GIBBS:  Good evening.  On our broadcast tonight:

• Miracle in Detroit–First Sharia law zone in nation records falling crime rates as word of amputations spreads.
• Voters heard–Congress unanimously passes tern limits bill, setting seasonal daily bag at ten.
• Gimme shelter–Hovel-ready projects to provide corrugated cardboard dwellings for urban homeless.
• And finally, Gray Lady Gray – New York Times to boost circulation with Sunday photo feature: “Op-Ed Beauties–Babes of the Times.”

Those stories and more later.  But first, Obama senior advisor David Axelrod joins us from Chicago shortly after being questioned by the FBI about former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich’s disappearance.  Welcome, sir.

AXELROD:  Thanks for having me on, Bob.

GIBBS:  Any word on Blagojevich, David?

AXELROD:  Who?

GIBBS:  Never mind.  Rumor is the Obamas will extend their stay on Martha’s Vineyard by two weeks.  True?

AXELROD:  Yes, Bob.  With state-of-the-art communications, the president can avoid his responsibilities wherever he is. Doesn’t matter to him at all.

GIBBS:  But so many Americans are suffering while he parties on.  Doesn’t it look bad? (more…)

Even for the MSM lackeys and lickspittles who embraced the “narrative” of hope and change, the public recovery from their hangover is a brutal thing to watch.

“Hello, my name is Anderson Cooper and I’m an Obamaholic.”

David Axelrod’s media buddies and their parent companies are paying a terrible price for their slavish, disgraceful. unprofessional and in-the-tank “coverage” of the 2008 presidential election. And so are the rest of us — with the loss of our First Amendment freedoms as represented by the press’s unfettered ability to tell the story.

Not the “narrative” — the story.

Who’ll be the next major media figure to get up in front of the American public group and accept the 12-step program? (more…)

JOE BIDEN: [on phone] Sure, sure, I’ll tell him.  No problem.  [hangs up]  Charlie Rangel, Boss.  Said he appreciated the offer but would rather you didn’t come to Harlem to campaign with him.

OBAMA:  Good grief.  Harlem?  I’m that toxic?  We are gonna get smoked in November.  Lame duckdom, here I come.

JOE BIDEN:  Loser talk, Chief.  Stay away from the press with that attitude.  MoDo nailed it in her column about me —I’m your go-to PR guy. Now, either hole up at Camp David and watch your world crumble, or trust me to turn things around.

OBAMA: Rescue me, Joe.

BIDEN: All right. But we’re gonna hafta take a page outta Dolly Parton’s book and think outside the buxom.

OBAMA:  Outside the . . . ? (more…)

MEMORANDUM

To:                   Eric Boehlert, Media Matters
From:               David Axelrod

Personal and Confidential

SUBJECT:       BREITBART

“O’Keefe’s humiliating guilty plea”—is that the best you could do?  Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear yesterday.  We don’t want to embarrass Breitbart; we want to destroy him.  O’Keefe is the instrument–if we act decisively.

Forget BP and Sestak.  Put Stossel, Beck, and O’Reilly on the back burner for now.  Call in your people who are sitting in toilet stalls around Washington hoping to snag a Republican congressman on the next john over.  Devote all your resources to mounting a sustained effort to morph O’Keefe’s “entry under false pretenses” charge (hey — they could get everyone in Congress on that beef! Little joke there) into a McVeigh-level atrocity sponsored by Breitbart.

The whole crew at MSNBC will be pounding on Breitbart’s mania to foster civil chaos in America as long as it takes to make the charge resonate.  He will be Olbermann’s first “Worst Person of the Millenium.”  The Times and Post have assured me they’ll give the matter their full Abu Ghraib treatment, starting with above-the-fold articles this weekend.  Williams, Couric, and Sawyer will jump on the story after a decent interval, citing a “raging controversy.”  Time Magazine’s cover next week, I have on good authority right from Rick Stengel, will feature a caricature of Breitbart setting fire to an SEIU T-shirt in front of the White House, with the headline: “What Are the Limits of Dissent in Obama’s America?”

When public indignation reaches white heat (or even if it doesn’t), the entire House Democratic caucus (and a few Republican simpletons) will demand that Attorney General Holder appoint a Special Counsel to investigate the Breitbart affair.  He will immediately agree.  I understand Ramsey Clark will make himself available to Justice, and believe me there are plenty of empty cells down at Gitmo. (more…)

David Broder is known as the “Dean of the Washington press corps,” but it can more accurately be said that he’s the “David Gergen of the Washington press corps:” the apostle of conventional wisdom/custodian of institutional memory/protector of Democrat Party interests/and non-rocker of the boat.

Broder is the kind of journalist who facilitates the smooth operation of the rackets, the scribe who keeps the rubes out there in Flyoverland thinking that the game isn’t rigged, that somebody inside the Beltway takes those noble words inscribed on the D.C. buildings and monuments at face value, and that here in America the people — not the powerful — rule.

Which is why he could hardly let slide his Post colleague Dana Milbank’s astonishing act of lèse majesté against the Emperor Hussein in the form of this extraordinary paean to the genius of Obama hatchet man Rahm Emanuel, which included these gems:

Obama’s first year fell apart in large part because he didn’t follow his chief of staff’s advice on crucial matters. Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter. (more…)

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood represents the Illinois Combine in Obama’s Cabinet. His history in Illinois politics is that of a Republican chameleon. So it’s no surprise he gets high marks from MSM pundits.

For example, as LaHood prepared to retire from the House, Mark Shields gushed over him,

After 14 admirable years of representing Peoria and central Illinois in the U.S. House, Republican Ray LaHood has made the House a more civil, more decent and more personal place…Listen to the testimony of U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago Democrat who is so tough he’s widely rumored to eat nails and spit rust: “I’ll miss him dearly.”…As somebody who clashed often with his own hyper-partisan GOP leadership in the House, [LaHood] admits: “I survived Gingrich, Armey and DeLay. I’m still here. They’re all gone.”

In December 2008, David Broder described LaHood as: (more…)

You know you’ve just had a bad day when the apostle of Washington Conventional Wisdom, David “Teddy Kennedy’s seat” Gergen puts on his serious mien (does he have any other?) and pronounces upon the weighty matters of the day.

Yes, when Gergen speaks, people not only listen — they’ve already heard it all before!  In fact, it’s what everybody else is already thinking!  By the time it gets to Gergen’s lips, God long ago changed the channel to re-runs of Happy Days.

So what do you think?  How did POTUS do, sans TOTUS — commanding college professor (okay, “senior lecturer”) or tongue-tied, smirking, classless community organizer?  Mr. Smile and a Shoeshine, or an anxious, cantankerous former wonder boy/palooka who can’t figure out why this particular fight wasn’t properly fixed by David “Jake Lingle” Axelrod, like all his others? A strike, or a gutter ball?

(more…)