Howard Fineman pretends to know what’s best for the tea party and plays into the hands of the establishment by issuing back-pats for Mitt Romney.

Newsbusters notes:

The show did not delve into whether the GOP candidate had a legitimate complaint about Virginia’s ballot access laws which will only include the names of two Republican presidential candidates on the ballot for the state’s March 6 primary.

Yes, apparently it’s “megalomania” to be upset when ridiculously stringent rules for ballot legitimacy are changed mid-game (a must-read post on this). Basically, the rules for the Virginia’s primary ballot access are more complicated than those of Whack Bat:

Perry wasn’t called names for objecting to VA’s oddball rule change most likely because he isn’t nearest to Romney in the polls. Newt Gingrich is a larger-than-life beltway candidate, but he’s not the establishment’s choice for this race. They’re squarely behind Mitt Romney this time [my emphasis]:

“A lot of us who normally would have been in this presidential race a long time ago, have been waiting for Christie to make a decision,” said Georgette Mosbacher, a Republican uber-fund-raiser and former finance co-chair of the Republican National Committee who was among a group of Republican bundlers hoping to convince Christie to enter the race. “I think tomorrow, we’ll be contacting one another and probably put something together with Romney.”

That oldie-but-goodie afore-linked article, by the way, gets better the further down you read. Like here, when they tried justifying soul sales:

“The speech I gave to my conservative friends was, if you pick somebody who makes you 100 percent happy, you only get 47 percent against Obama,” said Catsimatidis. “We have to capture the middle in order to win and make a change in this country. Ninety percent of them stood up and said, ‘You’re right.’”

What good is principle if you sacrifice it to win? You’re not winning on your principle because you didn’t enter that horse in the race; you’re winning on a compromise of that principle. You can tell yourself that it’s a “strategy,” a strategy to inch us ever closer back to that place of simple government conservatism, if doing so makes you fall asleep easier at night. Compromising your principle to present less of a difference between yourself and your opponent isn’t a strategy, it’s forfeit. You’re not winning on your merits, you’re winning on theirs. It’s almost as if the establishment’s strategy was devised entirely by the Democrat opposition: be more like the other guy to win. Be Democrat-lite. That serves Democrats, not Republicans. The GOP establishment thinks that you won’t notice if they dress it up with a shiny red “R” by the name. It’s not like the Devil can quote Scripture or anything, right?

It’s frustrating to see so many Republicans simply throwing up their hands and throwing in the towel for Romney because they have such low political self-esteem. That’s what this is: it’s a self-esteem problem. We think we can’t do any better than what we have right now and we lack the self-confidence to try.

The right has an inferiority complex (or we’re sadists) and people like Howard Fineman and the MSM can’t get enough.

The battle for conservatives isn’t the general (have you seen Obama’s approval ratings?), it’s the primary. The first and best blow that The One can deliver to the GOP is by nudging the establishment to nominate a candidate that cancels out his own faults. Nominate a guy who drafted the blueprint for nationalized health care and you remove health care ammunition from your stores in the general. Nominate a guy weak on immigration and you remove that weapon from your arsenal. There isn’t a bogeyman against which the DNC can pit Obama; aside from congress–whose own approval rating is tanking so it’s useless–their second best choice is to make unnoticeable the difference between Obama and the GOP nominee.

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The once-passionate, even slobbering, love affair between the media and Barack Obama is rapidly cooling.  Writing in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen bemoans “Obama’s Shrinking Presidency:”

One of the unintended results of the redecoration of the Oval Office was the downsizing of Barack Obama. In last week’s prime-time address to the nation, the president sat behind a massive and capaciously empty desk, looking somehow smaller than he ever has — a man physically reduced by sinking polls, a lousy economy and the prospect that his party might lose control of Congress. Behold something we never thought we’d see with Obama: The Incredible Shrinking Presidency.

This is an amazing and, to me, somewhat frightening, turn of events. The folks who ran a very smart presidential campaign in 2008 have left the defining of the Obama presidency to others, in this case people on the edge of insanity. For example, a recent Pew poll reported that “nearly one in five Americans (18 percent) now say Obama is a Muslim, up from 11 percent in March 2009.” In other words, the longer Obama has been in office, the more ignorant people have become about him.

Luckily, there’s still hope for these crazy kids yet, and Cohen has the solution: (more…)

We have finally reached the number one, most left-biased journalist in America today on our top ten count down and our most biased journo pick probably won’t surprise any of you. Even though she just “retired” due to her outrageous bias and hatred for Israel, we just have to give the number one most biased slot to the ever-vitriolic Ms. Helen Thomas, long time employee of United Press International (UPI) and the Hearst New Service.

Thomas was an over 50-year employee of UPI but in the year 2000 she quit the wire service because it was bought by News World Communications which is affiliated with the Unification Church. She was proud of herself, though, because according to her she was “never, never accused of bias” in her reporting.

I worked for United Press International for more than fifty years, and I wrote straight copy. I was never, never accused of bias. I did not bow out of the human race. I permitted myself to care, to believe, to think. But I assure you, I assure you that it did not get in my copy.

But that isn’t what her record says. Bias was epidemic throughout. In May of 2000 the MRC went back and found at least half a dozen instances where Thomas readily revealed her bias. Instances range from Ronald Reagan’s days in office up to the year 2000 when she quit UPI.

The MRC found in part: (more…)

As we continue our Summer series of the most left-biased journalists working in the Old Media today, it’s time for number seven on the list. We’ve done Cable TV, we’ve done a wire service, and we’ve done a newspaper, so now it’s time to turn our attention to the wonderful world of magazines where we find a worthy candidate in Howard Fineman of Newsweek.

The venerable magazine has been around since 1933, but a bit of its long-time luster has faded of late. Not long ago the news mag tried a revamping under the guiding hand of wunderkind Editor Jon Meacham, but the new take didn’t… take, I mean. For some time Newsweek has been steadily losing readers and money (it lost about $29 million in 2009 alone). Perhaps it is because some of its writers are so hopelessly biased?

Enter Howard Fineman.

One of the first strikes against Fineman is that he’s a constant presence on the most left-wing entertainment/news cable networks in America. A day hardly passes when Fineman isn’t seen on MSNBC and that right there bodes ill for his status as a non-partisan journo.

But even if it were possible to maintain a good, unbiased status while still making the cut to appear on MSNBC–a dubious proposition in itself–Fineman isn’t able to toe that line. (more…)

Columnist Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner, has found the enemy and he is us. During a recent episode of the Chris Matthews show, Tucker decided that because we are “addicted to petroleum” we are our own enemy just as much as communism was our enemy during the Cold War.

Tucker characterizes our “addiction” to oil as an “external threat” — just like communism was — and presents oil as an enemy that we should defeat. Tucker also makes excuses for Obama saying that it’s “harder” for him to call on Americans to sacrifice because of this addiction.

Leave it to a member of the Old Media to construe capitalism, progress, a growing standard of living, and even our own fellow citizens to be as great an enemy as an antithetical foreign system that was sponsored by those who once promised to bury us. Leave it to a member of the Old Media to pinpoint our own system as the enemy. (more…)

How can President Obama know when the thrill is gone? When the kindest of responses from his fiercest apologists, the mainstream media, was a long, collective, disappointed sigh to his speech concerning the BP oil spill. CNN has a rather harsh montage of “pundit response” from the speech on their website.

Joan Walsh called the speech “Just Words” saying that Obama was not “playing to win” politically. Rachel Maddow physically dropped her head in disappointment when asked by Keith Olbermann for her reaction to the speech. She then added that America wanted a little more “adult talk from the President on this.”

Maddow continued to call the speech a “sobering spectacle”, hardly a rave review. Ezra Klein, when asked by Rachel Maddow if the president made the “best possible case for energy reform” (which is what Klein earlier that day said that Obama had to do in his speech), Klein responded with “No, I don’t.” He then went on to clarify today that the speech wasn’t “that bad of a speech. It was more of a bad situation.”
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This piece, in the Times of London, is worth reading for many reasons, but most of all to show how far journalism — we used to call it “reporting” — has strayed from its mid-century ideal. To wit:

Nicholas Tomalin — the wonderful, bombastic Sunday Times writer who died in 1973 reporting from the Golan Heights — thought he knew the answer. In 1969, a happier time for the industry, he began a piece in this magazine by asserting: “The only qualities essential for real success in journalism are rat-like cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability.” But if Tomalin were commissioned now, he would strike out that famous gambit and start again.

Jon Meacham

Today, you’ll need luck, flair, an alternative source of income, endless patience, an optimistic disposition, sharp elbows and a place to stay in London. But the essential quality for success now is surely tenacity. Look around the thinning newsrooms of the national titles. Look at the number of applicants for journalism courses, at the queue of graduates — qualified in everything except the only thing that matters, experience — who are desperate for unpaid work on newspapers and magazines. Look at the 1,200 people who applied in September for one reporter’s position on the new Sunday Times website. You’d shoot a horse with those odds.

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Newsweek columnist Howard Fineman misrepresents the separation between the MSM and President Obama. It has little to do with Fineman and his legacy media colleagues falling out of love with Obama. It has more to do with we the people losing confidence in the integrity of Fineman et al. The MSM is the clock that stuck thirteen. We’ll never again trust its ability to tell time.

In his March 12, 2010, column, Fineman wrote:

If you are president, the only thing worse than criticism is not being covered. And the truth is, we in the press are bored with Barack. The “mainstream media” are losing patience with, and even interest in, their erstwhile hero.

Howard needs a reality therapy intervention. He needs a crucial conversation with the American citizenry. He needs the truth…one that he and those like him can’t handle.

Howard, we are the bored ones, bored with you and those like you. On the one hand, it’s nothing personal. On the other, our boredom is very personal. It borders on distain.

The reason as to why this feeling grows daily is found in your own words, Howard: (more…)

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

The press finally falls out of love with Obama.

In Newsweek, Howard Fineman says it’s over:

The “mainstream media” are losing patience with, and even interest in, their erstwhile hero. President Barack Obama never had a chance with the Ailes-Murdoch crowd, of course, and it didn’t take the president long to offend the fierce left wing of the blogosphere. But now, finally, the MSM, which views itself as ideologically neutral, has found ideologically neutral reasons to lose patience with him: that he may be ineffectual; that he doesn’t know how to play the game; that he can’t get anything done. Exhibit A: the health-care bill. The Times’s Frank Rich, the astute dean of the commentariat, wrote recently that Obama has failed to “communicate a compelling narrative” in office and, as a result, “could be toast if he doesn’t make good on a year’s worth of false starts.”

Leaving aside for the moment the hilarious statement that Frank Rich, the erstwhile “Butcher of Broadway,” showbiz wannabe and non-bestselling author, is now the “astute dean of the commentariart” — wonder what David Broder has to say about that? — this would seem on the surface to be that moment in the movie when the hero realizes he’s been duped all along and now must take charge of the situation and expose the bad guys for who they really are:

But since this is, after all, Howard Fineman, one ought not to take these brave words of independence at face value.  And sure enough, one would be right not to:

And yet this collective falling out of love is great news for Obama. Calling it quits with the MSM is just what he needs. A breakup might even save his presidency.

Now that this deviously clever psywar operation has been revealed, Fineman goes on to explain: (more…)

Headlines like the ones below tell the story:

“Democrats point fingers after stunning loss”

“GOP Win in Mass. Puts Dems on Offensive – Scott Brown’s Surprise Senate Victory Has Democrats Scrambling to Regain Footing”

“GOP Senate Victory Stuns Democrats”

“In Stunning Upset, GOP’s Brown Wins Mass. Seat“

Etc.

In one sense, yes, Scott Brown’s victory over Martha Coakley was stunning: In the bluest of blue states in the bluest region of the nation, voters rejected the Democrats’ — and Obama’s — agenda, sending a Republican to the Senate whom they hope will help stem the waves of left-wing socialism upon which our president, accompanied by a majority in Congress, has been bodysurfing since he came to office, despite campaigning as a moderate who would govern from the center. (more…)