Slanties 2016: The Slant Awakens

There aren't many stars, but there's definitely a war going on in the ConWeb, with the usual misinformation and wackiness that entails. It's time once again to recognize their efforts.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 1/11/2016

	Related articles on ConWebWatch: 2004 Slanties 2005 Slanties 2006 Slanties 2007 Slanties 2008 Slanties 2009 Slanties 2010 Slanties 2011 Slanties 2012 Slanties 2013 Slanties 2014 Slanties 2015 Slanties

In other words, it's another year in the ConWeb filled with falsehoods, misinformation and general insanity. Any new hope of responsible journalism was dashed.

What you're feeling is not a disturbance in the Force but, rather, the impending announcement of the 13th annual Slantie Awards, ConWebWatch's celebration of ConWeb behavior. Let's do this...

* * *

The first award is for the most egregious example of bias in "news" coverage. The nominees are:

Coulter cowardice -- Ann Coulter sunk to new depths of offensiveness in 2015, and her friends at WorldNetDaily and the Media Research Center tried to pretend it didn't happen. Despite admitting she was being offensive, WND editor Joseph Farah refused to put his money where his mouth is and drop her column; however much he denies it, he's clearly afraid of losing the traffic she brings to his website. The MRC, however, wouldn't even acknowledge Coulter's anti-Catholic viciousness even though it regularly attacks any perceived anti-Catholic sentiments in the media.

Protecting the Duggars -- CNSNews.com promoted Josh Duggar when he was a spokesman for the Family Research Council, and of course it loved the Duggar family's TV show. But when it was revealed that Josh Duggar had molested his sisters as a teenager, CNS tried to censor the story, then finally grudgingly acknowledging it by pushing pro-Duggar spin.

Fake journalism, part 1 -- CNS sent an intern to ask a gotcha question of Nancy Pelosi, then ginned up outrage that actual journalists called him an "abortion protester." That kind of fizzled after the MRC itself published a glowing account quoting the intern's pride that he had "pushed the right button" to make Pelosi "erupt with anger."

Fake journalism, part 2 --The MRC launched a campaign to remove a bust of Margaret Sanger from a museum. Its purported "news" division, CNS, published lies about Sanger, then fawningly covered an anti-bust protest but failed to disclosed that it was organized by the MRC seemingly for the sole purpose of giving CNS something to do.

The birther blind eye -- WorldNetDaily was very excited that Ted Cruz is running for president ... so much so that it seems to have forgotten that, according to the (overly strict and never supported by any relevant court decision) standard it applied to Barack Obama, Cruz is not eligible to be president. Thus, the Obama birther obsessives have become Cruz birther censors.

And the winner is ... CNS' stenography for its parent organization's anti-Sanger jihad. CNS has proven once and for all it's not a real "news" organization but simply the MRC's right-wing bias translated into journalese.

* * *

The next award is the LoBaido Award for the silliest statement made by a writer for a conservative news Web site (named after Anthony LoBaido, who wrote a post-9/11 column for WorldNetDaily that was so unhinged -- he blamed the attacks on America's immorality since "all that is evil in the world can be found in New York" and, for good measure, called Hillary Clinton "openly Marxist, treasonous and abortion-mongering, occultic" -- that WND eventually pulled it from its site). Here are this year's finalists:

Mr. Obama must be some form of warped, terror denier. Faced with facts of an actual terror attack, including an attack that saw a breakdown in vetting, a breakdown in terror tracking, and according to a whistle-blower, a directive to stop following terror leads in that area due to religious sensitivity concerns, Mr. Obama still had his press secretary recasting the terror attack. Oh yes … why hasn’t the President gone to San Bernardino after this terror attack?

The President appears to be the commander in chief of a gun control cult of terror deniers who have hunkered down in the White House behind a narrative designed to disarm Americans, attack the Constitution, and ignore international enemies waging war against the United States. This is way past troubling.

-- Richard Kelsey, Dec. 14 CNSNews.com column

It's virtually impossible to know anything definitive about this fellow.

Who was the best man at his wedding? Start there. Then check groomsmen.

Then get the footage of the graduation ceremony. Has anyone talked to the professors? It is odd that no one is bragging that they knew him or taught him or lived with him.

When did he meet Michelle, and how? Are there photos there? Every president gives to the public all their photos, etc. for their libraries. What has he released?

-- Bradlee Dean, Dec. 10 WND column

Rather than accuse Obama of being a secret Muslim blinded by Marxist ideology, perhaps the way for Congress to save our nation is to invoke the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution dealing with presidential disabilities. This amendment allows Congress to review whether or not the president is able to discharge the powers and duties of his office. If it is determined that he is not, then he can be replaced. A case can be made that he is so affected by previous drug use that he is just not capable of comprehending reality. As a former member of the “Choom Gang” of heavy marijuana users, Obama seems indifferent to the facts on the ground concerning the Muslim terrorist threat.

The charge that Obama has been impaired by marijuana is not made lightly. Interestingly enough, however, a new study has just been released regarding the “psychosis-like effects” of marijuana.

-- Cliff Kincaid, Dec. 7 Accuracy in Media column

Nothing has ever happened to the United States that is worse than the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. A committed Marxist collectivist, he has stood throughout his presidency against that very principle of individual rights that made America great. In abandoning our allies and aligning with the Muslim Brotherhood and other sinister groups, he has aligned with the most evil forces of the 21st century and overturned the order of the world. In abandoning and even actively turning against our allies (most notably Israel), he has made the United States of America, for so long the beacon of freedom in the world, into an untrustworthy ally, a nation that cannot be taken at its word.

We will be paying for Obama’s presidency for decades to come. The full dimensions of the damage he has caused – the gutting of the economy, the new polarization of the races, the Iran nuclear deal and more – is likely only to be known once he is out of office. And America may never recover from this catastrophe.

-- Pamela Geller, Nov. 29 WND column

I believe God wants Christians to pray a very specific prayer: Pray for the conversion of Barack Obama out of Islam. Just that. Nothing more. Try that this Sunday. It should liven up your church service.

-- Craige McMillan, Nov. 20 WND column

My own politically incorrect suggestion is that we remove ISIS from the face of the earth, hopefully as a joint effort with every other nation it has threatened or attacked, and that we then bomb Mecca off the face of the earth, not concerning ourselves in the least with collateral damage, letting the Muslims know once and for all that our God is far more powerful and, yes, vengeful than their own puny deity.

It’s harsh, but they’ve been asking for it for over 1,400 years, and it’s time they got it.

-- Burt Prelutsky, Nov. 19 WND column

The No. 1 threat to America’s national security has a name. It’s a person. It’s the de facto president of the United States at least until Jan. 20, 2017 – more than a year from now. The No. 1 enemy of this great experiment in self-governance and limited government under the rule of law and through the will of the people is none other than the man in the White House – Barack Obama.

-- Joseph Farah, Nov. 18 WND column

In every area, Obama demonstrates an unfortunate affinity for that which normal people would describe as destructive, corrupt, evil.

Whether this is because Obama is evil at his core, or whether there’s a decent person locked up inside but who has been traumatized and brainwashed – a Manchurian president, programmed not by exotic far-off communist brainwashers, but by a nonstop sequence of corrupting influences throughout his life – is not ours to know.

Ultimately, the question is largely academic. Whatever the ultimate explanation of Obama’s delusional presidency, he demonstrates at every turn a remarkable attraction for that which is destructive and corrupting to human life, that is, “evil.” And he is dragging America – and increasingly the world – through hell in search of it, which he somehow, however inexplicably, sees as good.

-- David Kupelian, Nov. 17 WorldNetDaily column

ALERT, America! Had this been an actual presidency, your beloved nation would not be in this cleverly and dastardly engineered suicidal downward spiral to hell. Had this been a real presidency, the words and policies emanating from your White House and from most of your elected employees would not sound like rejected nonsense from Alfred E. Neuman too loony to be found in the pages of Mad Magazine.

Had enough real Americans performed their basic “we the people” responsibilities to monitor, guide and prod our elected employees to strictly adhere to their oath to the U.S. Constitution, to remain in touch with common sense, logic and perform but a modicum of professional accountability, we would have never allowed the psychopathic liar in chief and his gang of commie goons to continually run amok with their America-hating “fundamental transformation” of what was at one time the greatest country ever found on earth.

-- Ted Nugent, Nov. 4 WND column

Obama isn’t a leader – he is a usurper. He is a usurper of privilege and a usurper of what America has to offer to the extent that it benefits him personally. Additionally, he is a destroyer. Obama doesn’t look forward to a better America; he looks forward to an America created in the image of Saul Alinsky.

Obama envisions a government based on nationalism and collectivism. Even worse, Obama is bereft of propriety but filled with ghetto hubris and the pop-culture swagger of commonality.

The dark hand of fate presented Obama with another opportunity to lead. Instead he reduced a moment that could have defined his time in office as having a brief modicum of decorum, to one of base commonality, lies and attempted subjugation.

-- Mychal Massie, Oct. 5 WND column

God is giving America over to her lusts and pride because, like ancient Israel, she has turned away her heart from Him, though He was like a faithful husband to them both.

America is, indeed, getting justice, but not the way Obama and the moral anarchists think of it. They are getting their just deserts, as are the rest of us who have not been the salt and light needed to hold back judgment.

Judgment isn’t just coming. It is here. This is it. It could get worse, but the Supreme Court ruling on marriage was, in fact, itself a form of divine judgment on America.

Let me risk prosecution for “hate thoughts” by raising what the Bible says about homosexuality, the behavior that opened this spiritual Pandora’s box.

-- Joseph Farah, June 29 WND column

If I see another picture of Michelle, Sasha and Malia trooping up or down the steps to their plane with their legs hanging out, I think I’m going to throw up.

What’s going on with the short, short skirts?

It’s bad enough when we’re treated to Michelle’s knees, but with the girls – who are growing into lovely young women – their above mid-thigh skirt lengths are ridiculous. Keep in mind, they’re 14 and 16 years old, yet wearing dresses and skirts short enough for a 4-year-old.

I know it’s summer, but their casualness in skirt length is more suitable for a beach, not when they’re representing our country.

-- Barbara Simpson, June 21 WND column

If I see that creepy Vanity Fair cover of Bruce Jenner come across my Facebook feed just one more time, I’m going to gouge out my eyeballs and bleach the sockets.

Ladies, please, if you ever again struggle with body image, just know that those stupid chick magazines you thumb through every day while nibbling arugula and baby carrots like some bulimic bunny, can, through the simple magic of $200,000 in plastic surgery and enough airbrushing to power a windmill farm, make a 65-year-old mentally ill man look, sort of, like a 35-year-old country club ninny. Brucie baby ain’t got nothin’ on you, sweetheart, I promise. It’s all fake as the rubber grapes on grandma’s centerpiece. You are you, he is he, and the cover models on your silly mags don’t look a stitch like that.

-- Matt Barber, June 5 WND column

The minimum wage has never helped blacks, and it won’t help them now.

-- Jesse Lee Peterson, May 24 WND column

With that background, let us address the question of whether Mr. Obama and the “gay”-promoting, catastrophist hard left are, to use St. John’s phrase, “of the devil.”

The charitable conclusion is that they are of the devil, that they are under the controlling influence of the father of lies, that they are his unwitting or unwilling mouthpieces.

For if that be not the case, Mr. Obama and others like him who utter the wicked falsehoods on the basis of which they promote such fatal abominations as “gay” “marriage” and “catastrophic” “manmade” “global” “warming” are deliberately, willfully telling lies – lies that kill.

On the evidence, they are certainly not telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So far are they from the truth, so many are the deaths their interminable and often gross lies cause, that it is surely kinder to grant them the Hitler defense – that they are not in control of themselves either because they are collectively mad or because they are individually of the devil.

-- Christopher Monckton, May 24 WND column

I’ll have to admit that First Sasquatch Michelle Obama outdid her husband concerning racialist gaffes in one fell swoop over the weekend, when she bloviated at length before a lectern at Tuskegee University. Her so-called commencement address was largely a stream of self-pitying, self-righteous, bitter, paranoid racialist propaganda.

-- Erik Rush, May 13 WND column

Well, I have news for [John] McCain and the establishment wing of the Republican Party: If he thinks that what the NSA (and also the CIA) have been doing is peachy keen, then perhaps he has more kinship to Ho Chi Minh and the senator’s dictatorial former North Vietnamese jailers at the Hanoi Hilton than our Founding Fathers.

-- Larry Klayman, May 8 WND column

The Hollywood and news media push on the latest frontier of "gender fluidity" demonstrates the libertine left's absolute arrogance that the LGBT revolution is an unstoppable juggernaut.

Time placed Laverne Cox on a "Transgender Tipping Point" cover last June, and the aggressive culture tipping took off. Amazon created a series around a retiree and father of three deciding he was a woman in "Transparent," and won Golden Globes. Fox's "Glee" had their female football coach grow a beard and be celebrated by a "historic" 200-member transgender choir.

The cherry on this vomit is Bruce Jenner.

-- Tim Graham and Brent Bozell, May 1 Media Research Center column

What if Obama isn’t looking to his “legacy”? What if the threat of nuclear devastation he helps to arm with this agreement (an America-hating Iran with nuclear bombs) is to be brandished, along with a related threat from ongoing terrorist uprisings on U.S. soil, to create the exigent circumstances needed to justify imposing martial law throughout the United States and a plausible excuse for demanding that Obama remain in office until the emergency passes?

-- Alan Keyes, April 9 WND column

Get off your knees, Gov. Pence; you’re not in a gay bathhouse (where only gays are, presumably, welcome). Muster a coherent defense of the bedrock of a free republic – and of civilization itself: the rights of private property and freedom of association.

Why do men like Mr. Pence, who understand these principles all too well, buckle before a mob of lobotomized tyrants with the intelligence of a Miley Cyrus?

-- Ilana Mercer, April 2 WND column

I want to express sincere apologies to any country or people across the world who consider the United States their ally and friend – people who believe they could trust the U.S. to keep a secret, to support treaties, to encourage freedom, to be a peacemaker yet lead the free world, to maintain the military strength to support freedom.

I apologize because since the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama as president, all that has changed, and we are all at risk.

-- Barbara Simpson, March 22 WND column

Dear Hillary Clinton,

I think you are a benevolent, insidious, sexualist, sexist racist. I mean that in the nicest of ways. In fact, based upon your own definitions, I think that might be a compliment to you. I am not even sure anymore because it all depends on what the definition of the word “is” is.

-- Gina Loudon, March 15 WND column

Sharing their disdain for America is Jon Stewart, to whom they should have given the “Most Disgusting Jew on the Planet Award.” No contest. After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ground-breaking speech to Congress last week, Stewart scoffed at the many standing ovations Netanyahu received as the “longest bl-wjob a Jewish man has ever received.”

This vicious traitor, smug and self-righteous, has long been working for the other side under the guise of comedy. Vile. Jon Stewart defines self-loathing Jew. But that’s not enough. He means to take us down with him.

-- Pamela Geller, March 8 WND column

President Obama has, in so many words, explicitly expressed his desire for total control over you. As he sibilantly slurs his way through various attacks on Christianity, individual liberty, economic freedom, American exceptionalism and every other foundational tenet of this free nation’s founding documents and underlying philosophy, he is making clear not just that he hates you and your politics, hates you and your liberty, hates you and your family. He is establishing quite clearly through word and deed that he has absolutely no problem with the myriad ways in which your government (and every other entity, private and public) invades your privacy.

To Democrats, you are not an individual. To progressives, you are not a human being. To Obama, you are not a free citizen.

-- Phil Elmore, Feb. 11 WND column

The Obama years will be forever known as the Dark Ages of US history, a time of political, cultural and economic deterioration. We have yet to see if they will lead to the fall of the American republic.

[...]

Unless we undertake a thorough exposition of who Obama really is, what is his background and true agenda, what forces made his unprecedented rise to power possible and who has conspired to hide the truth, an American Renaissance will not be forthcoming.

We are in a new Dark Age. In such situations, the record of history is unequivocal; either we produce a Renaissance, that is, a rebirth of the fundamental principles upon which America was founded or our republic dies.

-- Lawrence Sellin, Feb. 2 Accuracy in Media column

Are you prepared for two more years of Barack Obama as president?

As of tomorrow, two more years. That’s 730 days. That’s 17,520 hours.

I don’t know about you, but to me it feels like an eternity.

The countdown never seems to come to an end.

-- Joseph Farah, Jan. 18 WND column

Suppose America elects a charismatic young president who makes all kinds of brave promises and sweeps into the White House. This young man not only has little political or governmental experience, but none at all in business or administration. Curiously, his upbringing is never closely examined or evaluated; it’s just assumed that anybody elected president must love America – but this young man had been trained by parents and others to consider this country a colonial oppressor and unfit to be a world leader! In college, by his own autobiographical account, he sought out Marxist professors, in not one but three colleges.

Once elected, he uses his newfound executive authority to seal off all his early school, passport and travel records, lest his true intents be uncovered. He eventually has a fake “copy of a birth certificate” created and exhibited on the White House website, complete with glaring errors that betray its falsehood. Somehow Congress seems mesmerized and intimidated from confronting him, so he creates a phalanx of legislative “czars” to regulate and virtually stifle all business and energy progress, and these “czars” – among them known Muslim and Marxist and homosexual activists – report not to Congress but directly to him!

[...]

All this is theoretical, of course – but I think if such an interloper and subversive impostor were to somehow arise and become our president, if he weren’t eventually exposed, prosecuted and impeached, America should apologize to Benedict Arnold.

And his picture should be posted in Webster’s alongside the words “treason” and “traitor.”

-- Pat Boone, Jan. 9 WND column

And the Slantie goes to ... AIM's Cliff Kincaid for demanding that Obama be removed from office for purported drug use. We don't recall Kincaid being similarly concerned about George W. Bush's pre-presidency drug use.

* * *

Our final award is the Slantie Award for Career Achievement in Conservative Bias. This goes to a reporter or commentator with a consistent record of biased and slanted reports that fly in the face of time-honored journalistic practice, the truth and/or common sense.

This year's honoree is ... Aaron Klein, formerly of WorldNetDaily. For a decade, Klein was a mostly Jerusalem-based reporter for WND, where he began by whitewashing violent far-right extremism in Israel, portraying an AWOL Israeli soldier who shot and killed four Arabs on a bus in Gaza as a victim who was "murdered" by Palestinians who witnessed the cold-blooded shootings (but never described the soldier's innocent victims as having been murdered).

Klein became a rabid Obama-hater, as you'd expect from a WND employee. His 2010 book "The Manchurian President," which was chock-full of conspiracy theories and ridiculous guilt-by-association attacks. Needless to say, Klein is a birther as well.

Klein is a pretty sloppy reporter as well who likes to hide behind anonymous sources so his work can't be fact-checked -- he even grants anonymity to terrorists. Despite being nearly a decade into being a professional so-called reporter, he was still making rookie mistakes in 2014 by attacking the wrong Loretta Lynch. And Klein had to lie about the content of his own 2014 book, "The Real Benghazi Story," in an attempt to defend it against writers pointing out its deceptive content.

Last November, Klein (and his longtime research assistant, Brenda J. Elliott) jumped ship to Breitbart News, where he will head its new Jerusalem operation. Either Breitbart didn't vet Klein very well before hiring him, or it decided his kind of factually dubious right-wing bias and support for right-wing terrorists are just what its operation needs.

That's what's known as failing upward, even as his radio show moved downmarket from New York powerhouse WABC to a station that barely registers in the ratings.

So the question is: Do we start monitoring Breitbart in order to keep tallying Klein's misinformation-laden reporting? We're thinking about it.