On Monday evening, the political blogosphere was rocked by the unprecedented publishing of a 200-page opposition research book on Mitt Romney written by the John McCain campaign for the 2008 GOP presidential primary. Who decided to release this information to the public? It wasn’t ThinkProgress; it wasn’t Newsweek or the Washington Post or Mother Jones. It was by a website which currently features the headlines “Martial Artist Kicks Down Banana Tree,” “Baby Flummoxed By New Sound,” and “Jessica Simpson Wearing A Giant Deformed Penis Mask.” I kid you not.

BuzzFeed, the name of the site in question, is the latest venture for Politico’s JournoList-er Ben Smith, as previously reported by John Nolte. Smith is heading up the “Politics” section of BuzzFeed, and while he claims objectivity, the case of this leaked document reveals exactly how he plans to use the site to hurt the GOP and aid Obama’s reelection campaign.

Screenshot of BuzzFeed’s politics page

The “About” page of BuzzFeed presents the site as nothing more than a place where readers can find interesting and viral Internet content:

We feature the kind of things you’d want to pass along to your friends: an outrageous video that’s about to go viral, an obscure subculture breaking into the mainstream, a juicy bit of gossip that everyone at the office will be talking about tomorrow, or an ordinary guy having his glorious 15-minutes of fame.

The site’s niche naturally extends to its political page, headed up by Smith. The political news cycle is chock full of bizarre and hilarious information that normally doesn’t end up on NPR–Mitt Romney sparring with pop group LMFAO, Herman Cain singing “Imagine” with pizza-themed lyrics, or Rick Perry blasting a coyote while jogging, for instance. Thus, a site to present this kind of offbeat content (the categories on BuzzFeed include “LOL,” “WTF,” and “Fail”) sounds like a great place to unwind, to set aside all the partisan bickering and just check out posts “for the lulz,” as we whippersnappers say.

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Today’s opening snark courtesy of Journolister Dave Weigel from his Slate perch:

Big Government breaks the news that Bill Ayers hosted a fundraiser for Barack Obama; well, this was broken by Ben Smith in 2007, but still.

I call it a “snark” because the word “lie” feels a little harsh during this holiday season. However, it’s just a fact that Big Government didn’t position the piece as “breaking news” and as far as I can tell it wasn’t even a featured story. But you have to admire a guy like Weigel who poses as an objective journalist and yet sees no news value whatsoever in new video of a notorious domestic terrorist speaking openly about his relationship with a sitting President of the United States.

But is it really that Weigel saw no news value in it or that he knows that Obama’s re-election could be in even more trouble were he to receive the kind of vetting Journolisters like Weigel did everything in their power to prevent in 2008?

Naturally, Weigel isn’t alone. Here’s Politico’s Ben Smith joining in on the wrist-flicking of the new Ayers video:

Oh, and did you know Ben Smith was also a member of Journolist and that something he didn’t find at all, uhm, “footnote-y” was the possibility that Sarah Palin might own a tanning bed.

Priorities.

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Continuing with our top ten most left-biased journalists working in America today, at number six we feature the redoubtable… or is it just doubtable… Rick Sanchez of CNN. Let’s face it, no list of Old Media left-wingers could be complete without the Ricker appearing on it somewhere!

Any casual observer would conclude that Sanchez has been a thorough wallower in left-wing bias for decades, even pushing his agenda on college kids.

Back in 2008 during the campaign for the election that gave us President Obama, Sanchez took his CNN cameras on the road to see how “America Votes, 2008.” Apparently, Sanchez thought “America” only cared about the left because that was all he was interested in pushing.

On April 21, Sanchez aired his appearance at Penn State University but in the days before that episode of “America Votes” some of the students that participated in the taping of the segment complained that Sanchez was pushing a left-wing narrative the whole time and acted the bully against the conservative kids. (more…)

Did you believe in “Hope?”  Millions of American obviously did, including 99 percent of the media, as they elected Barack Hussein Obama II the 44th President of the United States in the fall of 2008.

Despite the loss of “Teddy Kennedy’s seat” in Massachusetts, the collapse of “health-care reform” and really ugly poll numbers, some members of the official Media Cheerleading Squad apparently still do, and nothing to the contrary is going to convince them otherwise.  Here’s Frank Rich over the weekend in the New York Times, head still firmly in the sand:

It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America. It was not a rejection of universal health care, which Massachusetts mandated (with Scott Brown’s State Senate vote) in 2006. It was not a harbinger of a resurgent G.O.P., whose numbers remain in the toilet. Brown had the good sense not to identify himself as a Republican in either his campaign advertising or his victory speech. (more…)