The New York Times is proving once again that it is simply a tool of the progressives that are presently running the United States.

Earlier in the week President Obama made House minority leader John Boehner public enemy number one in his effort to save the Democratic Party from total electoral disaster this November.  In a speech made in Cleveland Ohio, the President called out the minority leader eight times in his 45-minute address, saying that Boehner has no new ideas. Of course when you look at it the President’s only excuse for his policy failures over the past 20+ months is to blame it on his predecessor, not exactly a unique or helpful approach.

On Friday, Nancy Pelosi followed up on the president’s attack.  She criticized Boehner for meeting, “countless times with special-interest lobbyists in an effort to stop tough legislation’’ that would regulate corporations and protect consumers.

Today, the New York Times did their job as press agent for the progressive agenda by running a front page anti-Boehner hit piece that seems to have been written to give some meat to Pelosi’s comments. (more…)

It’s always disheartening to see someone from your own camp take a bad hit as Dave Weigel has.  The Washington Post blogger, who was hired to provide coverage “inside the conservative movement and the Republican Party,”resigned over recently leaked emails from the Journolist listserv, in which he used some less than flattering language in his personal commentary about many of the people he was covering.

While I’ve always been respectful of Weigel’s insights and his writing, I would be being less than honest however if I’d said there wasn’t something about his posts that I’d also found worrisome.  The revelation of the Journolist emails only strengthened my gut feeling, especially when I saw how nasty the rhetoric was in the emails.  Frankly, that part surprised even me.

It’s not that I wasn’t open-minded to the views that Weigel has always presented; I could appreciate that he has criticisms of the right.  But as someone assigned to provide conservative insight, his commentary sometimes struck me as being penned more from a liberal viewpoint than that of a conservative or libertarian one.  It almost seemed more targeted to pleasing Media Matters’ readers.  And since I already follow a number of liberal journalists to balance out the material I read from conservative and libertarian leaning authors, Media Matters’ tone isn’t exactly what I’m usually looking for.  But perhaps there was a reason his posts sometimes seemed that way to me. (more…)

The Washington Post’s David Weigel has resigned in the wake of a series of leaked emails, in which the blogger disparaged various figures in the conservative movement he was “covering” in his official capacity as the Post’s point man on the right. His resignation came less than a day after he posted this apology on the Post’s website:

I’m a member of an off-the-record list-serv called “Journolist,” founded by my colleague Ezra Klein. Last Monday, I was deluged with angry e-mail after posting a story about Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.) that was linked by the Drudge Report with a headline intimating that I defended his roughing-up of a young man with a camera; after this, the Washington Examiner posted a gossip item about my dancing at a friend’s wedding. Unwisely, I lashed out to Journolist, which I’ve come to view as a place to talk bluntly to friends.

Below the fold are quotes from me e-mailing the list that day — quotes that I’m told a gossip Web site will post today. I apologize for much of what I wrote, and apologize to readers.

There follows some choice Weigelisms:

• “This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire.”
• “Follow-up to one hell of a day: Apparently, the Washington Examiner thought it would be fun to write up an item about my dancing at the wedding of Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman. Said item included the name and job of my girlfriend, who was not even there — nor in DC at all.”
• “I’d politely encourage everyone to think twice about rewarding the Examiner with any traffic or links for a while. I know the temptation is high to follow up hot hot Byron York scoops, but please resist it.” (more…)

“Where were you when George Bush was President?” You know that question well. It’s been asked of each of us more times than any of us would care to count. Do you know how I usually answer it?

I was home, enjoying my life. I went to work every day and focused on doing the best job that I could do. When I wasn’t working, I hung out with family and friends. I went to baseball games, and barbecues, and obscure little hole-in-the-wall joints to hear some of my favorite live music over a couple of Guinnesses. Yum.

Why? Because while George Bush was president, we had a media establishment that was challenging our government, not our citizens.

I wasn’t necessarily happy with the direction of the country in those days. But I could sleep at night, knowing that we had media that pressed George Bush and our Congress on every single issue. I could know at any given moment what the “death count” was in Iraq because just about every channel splashed a persistent counter in the bottom corner of the television screen. When bills like the Patriot Act were first introduced in Congress, I never lacked for any detail on the dangers of the legislation. There was barely a single detail that went uncovered in the daily political grind. When there was a scandal to research and report, I certainly never had to do that myself. There were reporters who did all that.

Yep, I’m actually missing the Bush days now. I had so much more free time. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always done my homework and researched issues on my own anyway. I recognize that all media is biased to some degree (and has been for quite some time). But I could always count on the media to challenge the government in the days of George Bush. I wrote my fair share of letters, I called and complained about the spending, even attended a few protests, but I can’t say that I ever felt there just wasn’t anyone challenging the president in the mainstream media. Quite the contrary, there was never any lack of DC pushback from the collective press in those days.

But we live in extraordinary times today. There now exists this giant, open cavity where that healthy pushback against government used to be. And when the mainstream media stepped away from that opening in 2008, two things happened:

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Doesn’t it strike you as odd that of the two most recent losing Democratic presidential tickets, in 200 and 2004, the erstwhile vice-presidential candidate has become either a pariah in his own party (Joe Lieberman) or, well… this guy:

That would be John Edwards, ambulance-chasing poseur, fraudulent populist and all-around bad belly.  Even his long-suffering wife, Elizabeth, has finally had enough.

Hard to believe a major political party would run a first-term senator, little-known outside his home state, and then not vet him, isn’t it?  Even harder to believe that the Mainstream Media would later consciously and deliberately cover up his extramarital hanky-panky and love child while he was a candidate for the 2008 presidential nomination, and instead give us the myth of the good family man, with the wife suffering from incurable cancer, the champion of the Little Guy and the man who proved, once and for all, that there really are Two Americas — and that he lived in both of them. (more…)