Barack Obama ain’t closing Gitmo and the media is there to make excuses for him. Shocking.

There are as many examples of this as there are members of the activist old media, but let’s take this brilliant note from Good Morning America on Monday. Juju Chang, Emmy Award winning journalist for ABC News, gave us this gem:

“We begin with a legal turnaround for the Obama administration. It’s giving up the fight to try 9-11 suspects in civilian court here in New York, instead, self-proclaimed 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Muhammad and 4 other suspects will be tried before a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay. The President will have to break his campaign promise to shut down that prison.”

Oh, where do I begin? First, let me say, I’m not sure who wrote this, Juju, or a news writer or whether they cut-and-pasted from the AP. Doesn’t matter, Juju is still responsible. I’ve had many a spirited conversation with writers and producers who wrote scripts that would make any anchor look foolish or flat-out wrong. This makes Juju look foolish and partisan at the same time and I do not believe she is the former. I thought for a moment Robert Gibbs had taken a job as a news writer at ABC. He hasn’t, has he?

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Despite repeated, uxorious, absurdly one-sided endorsements from the liberal media, the February 4 vote on President Obama’s year-old nomination of “darling of the left” Dawn Johnsen to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has mercifully been postponed. The OLC, whose main duty is to defend the president’s authority in wartime, also advises intelligence and counterterrorism agencies.

Johnsen endeared herself to Obama and his followers by fervently urging during the presidential campaign, at Slate, that we “restore our nation’s honor” by condemning the U.S.’s “past transgressions” and rejecting “Bush’s corruption of American ideals.”

This – in particular, Johnsen’s zealous stand against the Bush Administration’s counterterror policies on matters such as interrogation methods as well as against its alleged excessive secrecy – resonated powerfully with anti- anti-terror progressives.

Slate contributor Glenn Greenwald, for example, effusively hailed Johnsen’s call for national breast-beating and purification, praising her nomination as “Obama’s best yet, perhaps by far.” When the Democrats first began to lag in mustering the votes to approve the nomination, Greenwald took umbrage: (more…)

One of the first things that Barack Obama did after being swept into office on the wings of “hopenchange” was to sign an executive order that would close the terrorist detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. President Obama gave a one-year deadline after which, he triumphantly promised us, the facility would be closed. Well, we are at one year plus ten days after the signing of the order and Gitmo is still open. Yet few stories expressing outrage about this lapsed promise have made the rounds in the Old Media.

On January 22, 2009, Obama signed the Executive Order that gravely asserted that Gitmo would be closed “no later than 1 year from the date of this order.” That was January 22, 2009. It is now February 3, 2010. I’d say a year and ten days after the order was signed just might constitute more than “no later than one year,” wouldn’t you?

Naturally, last year when Obama signed this order the Old Media covered it quite heavily. It was big news and was represented as an example of Obama’s fulfilling a campaign promise. All one need do is type “close Guantanamo executive order” into Google and page after page of Old Media coverage of the signing of the EO will be discovered. (more…)

Media Matters (for America, they claim) has officially become a parody unto itself.  What started as a wonderful (if not Orwellian) dream of a non-profit entity living off of the ample teat of George Soros busily crafting “rapid response” items in opposition to the small yet enormously effective voices from the right in journalism, has now turned into what appears to be a bunch of guys monitoring radio, TV and the internet with the hopes of finding the slightest divergence from left wing orthodoxy as dictated by their founder, spaceship enthusiast John Podesta.

John Podesta

It isn’t enough that they label as “homophobic” any questions about Safe School Czar Kevin Jenning’s objectively questionable judgment with regard to the teaching materials associated with his organization GLSEN.  And it isn’t enough that they dismiss any video report exposing left-wing sacred cows such as ACORN and Planned Parenthood as “heavily edited” as if editing automatically renders a report untruthful (even though the entire, unedited transcripts and audio for the ACORN stories have been available at Big Government).  No, those ridiculously laughable positions that fly in the face of common sense are not enough to keep the team at MM(FA) feeling smugly supercilious and self-important… now they go on the attack if a journalist dares to refer to Guantanamo prisoners as “terrorists,”   No, this is not a parody. (more…)