Topic: Media Research Center
When we last left off, the Media Research Center was hyping Josh Hawley's bogus attack on Ketanji Bown Jackson's sentencing record in child porn cases while pretending it hadn't been discredited. That obsession coninued, with a couple of additions.
Now, the MRC has been obsessed with Jeffrey Toobin's peener ever since he got busted pleasuring himself on a Zoom call, referencing the incident at every opportunity, and Nicholas Fondacaro kept the penner obsession up(!) in a post criticizing Toobin for criticizing Republican questioning of Jackson:
Day two of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings brought direct and pointed questions from Republican Senator Josh Hawley (MO) about her history of going easy on child porn cases. But CNN masturbation expert and chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin took strong issue with Hawley’s focus on the serious issue many Americans care about.
[...]
“This is about appealing to the QAnon audience, this cult that is a big presence in Republican Party politics now, that is – where Senator Hawley is trying to ingratiate himself with that group and run for president with their support,” Toobin asserted.
Adding: “This has very little to do with Judge Jackson who, as has come out throughout the hearing today, is one of many judges who have found the sentencing guidelines in these child porn possession cases excessive.”
Perhaps the concerning takeaway is that “many judges” think “the sentencing guidelines” for pedophiles and child porn offenders are “excessive.”
Is that more or less concerning than demandinbg that judges hand out only maximum sentences and not take individual circumstances into consideration?
Curtis Houck followed by rehashing right-0wing grievances of the treatment of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Comey Barrett in defending Republican attacks in Jackson:
During an afternoon break Tuesday in Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings, CNN Newsroom mocked and dismissed questions from Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) about critical race theory (CRT) as “below the line” and “reek[ing] of desperation” from “a clown” who “put on a performance” in “the surreal.”
To be clear about how CNN views things, it’s out of bounds to ask about matters of race and concerning a place where Jackson serves on the school’s board, but it was perfectly fine to smear someone’s deeply-held personal beliefs and accuse another of being a serial gang rapist who threw ice, didn’t deserve due process, and had racist and sexist supporters.
He too rembraced the peener obsession and referenced "Chief legal analyst and infamous masturbator Jeff Toobin," then insisted that Cruz was just "asking a Supreme Court nominee about major issues in American society." He didn't mention that the sentencing attacks have been discredited.
Kevin Tober lashed out at MSNBC's Joy Reid again:
When the U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown's nomination to the Supreme Court wrapped up Tuesday, MSNBC's Joy Reid only had five minutes left of her show,The ReidOut, to squeeze in as much venom and hatred against Republicans as she could. To her credit, she was successful. In the five minutes she had to react to Tuesday's hearings she managed to call Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) "thuggish" multiple times and accused Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) of never attending law school classes at Harvard.
How does that compare to the bnumber of times the MRC references masturbation every time it brings up Toobin? Tober didn't say. Instead, he again huffed that "it's a complete bald-faced lie to say Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was credibly accused of rape."
Tim Graham, meanwhile, embraced the idea of Republicans trashing Jackson as revenge for how he thinks Kavanaugh was treated -- not to mention indulging in the MRC's 30-year-old bitterness at Anita Hill:
Monday's edition of The NPR Politics Podcast sounded a little bizarre to conservatives. NPR congressional reporter Susan Davis marveled at "just how much bitterness lingers among Republican senators over the nomination process of Brett Kavanaugh." It was mildly comical that their discussion of Kavanaugh didn't describe the actual subject of the bitterness -- unproven allegations of teenage sexual assault. Would NPR reporters be bitter if they were accused of rape?
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Nina Totenberg -- who slimed Clarence Thomas in 1991 with Anita Hill's unproven charges of crude sexual banter -- somehow sounded mournful about the bitter partisan tone, as if she and NPR had nothing to do with it.
Graham rehashed that bitterness again in his March 23 column complaining about how Clarance Thomas was treated:
The liberal media have treated the Supreme Court nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson as a glorious and historic occasion. Nobody needs to care about where she stands on things, since she and the media share all the “correct opinions.”
Associated Press issued a story under this tweet: “For Black girls, the possibility of Ketanji Brown Jackson being the first Black woman on the Supreme Court is a moment of promise, hope and the breaking of yet another barrier.”
But on July 1, 1991, when President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, the networks were horrified. He was a conservative, so he wasn’t black. On ABC’s World News Tonight, reporter Tim O'Brien said that a “prominent black legal scholar called Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court insulting.” It was Harvard's Derrick Bell, the architect of Critical Race Theory, who angrily claimed “To place a person who looks black, and in conservative terms thinks white, is an insult.”
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Journalists tout black “lived experience” for the high court, but they savagely attack minorities who are conservative. Forget their experiences. The outpouring of media hostility felt like what Thomas described as a “high-tech lynching of uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.”
The MRC continued to whine that Republicans' bad-faith attacks were getting called out:
- Here’s the Late Night Hacks Who Think It’s Racist for GOP to Question Jackson
- MSNBC Blasts GOP's CRT 'Culture Wars' at Confirmation Hearing
- NY Times on KBJ: ‘White, Male Republican Senators’ Are Hypocrites for ‘Partisan Attacks’
- NOW You Don’t Want to Go There? ABC Seethes Over Cruz Asking Jackson About Race
- NEW NewsBusters Podcast: How Dare Anyone Question 'Historic' Ketanji!
Graham returned to have a meltdown over a Republican senator's attacks on Jackson getting fact-checked:
The Democrat-backing “fact checkers” of PolitiFact jumped to the defense of Ketanji Brown Jackson by slapping conservative Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee with two negative verdicts on Tuesday:
First, Tom Kertscher rated Blackburn “False” and in a headline said she was “wrong” on Jackson’s citation of critical race theory in sentencing.
When PolitiFact pointed out that Jackson was talking about sentencing policy, not critical race theory, Graham huffed: "Huh? Isn’t sentencing a crucial part of judges making decisions on the bench? Obviously, Judge Jackson’s alleged leniency in sentencing is a vital part of these hearings." Of the other fact-check, Graham complained that Blackburn was called out for cherry-picking Jackson's words but that she "quoted Jackson accurately."
The whining that Republicans were being busted for repeating discredited attacks continued in another post by Houck:
Wednesday’s CBS Mornings went above and beyond to prop up Biden Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson with almost 11 minutes of eye-rolling spin, denouncing Republican queries as unrelated to Jackson and instead to please their base, mocked concerns about her history on sentencing child sex predators as having “no there there,” and described Republicans as having failed to “strike a match.”
Worse yet, one CBS liberal even questioned the need for the confirmation hearings and process because there’s so much “grandstanding” (by which they meant Republicans, not Democrats).
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Congressional correspondent Nikole Killion adopted liberal spin, offering zero pushback to insane assertions about GOP questions being beyond the pale: “[T]he White House and Democrats are dismissing some of these questions from Republican senators. They say they cross the line and are even pushing on smears based on conspiracy theories.”
Killion hyped that Jackson “addressed the elephant in the room” about sentencing in child sex crimes, “refut[ing] debunked claims by Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley that she issued lenient sentences in child pornography cases.” In the clip used, Jackson played up the emotional argument that she still views sex crimes as “egregious” and “heinous.”
Houck offered no evidence to dispute the fact that the claims have been discredited.
