapman into paroxysms of rage -- a perverse entertainment unto itself -- we wouldn't be surprised if that's in the works.

NEW ARTICLE: Another Year of Hating Anita Hill
Topic: Media Research Center
A spate of sexual harassment allegations have given the Media Research Center one more opportunity to trash Hill and suggest her motivation for speaking out against Clarence Thomas was a book deal and a law-school job. Read more >>

Tim Graham, Hypocritical Media Concern Troll
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center's Tim Graham spends a Dec. 10 post huffing about the use of anonymous sources by the news media, this time complaining about how, in his words, "The Washington Postenjoys playing the game “Heads We Win, Tails You Lose” when anonymous sources lead journalists into looking stupid" in defending CNN's use of anonymous sources in a story that later had to be corrected. Let the huffing begin (boldface is his):

But here’s the “heads we win” part: since the sources are still anonymous, there can be no “evidence” -- unless either the sources or the source-exploiters own up to their little secret racket. We are prevented from knowing these are “Democratic sources” – most likely, because they’re Democratic sources, and that would make the story look more -- to use the Post term -- “vocally partisan.”

The “tails you lose” part is when the Post hides all their conservative-hating sources’ identities and then boasts the motto “Democracy dies in darkness.” The Post surely believes reporters are never manipulated by “puppet masters.” They’re always the smartest people in the room. Until it becomes obvious they trusted someone to just read them an email without looking at it themselves. That’s not what smart people do.

As @JohnSalmon859 tweeted: “Either CNN ‘got played’ - or it was purposeful. Trump Jr's being charitable here.” But in CNN's excuse-making, absolutely everyone had the best intentions, their journalists and their sources. The spin is furious, but not convincing.

It will not surprise you to learn that Graham has a double standard on the subject of anonmous sources in news stories. As we've docutmented, just before the 2016 election, Fox News heavily pushed a story -- sourced only to "two separate sources with intimate knowledge of the FBI investigations into the Clinton e-mails and the Clinton Foundation" -- suggesting that an indictment of Hillary Clinton was imminent and that her email server had been hacked. The MRC hyped this story to the point that MRC chief Brent Bozell himself ranted about the "media cover-up" and declared, "We will report developments on this continuing cover-up every hour from here on out."

One of those developments, however, turned out to be that the story was bogus; Fox News anchor Bret Baier, who first reported the story, retracted his claims. Not only wasn't Graham concern-trolling about how poor Fox News got burned by anonymous sources, the MRC never bothered to correct the story it had been relentlessly hyping despite Bozell's promise to report developments "every hour."

So, Tim, spare us your fake concern. If you actually cared about journalism, you wouldn't be exempting Fox News from criticism for doing the same thing you've bashed others for doing.

Jesse Lee Peterson Has Issues With Women, Alabama Election Edition
Topic: WorldNetDaily

After 98 percent of black female voters (96 percent of black voters overall) rejected a good man, Judge Roy Moore, in favor of wicked Democrat Doug Jones for senator of Alabama, it appeared evil won the night. Hollywood celebrities rejoiced and mocked Christians, saying, God is “a black woman.”

[...]

Even if I were into my blackness the way most blacks are, seeing the godless children of Satan applaud the black female vote would give me pause. Blacks with any sense should recognize these attempts at flattery as a major red flag – a warning that most blacks are on the wrong track.

Black celebrities – including Barack Obama, Charles Barkley, Deval Patrick and Cory Booker – pushed blacks to vote for Doug Jones. Decades ago, Jones prosecuted KKK members involved in a 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls. He’s done nothing good since, but only deceived blacks and others. Whatever happened way back then, today it is black-on-white violence and murder that’s far more rampant than the reverse. But pretending that “racism” is a problem spurs black hatred and hostility toward whites. Both deceivers and deceived will suffer.

[...]

The liberals put gullible and brainwashed blacks into a hypnotic trance by using the word “racist” against Judge Roy Moore, who told the truth that America was greater when families were together, even though we had slavery.

The unchecked daily massacre of blacks around the country by black gang members, drug dealers and abortions, year after year, dwarfs the few thousand or so lynchings blacks suffered before the so-called “Civil Rights Movement.”

Blacks’ displacement in the workforce and their neighborhoods by the flood of low-skilled immigrants and illegal aliens is worse than Jim Crow or segregation. Democrats and RINOs helped bring about fights and “hate crimes” between blacks and Hispanics, and the continued dependence and competition for government welfare, “health care” and low-quality education.

The absence of men, God, or love in black homes – allowing the unfettered anger of single black mothers and grandmothers and abuse toward children – is more oppressive, traumatic and mentally debilitating than slavery.

[...]

Blacks went from being moral, respectful, hard-working and employed, with good families to immoral, lazy, unemployed, complaining, excuse-making, disrespectful and criminal – with non-existent families, angry women, weak men and out-of-control children.

Blacks attend vacuous churches, regurgitate scripture, sing, dance, whoop and holler – pretending they believe in God. They don’t. In 2014, Pew Research reported 83 percent of black Americans said they believed in God. Time for honesty: They lied.

-- Jesse Lee Peterson, Dec. 17 WorldNetDaily column

CNS Managing Editor Lets Donohue Lie About Catholic Sexual Abuse
Topic: CNSNews.com

CNSNews.com has a new client for its stenography services: The Catholic League's Bill Donohue. Remember that CNS' publisher, Media Research Center chief Brent Bozell, is on the Catholic League's board of advisers probably has something to do with the whole stenography thing -- not that CNS is disclosing this conflict of interest to its readers.

CNS managing editor Michael W. Chapman is Donohue's personal stenographer. In a Dec. 14 post, he let Donohue rant about  a son succeeding his father as New York Times publisher, making the bizarre complaint that "no women were interviewed for the top spot." No women were interviewed either for the top spot in the Catholic Church the last time that job opened up, but we don't recall Donohue complaining about that.

On Dec. 18, Chapman was the servile stenographer for another Donohue rant, this time about the Boston Globe -- who in Chapman's words "has turned stories about child sexual abuse by Catholic priests into a cottage industry-- not publishing the names of staff members accused of sexual harassment. Donohue ultimately huffs, "We need Hollywood to do a 'Spotlight' film on the corruption within the Boston Globe," forgetting that a couple instances of sexual harassment at a newspaper have nothing whatsoever in common with the decades of systematically covering up sexual abuse of children in the Boston diocese.

Speaking of which, Chapman was the silent stenographer again for another post in which Donahue ranted about too many gays in the priesthood and blaming them for the sexual abuse crisis:

"Though it is not considered polite to say so, most people know that homosexuals are responsible for the lion's share of the problem in the Catholic Church," said Donohue.  "This includes those who insist they are gay-friendly."

"We do know that in the U.S., 81 percent of the clergy victims were male, and 78 percent were post-pubescent, meaning that homosexuals committed most of the abuse," said Donohue,  "less than 5 percent of the abusers were determined to be pedophiles (see the John Jay College of Criminal Justice reports on this subject)."

In fact, as we've repeatedly documented, Donohue is lying about this. The John Jay report not only found no correlation between homosexuality and the child sex scandals, the report's researchers explicitly warned against doing exactly what Donohue is doing:

"What we are suggesting is that the idea of sexual identity be separated from the problem of sexual abuse," said Margaret Smith, a researcher from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, which is conducting an independent study of sexual abuse in the priesthood from 1950 up to 2002. "At this point, we do not find a connection between homosexual identity and an increased likelihood of sexual abuse."

A second researcher, Karen Terry, also cautioned the bishops against making a correlation between homosexuality in the priesthood and the high incidence of abuse by priests against boys rather than girls -- a ratio found to be about 80-20.

"It's important to separate the sexual identity and the behavior," Terry said. "Someone can commit sexual acts that might be of a homosexual nature but not have a homosexual identity." Terry said factors such as greater access to boys is one reason for the skewed ratio. Smith also raised the analogy of prison populations where homosexual behavior is common even though the prisoners are not necessarily homosexuals, or cultures where men are rigidly segregated from women until adulthood, and homosexual activity is accepted and then ceases after marriage.

Donohue frequently lies about this, so you'd think Chapman would want to fact-check his claims instead of playing the servile stenographer. But we know fact-checking the things conservatives say -- particularly conservatives who are friends with the boss -- is not a big priority at Chapman's CNS.

WND Forgets How Money Talked With Clinton's Accusers
Topic: WorldNetDaily

An anonymous WorldNetDaily reporter writes in a Dec. 15 WND article:

Amid a flood of claims of inappropriate sexual behavior against men in Hollywood, sports, the media and politics, allegations about President Trump have resurfaced.

And now a new report suggests some of Trump’s accusers were “compensated.”

The details come from The Hill, which reported it reviewed relevant documents and interviewed some of the principals.

The Hill reported Lisa Bloom, a “well-known women’s rights lawyer,” sought “to arrange compensation from donors and tabloid media outlets for women who made or considered making sexual allegations against Donald Trump.”

This all happened during the 2016 presidential race, the report said.

Bloom’s mother is celebrity attorney Gloria Allred, who represented one of the women who made sexual-misconduct allegations against Roy Moore when he was running for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

The report said Bloom’s efforts “included offering to sell alleged victims’ stories to TV outlets in return for a commission for herself, arranging a donor to pay off one Trump accuser’s mortgage and attempting to secure a six-figure payment for another woman who ultimately declined to come forward after being offered as much as $750,000.”

The anonymous WND writer seems to have forgotten there's precedent for women who accuse powerful men of sexual harassment of getting compensation for it or at least trying to.

Gennifer Flowers, for example, cashed in handsomely after accusing Bill Clinton of having an affair with her. Not only was she paid $150,000 by a tabloid newspaper to tell her story, Republicans in Arkansas paid her another $50,000 and she was paid an additional $250,000 by Penthouse magazine for an interview and nude photo shoot. Kathleen Willey was at one time trying to shop her story of Clinton harassment to New York literary agents in order to get a book deal (they refused to bite). Paula Jones ultimately got an $850,000 payday in the form of an out-of-court settlement from Clinton, though her lawyers got most of it and ended up having nude photos published in Penthouse in order to pay the bills, her Clinton-hating conservative promoters having abandoned her after she ceased being useful to them.

Indeed, WND has no problem with cashing in on those very same accusers, having published a book on the subject (and we suspect little of that money ever made its way back to the accusers).

WND might want to make an accounting of all the money it made of Clinton's accusers -- and remember how the accusers themselves tried to cashh in -- before it lectures about Trump's accusers.

Old News: MRC Ramps Up Ancient Attacks on Anita Hill
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center, it seems, just can't stop obsessing over Anita Hill, whom it has spent the past 25 years smearing and bashing for making sexual harassment allegations against conservative icon Clarence Thomas. If anything, the attacks are ramping up.

MRC executives Tim Graham and Brent Bozell took a minor potshot at her in their Dec. 8 column: "Anita Hill had no photograph of Thomas grabbing her; she never claimed that he did. He was accused of talking dirty, and for that alone, the Democrats wanted him voted down."

News that Hill has been named by a group of entertainment executives to lead a commission tasked to address sexual harassment and inequality in the entertainment and news industries, however, really cranked up the MRC's wrath.

Kyle Drennen denounced Hill as "discredited" and having "credibility problems" who made "disputed accusations." The only evidence Drennen provides for these claims is a less-than-objective blog post at MRC "news" division CNSNews.com that, as we've noted, has as its chief source an attack website started by a personal friend of Thomas who was a lawyer for the team assembled by George H.W. Bush to push Thomas' nomination through the Senate.

Graham, meanwhile, continues to despise Hill so much that he needed two posts to vent his rage. In the first, he actually calls Hill's allegations "fake news" then spins his own version of the Hill-Thomas controversy, in which he once again pushed his unproven conspiracy theory that Hill came forward because she was chasing a book deal and a cushy law-school job:

After months of trying to defeat Thomas, the Democrats were about to lose the confirmation fight. So at the last minute, NPR and Newsday introduced Anita Hill and her unproven story. Hill testified, and Clarence Thomas strongly rebutted her allegations. When the weekend of hearings were over, a New York Times poll found the American people strongly believed Thomas over Hill, even women:

[...]

Politically, that’s a fiasco for Hill. But all of the mythical treatments of Saint Anita ignored what the American people concluded. The liberal elites have spent the last 25 years trying to revise history and reverse public opinion.

Few remember troubling details that made Hill's account less credible. For example, she followed Clarence Thomas around from job to job in the federal government, from the Education Department to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which doesn't exactly sound like someone seeking a less hostile working environment. Hill denied she was making the charges for her own personal benefit, but liberals raised an endowment to get her a job at the University of Oklahoma. After five years, she gained a prestigious professorship at Brandeis University. In 1993, she signed a two-book deal estimated to be "well over $1 million."

In his second rant, Graham rails against Hill over her 1998 comments regarding allegations against Bill Clinton, in which she reacted the same way that some conservatives have regarding the similar accusations against Donald Trump: it was known before the election, and the voters elected him anyway. Graham didn't mention that parallel of course; instead, he huffed, "If you are a true fighter against any and all sexual harassment, why would one refuse to acknowledge the women accusing Clinton as experiencing sexual harassment?"

(Of course, Graham himself is not a true fighter against any and all sexual harassment, given that he and the rest of the MRC have a certain Fox News-shaped blind spot on the issue.)

Graham also whined that Hill "also poured a bucket of disdain on the Paula Jones lawsuit," but the reason why she did so is why Graham has been attacking Hill's claims: there's no evidence, and her backers are politically motivated. Graham's ranting obscures that relevant point.

Graham concludes by delcaring that Hollywood looks "desperate and preposterous" by appointing Hill to this effort. But is that more or less desperate and preposterous than Graham and the rest of the MRC look in their quarter-century Hill-trashing obsession?

Graham, of course, won't answer that question.

WND Editor's Daughter Is The Vice President's Press Secretary
Topic: WorldNetDaily

In September, it was reported that Alyssa Farah, an adviser to the hardline conservative House Freedom Caucus, had been named press secretary to Vice President Mike Pence.

What most reports of the promotion didn't note: Farah's father is Joseph Farah, founder and editor of WorldNetDaily, the right-wing website notorious for its conspiracy theories, most famously forwarding the notion that President Obama wasn't born in the United States and has no valid birth certificate.

Curiously, the elder Farah has never publicly touted this great achievement by his daughter -- something you'd think he would be proud to tout. (He is, however, currently running a campaign encouraging Americans to thank Pence's boss, President Trump, for his "tireless efforts to change America for the better.")

Alyssa Farah's career path did not follow that of her conspiratorial father, though it was in many ways just as right-wing. She first served as communications director for the College Republicans National Committee and Young Americans for Liberty -- which grew out of Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign -- before becoming communications director for Republican Rep. Mark Meadows; her House Freedom Caucus gig was added onto that.

She's a graduate of Patrick Henry College, a conservative Christian school in Virginia outside Washington, D.C., that caters to homeschoolers. It was founded by Michael Farris, who earlier this year became the president and CEO of the anti-gay legal group Alliance Defending Freedom. Patrick Henry had a crisis a few years back involving how the school treated students who were victims of sexual assault (a story WND ignored, by the way).

Alyssa Farah wrote some articles for her dad at WND during her college years and for a couple years after, and they weren't exactly stellar by most journalistic standards (though quite acceptable by WND's lower standards):

• An April 2008 article creatively reinterpreted a debate over Internet content filters on public-access computers as being solely about pornography.
• A February 2010 article falsely claimed that a New York Times article on a controversial speaker at the conservative confab CPAC said that the speech "turned racist"; in fact, the Times reported that the speech used "racial stereotypes."
• A June 2010 article repeated misleading right-wing attacks on Elena Kagan after her nomination as a Supreme Court justice.
• A March 2013 article went the anti-vaxxer route, as Farah -- billed at this point as a "special Washington correspondent for WND" -- fearmongered about the "thousands of adverse reactions" and "serious side effects" of the human papillomavirus vaccine Gardasil. She also understated the effectiveness of the vaccine.

Alyssa Farah has undeniable right-wing credentials, a family connection to politics that are even further to the right, plus a little experience generating fake news -- which would seem to make her the perfect person to be Mike Pence's press secretary.