Ron Kessler's Week in Obama-Bashing Topic: Newsmax
Newsmax's Ronald Kessler was a on an Obama-bashing tear this week.
In his July 21 column, Kessler repeated a talking point he's been trying to misleadlingly create for months, that "a growing number of American Jews mistrust Obama." He claimed that Obama "has actively sided with Israel’s enemies and dissed Israel," but offered absolutely no specific evidence to back up the assertion. Kessler also called upon a reliable source to echo his attack, Morton Klein of the right-wing Zionist Organization of America (which, of course, Kessler does not identify as right-wing).
Kessler's July 22 column returns to another longtime obsession, Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
In January 2008, three months before the story of Wright’s connection to Obama finally broke in the mainstream media, I began writing stories as chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com about Obama’s close association with his America-hating, white-hating, Israel-hating minister. The media, which had known generally about Wright since Obama announced his candidacy in February 2007, ignored them.
Indeed, Kessler goes on to rehash what he wrote about Wright and complain that the media ignored him. Kessler went on tobaselessly assert that Obama is implementing "ultra-liberal policies and that "voters are asking why they thought he would govern as a centrist and would bring the country together."
Ellis Washington Derangement Syndrome Watch Topic: WorldNetDaily
It's been a while since Ellis Washington has gone into full-blown Obama Derangement Syndrome -- perhaps because he ran out of nefarious historical figures to liken President Obama to -- but Washington brings the crazy in his July 24 WorldNetDaily column.
Washington begins by making the false assertion that "murderous terrorist Bill Ayers" is "Obama's political mentor," and he quickly cherry-picks from Obama's autobiography to assert: "This is how Obama was raised: to hate America with a fanatical hatred that controls and animates his social, political, economic, religious and foreign-policy worldview. His entire Cabinet are a veritable Who's Who of political radicals, social engineers, Marxists, feminists, socialists, communists, fascists."
Washington also demonstrated that he made no effort to listen to the full video of Shirley Sherrod, for he follows in the same bit of slander that Brent Bozell engaged in:
So, are we to ignore Ms. Sherrod's racism because she recanted by embracing Marxism and redistribution of wealth? What about the hundreds or thousands of unnamed white farmers Sherrod was supposed to help during her career? Did she "do enough" for them?
From there, Washington became even more untethered from reality:
In less than two years, the Obama administration has caused this country cataclysmic and purposeful damage: TARP, $14 trillion debt, U.S. bailout now at $3.7 trillion, fighting two Vietnam wars (Iraq and Afghanistan), 17.5 percent actual unemployment, a de facto border war with Mexico on illegal immigration, over three months of oil gushing in the Gulf of Mexico and, worse than Jimmy Carter's "malaise," Obama has plagued America with an Orwellian dystopia where American exceptionalism, hope and Christian forbearance have devolved into despair, hopelessness and the politics of revenge.
Beginning in the 1880s, the Progressive Movement, which is embraced by the political left, had three key mandates for America: 1) Infiltrate the public schools and pervert the young minds of succeeding generations through moral relativism, evolution, Marxist economics and control by the education Brownshirts – the teachers' unions; 2) Characterize the constitutional framers as a bunch of rich, racist white guys and assert that because of slavery, de jure discrimination and misogyny, the Constitution has no binding authority in modern times; and 3) Characterize Christianity as a relic philosophy of the past with no current relevance or transcendental truth.
Washington also plucks Obama's statement that "Whatever we once were, we're no longer a Christian nation" out of context to falsely portray him as "Anti-Christianity."
Washington concluded with a final, desperate stab at Obama-hate:
Who, therefore, is Barack Obama?
President Obama is a vengeful, spoiled little man-child who, since he was raised and mentored by people who hate this country, derives perverse pleasure by seeing America on her knees. Obama's presidency is the revenge of liberal intellectuals, radicals and the counter cultural hippies of the 1960s and '70s.
Obama's presidency is a protracted world war on America, and his fascist policies are systematically being implemented as a politics of revenge.
This utter unhinged Obama derangement is why Washington is a WorldNetDaily columnist -- which he seems to need, since he seems to have no steady employment otherwise.
Sheppard Misleads in Attacking Dean Topic: NewsBusters
Noel Sheppard uses a a July 25 NewsBusters post to mount a bogus defense of Fox News and falsely attack former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean.
Noting that Dean said on "Fox News Sunday" regarding the Shirley Sherrod story, "I think Fox News did something that was absolutely racist. They took a, they had an obligation to find out what was really within the clip," Sheppard highlighted "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace's retort that Sherrod had been forced out of her job before Fox News started playing the out-of-context clip of her that Fox News host then used to falsely portray Sherrod as a racist.
"Wallace of course was correct," Sheppard wrote. "But facts weren't stopping Dean on Sunday as they NEVER do."
But Dean never claimed that Fox News got Sherrod fired -- he claimed that it hyped the deceptively edited tapes without bothering to look for the full story, which it most certainly did. Sheppard doesn't seem to want to admit that.
Sheppard wasn't the only one to decieve about what Fox News did; Accuracy in Media's Don Irvine did a similar bogus defense.
Morris Falsely Accuses Reid of Lying About Angle Topic: Newsmax
In a July 23 Newsmax video, Dick Morris falsely claims that Harry Reid "lied about" the record of his Republican opponent for his Nevada Senate seat, Sharron Angle:
MORRIS: Well, as soon as Harry Reid -- as soon as the Republican primary was held and Angle was nominated, Harry Reid put a negative ad on the air that lied about Sharron Angle's record and had her talking into the camera saying that she had -- she posed -- wanted to phase out Medicare and Social Security, and he put a million dollars behind that lie. The truth is she said she wanted to keep it, she just wanted to keep the Democrats from being able to raid the lockbox and use it to fund their deficits.
So there's a reply ad that has just gone on the air about a week ago, and it's just really beginning to run now. And the Americans for New Leadership.org has raised $300,000 to run that ad and needs additional money. With that moneywe will show people that it's a total lie that Reid is spreading. So please send a check to Americansfornewleadership.org. Sharron Angle can and will win this race, but we have to rebut Harry Reid's lie.
In fact, Reid's ad accurately quoted Angle stating her position, and it was only later that Angle changed her position. As Talking Points Memo notes:
In fact, during the Republican primary Angle did say that she wanted to "phase out" out Social Security, and said that "getting out" of Social Security and Medicare was "not up for grabs" -- that the only room for debate with her was the proper implementation and timeline for doing so. Since then -- after she won the primary -- Angle has shifted her position to wanting to allow people to use the same Social Security system as we know it, while also giving a choice of using a system of private accounts.
Further, Morris' blatant shilling for the newly formed anti-Reid group Americans for New Leadership comes without any disclosure of what his relationship is with the group -- namely, whether he is getting paid to shill for the group. Morris has a long history of using his media appearances to make solicitations for groups he is consulting with.
The MRC's Double Standard on Record Weather Topic: Media Research Center
In a July 23 MRC Business & Media Institute article (and NewsBusters post), Jeff Poor expressed annoyance with the idea that ABC's Jonathan Karl would dare to make global warming denier Sen. James Inhofe -- who insists that the earth is in a cooling trend, despite the fact that the past decade has been the warmest on record -- do an interview outside during a Washington heat wave, "Karl's effort to use the current heat along the East Coast is something the left was up in arms about earlier this year when snow covered much of the country, when it was used to mock the theory of manmade global warming," Poor asserts.
Poor doesn't disclose, of course, that his BMI and his fellow MRC employees at NewsBusters were among the chief promulgators of the idea that record cold in various places last winter disproved global warming -- and that it was not done mockingly. For instance, a March 2009 BMI article by Julia Seymour declared that the fact that "Temperatures have plummeted to record or near-record lows in 32 states this winter" meant that "Reality is not cooperating with the network news’ global warming theme." A Jan. 4 article by Seymour complained: "The news media constantly misuse extreme weather examples to generate fear of global warming, but when record cold or record snow sets in journalists don’t mention the possibility of global cooling trends."
We did find some mocking a BMI: a Jan. 8 article by Matt Philbin bashing the established-beyond-a-doubt fact that weather is not climate, asserting that only "properly indoctrinated young folk" believe such a thing.
Over at BMI's sister organization NewsBusters, such assertions that cold weather disproved global warming, in the form of attacking anyone who said it didn't or otherwise violated conservative correctness on the issue (many of which were penned by Noel Sheppard), were endemic:
Why doesn't Sheppard write about all this record heat we're seeing these days? (We checked -- he hasn't.) Because it conflicts with his denier agenda? Or perhaps because he was too busy falsely smearing Shirley Sherrod as a racist?
No, Obama Didn't Campaign for Kenya's Odinga in 2006 Topic: WorldNetDaily
In a July 15 article, WorldNetDaily promoted right-wing author Andrew McCarthy's claims that then-Sen. Barack Obama campaigned for "communist Luo" Raila Odinga during a 2006 visit to Kenya and that such campaigning, on top of Obama's criticism of Kenya's endemic corruption, is a violation of the federal Logan Act.
Over at Media Matters, we debunk these claims -- Obama never campaigned for Odinga, and nothing Obama actually did in Kenya was a violation of the Logan Act, under which no one has ever been prosecuted.
WND has made the false claim about Obama and Odinga severaltimes before, including in a July 19 article by Jerome Corsi that contains other Obama-Kenya falsehoods.
Look, Mr. Olbermann: You are no Emile Zola. You don't even rise to the level of the kings and queen of Kvetch TV, John and Larry King and Anderson Cooper of CNN.
And Sherrod is no Dreyfus. She was fired by an administration that mistook her for a worse racist than she actually was. The Obama posse overestimated the extent of Sherrod's animus for whites. She turned out to be merely a mezzanine-level racist.
Neither is Sherrod's story one of "redemption and cross-racial friendship," as Newsweek put it slightly less hyperbolically than did MSNBC's frontman. Shirley Sherrod's is a tale of the triumph of low expectations and black racial exculpation in contemporary America.
Here is a USDA worker, whose pay and perks are provided by wealthier Americans – given that this country has the steepest, most progressive tax system among all Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. Yet she disdains the very "haves" who've funded her existence and facilitated her "life's work." By her own admission, Sherrod arrived each day at work eager to toil for the betterment of nobody but blacks.
[...]
The acme of ethics in American: a black woman who has graduated from hard-core to soft bigotry.
For Gainor, Right-Wing Talking Points = 'Good Reporting' Topic: Media Research Center
Congressman-threatener Dan Gainor writes in his July 21 MRC Business & Media Institute column:
Unicorns, ogres and dragons you can find aplenty on the network news shows. Fair journalists and the stories they should be covering, not so much.
And what are these stories that "fair journalists ... should be covering"? The New Black Panther Party and "Climate Gate," among other right-wing darlings.
This ignores the fact that the New Black Panther story is propped up by a Republican activist portraying himself as a "whistleblower" who has no firsthand knowledge of the claims he's making, as well as incessant but empty fearmongering by Fox News.
As for "Climate Gate," there's also no there there -- the authors of the stolen emails were cleared of the most serious charges and most of the minor ones, despite the efforts of Gainor and his MRC fellow travelers to claim otherwise.
Gainor hasn't proven that there's anything to these stories that, if truthfully reported, rise to the level of actual news.
While Gainor obsesses about unicorns, ogres and dragons, his real problem is that he's trying to snooker us into hunting another mythical creature: the snipe.
Kinsolving Suggests Quarantining AIDS Victims Topic: WorldNetDaily
Is there any record that President Obama's fellow Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt ever disagreed with, or took any action against, authorities of his native state of New York, for their years of quarantining Mary Mallon?
In 1915, working under an assumed name in New York City's Sloane Maternity Hospital (where I was born in 1927), she spread typhoid fever to 25 doctors, nurses and staff – two of whom died.
They were only a few of those she infected and killed.
She was sent to a penal institution, North Brother Island, off the Bronx, where she was kept in quarantine until her death in 1938.
If "typhoid Mary" Mallon was so isolated for so long, to protect the public from typhoid, when will New York and the United States begin protecting the public from spreaders of the far deadlier disease of AIDS?
NewsBusters' Double Standard on Violence Toward Others Topic: NewsBusters
A July 22 NewsBusters post by Tim Graham complained that in the cherry-picked Journolist email released, there appears a "call for violence," namely that "Spencer Ackerman (now with Wired magazine) is again talking about putting conservatives through a plate-glass window (as in the Caller's first piece), in this case terrorism expert Michael Ledeen."The previous day, Graham highlighted another cherry-picked Journolist post from "an NPR producer who admits flaming hatred for Rush Limbaugh" and wrote that if Rush Limbaugh were dying, she would "Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out."
Graham, meanwhile, has been silent about a call for violence made by one of his own co-workers. Dan Gainor, the Media Research Center's vice president for business and culture, Twittered the other day, "I'll give $100 to first Rep. who punches smary [sic] idiot Alan Grayson in the nose."
Apparently, threatening people with violence is perfectly OK when conservatives do it.
O’Reilly Teams Up With Newsmax for Another Webcast Topic: Newsmax
On July 21, Newsmax -- following up on its previous partnership with Bill O’Reilly, in which O’Reilly appeared in a Newsmax webcast designed to sell its financial products -- issued an email announcing that O’Reilly will star in a new upcoming webcast.
Described as “A Newsmax Undercover Report,” the email states that “This Internet Broadcast Will Feature Bill O’Reilly and What He Is Doing to Prepare” for what Newsmax calls “the Largest Tax Hike in America’s History,” the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. In the email, Newsmax financial publisher Aaron DeHoog follows Newsmax tradition by engaging in anti-Obama fearmongering (underline in original):
Dear Newsmax Reader,
I’ll cut straight to the chase. You are about to be directly hit with a full assault from the IRS.
And you should heed this warning and prepare yourself accordingly.
To pay down our massive federal deficit, President Obama is going to come calling for what he believes is your portion of our $13.2 trillion tab.
In fact, as we stand now in his eyes, you are responsible for more than $119,000 (that’s exactly how much each citizen owes, according to my sources).
So you are going to be slapped with new Medicare taxes, cap and trade, and a value-added tax.
And President Obama is just getting started.
Once he intentionally lets the Bush tax cuts expire, tens of millions of Americans will feel a direct impact to their retirement savings.
And that’s just on the federal level.
In fact, Obama’s fiscal year 2011 budget calls for keeping the Bush tax cuts for all except individuals making more than $200,000 a year and couples making $250,000.
DeHoog goes on to write, “You need sound advice in these days of extortion from over-taxation.” That sound advice will be coming in part from O’Reilly, who will tell how he is “preparing.” This is the same O’Reilly, by the way, who has repeatedly pointed out that he’s “not an economist.”
What this webcast will inevitably be is yet another infomercial for a Newsmax financial product, even though it can be expected that O’Reilly, as he did last time, will claim he’s not there to endorse said financial product. Of course, O’Reilly’s presence can logically be seen as an implicit endorsement, whether he wants to admit it or not.
Bozell Doubles Down on Sherrod Lie Topic: Media Research Center
Brent Bozell doubles down on the lie that Shirley Sherrod is a racist, saying it even more emphatically on the July 21 edition of Mark Levin's radio show:
BOZELL: I watched the full tape. It gets worse, it doesn't get better. It's not that Andrew Breitbart took out something that was going to somehow get her off the hook. She hangs herself later on with footage that Andrew Breitbart, I believe, did not have on his.
[...]
She goes on to say, "Some of the racism we thought was buried, didn't it resurface?" The audience applauds. "We endured eight years of the Bushes, and didn't do the stuff these Republicans are doing because we have a black president." Here is a woman who is herself inserting racism into the debate, and conservatives somehow have to apologize?
[...]
I thought that what we were leading to was her saying that she had come to the realization it wasn't about racism, that it was about poverty. That was the theme of her speech. Until you listen to it carefully, and what's she saying is it's racism and poverty. She's inserting racism and class warfare into this debate. I mean, this is what we're up against.
Bozell is trying to change the subject from the fact he falsely smeared her as a racist. He's throwing more cherry-picked, out-of-context quotes around to disguise his own libelous behavior.Given that he has already embraced cherry-picked, out-of-context quotes to falsely smear Sherrod as a racist, there's no reason to believe that more cherry-picked quotes will make his point.
And if Bozell will not apologize for his false and libelous smear, he is certainly not going to hold Andrew Breitbart accountable for his irresponsibility in posting the cherry-picked clips in the first place.
It's yet another reminder that the Media Research Center cares abolutely nothing about media research -- it's all about partisan politics, which may very well violate its current tax-exempt status.
He has an already legendary taste for Kobe beef, one of the most expensive delicacies on the planet, and one of the fattiest, while his wife condescendingly chastises Americans for their diets and "lavish lifestyles." I don't know if I'd feel comfortable even admitting I had an affinity for that particular culinary extravagance – let alone indulging in it regularly – if I had any access whatever to the public purse strings, as does our president, Barack Hussein Obama.
This sort of cavalier behavior – even if the president does pay for his own meals – is pretty much standard fare for the progressive; it isn't given a second thought. Lacking even the rationale of the robber baron, who at least creates jobs through the goods or services he provides, progressives succeed by virtue of their lack of virtue, then enjoy opulence and privilege whilst living out a parasitic existence on the backs of those who do produce.
In the instance of our current chief executive, his inopportune indulgences and trust-fund-baby lifestyle, no pretext nor rationalization is forthcoming, let alone some justification, since his propaganda ministry, the establishment press, absolutely refuses to hold him accountable.
It is quite conceivable that President Obama has already decided to not seek a second term in 2012 and therefore can afford to ignore public opinion and "do the right thing" by his own compass – not only on border security and amnesty but all across the board. The problem for the nation is that his compass is set on the goal of a socialist America within a new international socialist order where borders – and the Constitution's limits on his power – are of little consequence.
After President Obama repeatedly and emphatically promised last summer that Obamacare would not use federal funds to pay for abortions (and even signed a supportive presidential order to boot), last week it was revealed that federal funds were being funneled to provide for abortive services in Pennsylvania and New Mexico.
This presidential lie is tragically just one more in an unprecedented string of flat-out falsehoods reaching back to Obama's campaign promise to "clean up both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue" with "the most sweeping ethics reform in history."
-- Chuck Norris, July 19 WorldNetDaiily column (making a claim that's unequivocally false)
Newsmax Disappears Breitbart From Sherrod Story Topic: Newsmax
A July 21 Newsmax article by David Patten portrays a "a chastened White House" apologizing to Shirley Sherrod after being '[b]lasted by pundits on both ends of the political spectrum for its firing of a USDA worker who made racially tinged remarks."
But Patten curiously disappears the name of the person who is responsible for posting the dishonestly edited videos that falsely portrayed Sherrod has having made "racially tinged" remarks -- Andrew Breitbart.
How does one write an entire story about Sherrod and fail to mention the person who put the false narrative in motion? We don't know, but Patten has achieved it. Then again, Patten is a horribly biased reporter.
Kincaid's July 19 AIM column is more of the same, touching on various anti-gay subjects he has made over the past several months -- gays in the military, gay marriage, "gay blood" -- with some updated right-wing talking points.
Kincaid also announces that he is "honored to be invited to be a part of" an upcoming "Truth Academy" being held by the rabidly anti-gay Americans for Truth about Homosexuality. He oes on to praise AFTAH leader Peter LaBarbera as "one of those brave few taking a leadership role in the effort to preserve traditional American social and religious values." Kincaid writes that LaBarbera has been "[f]ighting off the predictable smears of 'hater' and 'homophobe' from the gay-run Media Matters group and the Southern Poverty Law Center," failing to mention the fact that such statements are "predictable" because they are true.
Kincaid completed his point with photo promoting his column on the AIM front page, apparently ripped directly from his subconscious:
It's as if Kincaid is channeling the critic in the Onion article who said, "If this is repealed, what's to stop all-night sex romps from breaking out while U.S. servicemen are hiding in a bunker, or crawling around an irrigation ditch bathed only by the light of the moon, or, say, the dozens of other situations I've already thought through in elaborate detail?"
