It almost sounds like the set up to a “guy walks into a bar” joke — or maybe a knock-knock joke — but the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank made an assessment of his own political ideology that can’t help but draw a laugh.
As WaPo columnist Howard Kurtz reports, Milbank is being moved to the Post’s editorial pages. But it is what Milbank said of himself that amuses.
“Anybody reading my column would make an informed judgment that I’m left-of-center, and I wouldn’t quarrel with that,” he says. “But strongly ideological people on the left do not recognize me as one of their own.”
I see. So because the wholly whacked-out fringe of the far, far left (see the Communist Party USA, George Soros, or MoveOn.orgers) don’t consider him a sufficiently whacked out, moonbat to suit them… then what, Dana?
Is that supposed to be some sort of mitigating factor for Milbank? He admits to being a leftist, but because the most fringeworthy left doesn’t accept him are we supposed to slap him on the back and welcome him to the right side of the aisle?
The fact is he’s still a leftist ideologue and his work should be taken as that of a leftist ideologue, no matter whether he isn’t left enough for the left-wing fringe.
But let’s have some fun with Milbank’s distinction-without-a-difference style of reasoning. Let’s take his logic and see what other situations we can excuse using it… (more…)
Apparently, shutting down Ezra Klein’s JournoList listserv wasn’t enough to kill it. I spotted it lumbering through the dense undergrowth of the MSM just today. Over at Newsweek, former JournoLista Ben Adler recycles the talking points of former JournoLista Greg Sargent of the Washington Post. To appreciate what’s going on here, a bit of background is necessary:
Last week, Greg Sargent was thrilled over Obama’s pro-Cordoba House speech, saying it would go down as one of the President’s finest moments. When Obama changed his tune the next day, Sargent was at pains to explain how the clarified position definitely did not represent a walk back. Defending the President had an added benefit. It allowed Sargent to avoid climbing down from his own over-the-top Obama cheerleading. It was a win-win in theory, though in actual fact his argument wasn’t convincing.
Now, a week later, Ben Adler jumps in to sweep the whole episode under the rug saying, “it looks as if everyone may have overreacted.” He then offers this sentence full of weasel words restating Greg Sargent’s arguments [emphasis mine]: (more…)
She was once a star reporter for the Style section. Then she made the big career move and married the boss. Today Sally Quinn is the “doyenne” of Washington, a celebrity in her own right and a fixture of the D.C. social set. And although she’s never had an original thought in her head — by the time Quinn gets around to it, it’s long since solidified into conventional wisdom –
About “faith,” no less, having once bellied up to the communion rail in a Catholic church and partaking of the Eucharist, even though she’s not Catholic. (Her “co-moderator” of the “On Faith” column is none other than Jon Meacham, the man who drove Newsweek into a ditch, where it was recently auctioned off for a buck plus parts.)
A mosque near Ground Zero? Who’s going to pay for it? Where are they getting the money?
This is the cry of the conspiracy theorists who claim that the mosque will be built with suspicious money, including charities possibly connected to terrorism. Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich are intensely opposed to the mosque. They want it to be moved. I have a great idea. Why don’t they find a new property and personally raise the money themselves to fund the $100 million community center? They could call the project The Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich Foundation for Religious Freedom. It has a nice ring to it. I think they should put their money where their mouths are. Nothing could be more patriotic or American; it’s what this country is all about. It would take, especially with Palin’s popular following, probably 20 minutes to collect the amount needed.
Even by the current low standards of excellence that obtain at the kiddie-corps-run WaPo, this is breathtakingly fatuous. By now, it’s clear that the denizens of the Beltway look upon Sarah Palin the way the inhabitants of Constantinople viewed the Muslim hordes during the final siege of eastern Christendom.
Kathleen Parker is an allegedly conservative columnist at the Washington Post, but if there’s any evidence she is, in fact, conservative, it’s certainly scant. About the only support for this allegation comes from liberals, who always cite her as a “conservative” they like.
Right — you love it already, don’t you? An exercise in morally preening, fatuous sophistry now follows:
The mosque should be built precisely because we don’t like the idea very much. We don’t need constitutional protections to be agreeable, after all.
This point surpasses even all the obvious reasons for allowing the mosque, principally that there’s no law against it. Precluding any such law, we let people worship when and where they please. That it hurts some people’s feelings is, well, irrelevant in a nation of laws. And, really, don’t we want to keep it that way?
Parker goes on to say that she, personally, would prefer the mosque to be built somewhere else, but hey: (more…)
With fresh examples of the intellectually absurd, ethically compromised work of the in-the-tank members of the JournoList now being made complete fun of by the rational wing of the blogosphere, it’s time for this friendly reminder to the ‘Listas and their employers that we’re far from finished with the subject:
Greg Sargent is a Washington Post blogger and compromised JournoList hack whose “Plum Line” entries are decidedly left of center. Greg was overwhelmed with enthusiasm last Friday when, for a brief but shining moment, it appeared President Obama was supporting the construction of the ground zero mosque. He gushed that it would “go down as one of the finest moments of his presidency.”
Former Cathedral of St. Sophia, now a mosque
Sargent contrasted Obama’s bold stance with the “clever little dodge” which some Republicans were using. Here’s his description of the conservative stance, “The group has the right to build the center, runs this argument, but they are wrong to exercise it.”
That was Friday. On Saturday, the President gave an impromptu response to a reporter’s question, which went like this:
I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding.
This struck a lot of people as very similar to the distinction made by conservatives, i.e. a legal and religious right to build does not equate to a good (or wise) idea. The only real difference is that President Obama refused to take sides on the crucial issue. In effect, he voted present on the wisdom question.
Needless to say, this came as a big disappointment to Sargent, who was quick to argue that Obama’s clarification was not a walkback: (more…)
In case you thought the “non-partisan media company” known as Politico was an objective news organization, playing politics right down the middle (as they promised they would when they started), think again. From today’s sob story about how the media is being mean to Michelle Obama:
It’s been a long time since Michelle Obama has been attacked like this.
The first lady’s lavish Spanish vacation was the lead story in the Drudge Report for days. Political columnists and commentators lampooned her as a 21st-century Marie Antoinette, unwinding at a luxury resort while unemployment lingers near 10 percent and President Barack Obama’s poll numbers fade. And headlines set off political sirens: Scandal! Tone deaf! Elitist!
Tone deaf? Elitist?
Yet still, those mean conservatives just won’t let the poor woman have her umpteenth vacation before the First Family, you know, goes on vacation again:
The attacks from right-wing commentators — and a handful of left-leaning pundits — produced the first harsh critiques against the first lady since the heated days of the 2008 presidential campaign when she told an audience that America had finally improved: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.”
The outrage from conservatives could foreshadow how Republicans might treat the first lady when she sets out to stump for Democrats during midterm elections. When Obama returns to the campaign trail, it could expose her to attacks by Republicans and jeopardize her new, more polished image as a modern woman balancing a career, children and marriage to the leader of the free world.
WJLA-TV, a Washington, D.C. ABC affiliate, suspended reporter Doug McKelway following his alleged “partisan” comments at a liberal rally on Capitol Hill marking the three-month anniversary of the Gulf oil spill. Video of the broadcast tells a different story:
Apparently facts are now “partisan.”
McKelway stuck to the truth about BP’s political contributions and pending cap-and-trade legislation, newsworthy subjects given that the event’s organizers were lobbying to “pass legislation to end America’s addiction to oil and urged lawmakers to donate campaign money raised from the oil industry to the clean-up efforts in the Gulf.”
According to the Washington Post, it was McKelway’s supposedly controversial comments on July 20 that led to his suspension. Anonymous sources at the station are now accusing him of “insubordination” in an apparent attempt to fire him. (more…)
The title of this column seems unbelievable, but it is in fact what happened in America this past week. And almost no one has noticed.
After 50 years of being inundated with stories of white racism, and being taught in college that in this white-dominated society, only a white can be a racist, the American public has been properly brainwashed into accepting the otherwise incredible: A black man murdered eight white people at his place of work because they were white, and the media story is about the murderer’s alleged experiences of racism.
Here’s the Associated Press Report from Aug. 7, four days after the murders. It was reprinted in The Washington Post and throughout America:
To those closest to him, Omar Thornton was caring, quiet and soft-spoken … But underneath, Thornton seethed with a sense of racial injustice for years that culminated in a shooting rampage Tuesday in which the Connecticut man killed eight and wounded two others at his job at Hartford Distributors in Manchester before killing himself.
‘I know what pushed him over the edge was all the racial stuff that was happening at work,’ said his girlfriend, Kristi Hannah.
‘He always felt like he was being discriminated (against) because he was black,’ said Jessica Anne Brocuglio, his former girlfriend. ‘Basically they wouldn’t give him pay raises. He never felt like they accepted him as a hard working person.’
‘Thornton changed jobs a few times because he was not getting raises, Brocuglio said.
The New York Times Aug. 3 headline read: “Troubles Preceded Connecticut Workplace Killing,” and in the second paragraph, the Times reported: (more…)
I have written here severaltimesrecently about the all too visible partisanship of the Washington Post, but Karen Tumulty’s lead article on Sunday (August 8), “In Va.’s 5th, incumbent Democrat Tom Perriello sees voter frustration firsthand,” takes the cake. Or perhaps it’s simply that as a resident and voter in Virginia’s 5th District I can see her slant more clearly and hence resent it more.
Her bias appears right away:
CHARLOTTE COURT HOUSE, VA. — The crowds that have been showing up for Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello’s town halls have been smaller and more polite than the angry throngs he saw during last August’s raucous congressional recess.
Catcalls about socialism and death panels have given way to substantive and pointed questions — about the intricacies of the new health-care law and financial regulations, finding alternative energy sources, and that most perennial of Virginia problems, traffic.
Gale-force outrage — both the real kind and the kind manufactured for television — has faded this August. There is still the occasional outburst: On Saturday, the Lynchburg Tea Party Patriots hastily called a rally outside a Perriello town hall in Fork Union to demand that he vote against $26 billion in aid to state and local governments when the House reconvenes briefly this week.
It’s not fair to blame Beck for violence committed by people who watch his show.
This tiny journalistic fig leaf appears midway through Dana Milbank’s latest article for the Washington Post. The remainder of Milbank’s 750-word piece is devoted to blaming Glenn Beck for violence committed by those who watch his show. Or, more specifically, the violence of two specific men who had watched Beck’s show.
The first is Byron Williams, a two-time felon who was on parole, out of work, and living with his mother. Two weeks ago, Williams was stopped by police en route to “start a revolution” by killing members of the ACLU and the Tides Foundation in San Francisco. We don’t know where Williams heard about the Tides foundation, but based on an interview with William’s mother, Milbank implicates Beck. Of course this is, at best, guilt by televised association. Glenn Beck has never met Williams or encouraged him or anyone else to take up arms against the Tides Foundation (or anyone else).
And this turns out to be Milbank’s best argument. When he tries to offer the proverbial 2nd point required to draw a line, he blows it completely: (more…)
In an August 2 column, the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz cried a river over the rancor he saw in today’s media calling it a “nastiness index” that continues to rise. But his lament is not only off base in many ways, it is also historically illiterate and is built on only one real complaint: the left no longer has a lock on what is considered newsworthy.
Kurtz starts off with this lament: “Media outlets, which once merely chronicled this era of hyper-partisanship, now seem to be both the purveyors and often the targets of ugly attacks.” Kurtz sadly says that it has all become “journalism as blood sport, performed for the masses.”
Oh the humanities. We just hate to see the media business cater to the great, unwashed masses, don’t we? (By “the masses” he means us, folks.)
Kurtz goes on to detail just some of the latest journalistic transgressions as he sees them.
In just the last few weeks, Salon Editor in Chief Joan Walsh and CNBC contributor Howard Dean have accused Fox News of racism; conservative crusader Andrew Breitbart has delighted in pushing a maliciously edited video smearing Shirley Sherrod and refused to apologize; Fox hosts have denounced mainstream organizations as Obama lap dogs for downplaying a case involving the New Black Panther Party; e-mails from an off-the-record discussion group showed one liberal pundit wishing for Rush Limbaugh’s death and another suggesting that conservatives such as Fred Barnes be tarred as racist; Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings was accused of betraying journalistic ethics with the story that torpedoed Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and Hastings’s critics were ripped as lackeys of the military establishment.
Kurtz also carps that anyone who tries to speak up for the “old regime” is “pilloried” for the effort. Then he attacks me… and everyone who blogs: (more…)
In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother increased chocolate rations from 30 grams per week to 25 grams per week. You read that right. There are no objective facts; there is only the word of the Ministry of Truth. The 21st century Thought Police, i.e. the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and the JournoList, don’t just get the facts completely wrong, but they double down and congratulate themselves as if they’d gotten them right, so long as the misinformation they spread serve their political purposes. This mainstream media totalitarianism was on full display on Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources this weekend on CNN:
As we documented last week, Chris Matthews aired a highly entertaining segment of Hardball where he blasted Howard Dean for not watching the original Shirley Sherrod footage and rightfully pointed out that Breitbart had included footage of her redemption in the original video. Apparently, the Thought Police tracked Matthews down between shows and made him re-tape the segment with Politico’s Breitbart beat writer/lefty double agent Ken Vogel replacing Dean; the discussion changed from the actual substance of Breitbart’s multimedia presentation to popcorn “the state of journalism today” malarkey. (more…)
At least that’s what the wise man of the Washington Post, David Broder, has asked.
David Broder, sage of the center, has long (very long) been the quintessential middle of the roader, Mr. Moderate, the Dean of Conventional Wisdom, David Gergen without the unctuous smarm. But now that the Democrats under Obama have veered sharply left, Broder’s position just to the right of them no longer seems so moderate, or sensible.
Broder mentions with evident approval that “there’s more talk these days in White House circles about measures that might attract bipartisan support” and quotes a White House “insider” (it takes one to know one) who says, “If you asked the president what he would really like for Christmas, it would be a smart loyal opposition.” Then comes the moderate, sensible, centrist Broderism: (more…)
Eugene Robinson, the name-calling scourge of all critics of Obama who writes one of the anti-conservative columns at the Washington Post and serves the same function on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” has just provided another example of what post- — or in this case, Post- — partisanship looks like in Obama’s Washington.
According to the Post-partisan Robinson, Arizona’s embattled S.B. 1070 “amounts to a prescription for racial profiling on a scale not seen in this country since the days of Jim Crow laws in the South.” It is “anti-Latino” and “patently unconstitutional.” Those who support it are “xenophobes” and “demagogues … who delight in turning truth, justice and the American way into political liabilities.”
It appears as though the vituperative Mr. Robinson hasn’t gotten the message — stated by pre-presidential Obama on the Rick Warren show in 2008, repeated (with increasing shrillness, as it has turned out) ad nauseum during the campaign, and just recycled on “The View” this week — that “we can disagree without being disagreeable.”
As one can clearly see, there is never any shortage of political invective in Eugene Robinson columns, but there frequently is a severe fact shortage. In the column under review (“Immigration Helps Dems Long Term,” July 30), for example, he asserted that: (more…)
Greg Sargent is a Washington Post blogger. He’s also a former member of JournoList and a friend of Ezra Klein. Any or all of that may explain why he’s twice used his platform at the Post to claim that there is a media conspiracy surrounding the Daily Caller’s publication of JournoList archives:
The real media conspiracy here is on the right. It’s a conspiracy to pretend that there’s a story here when there isn’t one.
Yes, you read that right. He’s accusing the right of a media conspiracy. It’s the sort of fabulist, black-is-white inversion of reality we’ve come to expect from Media Matters, not from the Washington Post. So let’s take a look at Sargent’s case for a right-wing media conspiracy and see if it passes the belly laugh test.
In his first stab at this claim, he took issue with the headline for one of the Daily Caller’s pieces:
It has this huge headline:JournoList debates making its coordination with Obama explicit. But way down in the 13th paragraph, the story quotes a post from the very same thread in which J-List founder and Post blogger Ezra Klein explicitly rules out any such coordination…In other words, the headline on this story could have been: “J-List founder ruled out conspiracy.”
If the Daily Caller was part of a right-wing conspiracy, why bother to include the line Sargent just quoted, or the one that came immediately afterwards which also depicts a list member rejecting the idea? Wouldn’t the conspiracy be more successful without any contradictory evidence? What Sargent wants us to blithely ignore is statements like this from Todd Gitlin of Columbia University: (more…)
The JournoList scandal is getting worse every day and the Washington Post is at the center of it. Blogger Ezra Klein ran the operation and at least three other staffers were members. (Blogger Greg Sargent claims he wasn’t a member after he joined the Post.) In addition, at least one member of Slate and two from Newsweek, also owned by Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, were members.
Ezra Klein, JournoList founder
The almost constant revelations of political activism and journalistic conspiracy raise an enormous number of questions about Post policies, professionalism and ethics. As a conservative, and therefore a member of the movement JournoListers sought to demonize, I feel Post readers are owed full disclosure.
Any understanding of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics makes clear this list and the Post’s involvement violate a number of ethical guidelines. In fact, much of the code seems to have been ignored. Here are just a few examples from the code: (more…)
On Sunday the Washington Post ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, issued an interesting apology for his paper’s failure to write about the Department of Justice’s handling of the Philadelphia New Black Panther Party case.
After summarizing the case and the controversy over it, Alexander admitted,
The Post didn’t cover it. Indeed, until Thursday’s story, The Post had written no news stories about the controversy this year. In 2009, there were passing references to it in only three stories.
That’s prompted many readers to accuse The Post of a double standard. Royal S. Dellinger of Olney [Maryland] said that if the controversy had involved Bush administration Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, “Lord, there’d have been editorials and stories, and it would go on for months.”
“To be sure,” Alexander said, “ideology and party politics are at play,” although he seemed to be referring only to liberal bloggers, “Fox News and right-wing bloggers,” “Congressional Republicans,” Sarah Palin, etc. No admission, that is, of ideology or party politics at the Post.
To his credit, Alexander chastises the Post for not covering the controversy and concludes by telling his colleagues, “Better late than never. There’s plenty left to explore.” He even suggests some topics: (more…)
Today the Washington Post published an article from William Arkin, who along with Dana Priest attempts to expose government corruption and waste in the area of intelligence gathering. Regardless of what’s in the piece, serious questions are raised about the credibility of a news piece written by Arkin, who has a lengthy history of activism. According to the Washington Post’s own Howard Kurtz, May 24, 2002:
[Arkin] insists he’s not a journalist.
In fact, he’s an activist who works for the liberal group Human Rights Watch. He also does work for the Air Force. He’s also an academic, an author, a newspaper columnist and a talking head.
From his home in the mountains of Vermont, William Arkin seems to have mastered one of the great juggling acts of the multimedia age — persuading news organizations, advocacy groups and the Pentagon, through sheer smarts and a bulldog personality, to take him on his own terms.
“Sometimes I even write a story and get all of them mad at me at the same time,” says Arkin, 46. “Any institution is uncomfortable with someone they don’t control.”
Last weekend, I had the privilege of attending the "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington, D.C. While I'm proud to be an American each and every day, I was especially proud on that day. The feeling I had being amongst so many people that love and appreciate the blessings...
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