This morning on our CNN panel Will Cain and I discussed the “angry Newt narrative.” The question centered around Peggy Noonan’s latest column wherein she calls Gingrich an “angry little attack muffin“:

Right now Mr. Romney’s taking a beating. He’s everyone’s target, and in a way that speaks of something beyond the usual campaign ferocity. There’s something else going on, a taunting: “If you’re so inevitable how come I’m not afraid of you?” Newt Gingrich, angry little attack muffin, called Mr. Romney a liar.

This is why it has taken Republicans until New Hampshire to vet their leading candidate (and they didn’t vet him in 2008, either): criticize Mitt Romney and you’re called a meanie. Most of the people I’ve witnessed using this argument have been in politics longer than I’ve been alive, so unless the landscape has changed recently and I missed the memo, politics is still a bloodsport. No one is calling Romney an “angry little muffin” for doing exactly what Gingrich is doing; the difference is that Romney has a frillion groups and admirers doing it for him so he can keep his mitts clean and appear above the fray. If the tactic seems familiar, it’s because Barack Obama is famous for it. I’m not comparing Obama to Romney, just simply pointing out that they happen to share more in common besides health care.

The base is crying out for someone, anyone in this primary to stop pretending that Romney doesn’t have the gubernatorial record that he has. Those who pretend it doesn’t exist only kneecap themselves. They criticize ads from primary opponents which address Romney’s record. Instead of asking “Is this what the oppo will look like?” they howl over Gingrich quoting a NYT article.

Most media, and even the candidates themselves, coddle Romney at every debate and behave as though less offensive baggage from other candidates is somehow worse than socialized health care at the state level. I may have had my differences with Gingrich on different issues before, but this much I know: he’s not auditioning for a VP job in the event of a still uncertain Romney nomination.

Newt Gingrich is doing what the GOP would do, if they were smart, and testing the mettle of these candidates before the Obama machine does with good ol’ fashioned primary politics.

On Sunday’s broadcast of NBC Nightly News, Andrea Mitchell hosted a segment on the upcoming GOP caucus in Iowa. Referring to the state itself, she stated:

The rap on Iowa? It doesn’t represent the rest of the country. Too white, too evangelical, too rural.

Yet literally the sentence before, she mentioned that Iowa “established that Barack Obama could attract white voters” in 2008.

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A narrative growing around former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is that he avoids right-of-center news outlets. A few weeks ago, the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis stood by a piece the Romney camp disputed that took issue with the fact that only left-wing news outlets received any attention on one particular conference call. And in recent months both Brett Baier and Chris Wallace of Fox News have made an issue over the Governor’s apparent reluctance to show up for a grilling on their respective shows (though Romney did eventually make an appearance with both).

Today, the Daily Caller repeats a familiar refrain:

Romney last week granted one-on-one interviews in Iowa to both MSNBC and the Huffington Post, among the best-known sources of news for liberals in the country. In recent weeks, he also gave interviews to The Washington Post, The New York Times and Politico.

It’s a peculiar strategy for someone who has had trouble convincing conservatives throughout this race he’s one of them.

The Romney campaign runs a tight ship when it comes to media access. Unlike other candidates who can be more open at campaign stops, Romney will only answer questions from reporters during organized media availabilities. …

Romney’s campaign has refused multiple times over the last year to provide the former Massachusetts governor for an interview with The Daily Caller.

There is, I think, an important difference between a candidate and an elected official. If you’re president of the United States or the local dog catcher, you have an obligation to meet with the press, even the hostile press. You are, after all, representing all of the people once you take office. A candidate, though, is a different story. Their job is to win as many votes as possible and, yes, to manipulate the media to their own advantage. In fact, how well a Republican candidate does or doesn’t manage the media frequently means the difference between a loss or a win. Democrats, of course, almost always have the media wind at their backs.

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Working as a reporter for the election night coverage on Glenn Beck’s Insider Extreme webcast the other night, I spent five solid (and painful) hours tuned in to the cable network that uses the word Progressive so often that one expects Flo to pop in every hour with a cheerful quip about saving money on your car insurance.

MSNBC could have used some perkiness

Back to MSNBC’s live coverage of the midterm elections.  I’m not certain on the exact definition of torture, but I know it when I sit through five hours of it. Yes, for five truly torturous hours I was unable to tune away from NBC’s failed experiment in the news channel biz. I did persist,  making it all the way to midnight Eastern time when most of the significant races had been called.  Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Eugene Robinson were considerably less jubilant than two years ago when the 2008 elections offered a markedly different result.  This broadcast initially had the tone of a wake as all assembled knew what was coming down the pike.

Here are the Top Five things I learned while being force-fed MSNBC’s election night coverage. (more…)

From the Media Matters front page. You don’t want to go over there. You might get some on you.

Here’s something even crazier: (more…)

After flying Andrew Breitbart all the way out to Phoenix, Arizona yesterday to participate in an online Townhall election event, after taking him out of his home state, away from his business, and nearly making it impossible for him to vote in today’s crucial midterm election (though he’s on an airplane now in order to cast his ballot), at about as close to the last minute as you can get, Andrew Morse, chief of the ABC News digital division, sent the following email late this afternoon abruptly canceling Breitbart’s appearance:

We have spent the past several days trying to make clear to you your limited role as a participant in our digital town hall to be streamed on ABC News.com and Facebook.   The post on your blog last Friday created a widespread impression that you would be analyzing the election on ABC News.   We made it as clear as possible as quickly as possible that you had been invited along with numerous others to participate in our digital town hall.  Instead of clarifying your role, you posted a blog on Sunday evening in which you continued to claim a bigger role in our coverage.  As we are still unable to agree on your role, we feel it best for you not to participate.

This is yet another obvious attempt to  build a narrative that puts the blame on Breitbart when the truth is that this is nothing more than ABC News caving in to and attempting to appease the organized left’s outrage machine that went into full astroturf mode after Breitbart’s ABC News appearance was made public.

As a reminder as to who’s exaggerating, here is exactly how Breitbart’s election night townhall event was described by an ABC News producer to him in an email:

This program will broadcast on the ABC Television Network, abcnews.com, ABC News Now, and ABC News Radio. …

The show will be live on the web and ABC News Now as well as on the network from 4:00pm till 11:00pm MST.

With this in mind and in writing, here is how Big Journalism announced Breitbart’s ABC News appearance: (more…)

I’ve always liked getting to the heart of the matter—something the activist old media has no interest in doing during this election cycle.

November 2 is a mandate on whether America will remain a country based on the Constitutional values of Liberty and freedom, or whether we are headed to the dregs of communism and socialism embraced by the American left and its Democrat Party. Too extreme you say?

This point was made as clear as can be with the two rallies held recently on the Washington Mall.

Ignore the crowd size for a moment (Glenn Beck’s was much, much larger on Aug. 28) and you can even ignore the fact that unions clearly organized and used their funds to bus people to the event (astroturf, anyone?)

The clear choice was seen in the messages being displayed by the people at the two events. (more…)

Should the National Enquirer get the Pulitzer Prize for its multi-year investigation of the John Edwards affair, scandal and cover-up? That’s a question that’s been asked lately: in some cases, at the same Mainstream Media papers which participated in the news blackout of the Enquirer’s Edwards’ coverage.

Edwards, who had been Sen. John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, was one of the front-runners at the time the Enquirer broke the second installment of the story on December 18, 2007.

The Enquirer released an abundance of easily-verifiable information at that time: Rielle Hunter, a former Edwards campaign worker, was pregnant with what the Enquirer reported was Edwards’ love child; she had been moved within five miles of the Edwards campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill, NC; Hunter was living an exclusive gated community, a few houses down the street from Edwards’ former Director of Finance, Andrew Young; and, she was driving around in a BMW registered to Young.  Add all this to the fact that information about Hunter had disappeared from the Internet and other publicly-searchable databases and the MSM was handed a great story. (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…)