Throughout his tenure, there have been several facets in which President Obama has been demonstrably weak on leadership, with the debt debate coming to the forefront in recent months. Now however, lost in that news cycle has been another failure of leadership for the President – his own request to tone down violent rhetoric in this country. For it was mere months ago that Obama stood in front of a crowd in Tucson that had anxiously sought leadership amidst the chaos of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting; a teachable moment that had The Guardian gushing about how the President had delivered “calm amid the toxic rhetoric.”

That moment of calm has long since dissipated. Where once the President had denounced discourse that places “the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do,” we hear Republicans blamed for holding the American people hostage to their economic policies. Where once we were urged to talk “with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds,” we now hear tea party members being denounced as terrorists.

Make no mistake, this ratcheting up of terrorism and hostage-taking discourse directly coincides with recent events in Norway. The instant that Oslo terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, was labeled as a ‘right-wing Christian,’ liberals finally had their moment to seize upon – not just a chance to mislabel conservatives as extreme ideologues but a chance to label them as violent ideologues. This message has been a coordinated and vicious attack amongst the media, the Democrats, and most assuredly, the President.

Prior to the Norwegian massacre, references to the tea party as extreme were prevalent, but making the leap in logic to terrorism had been scant. After the Norwegian massacre however, liberals defining the tea party as hostage-taking terrorists have become far more frequent. In the last few days it has become practically commonplace.

This past Friday Politico ran an op-ed titled, “The Tea Party’s Terrorist Tactics,” which featured an illustration of an individual with a dollar sign-shaped bomb strapped to their chest, and argued that the party had progressed from hostage-taking to “the intentional infliction of harm on innocent Americans to achieve a political objective – terrorism.”

Joe Klein penned a piece for Time in which he accused Republicans of being beholden to ‘tea party robots,’ and worse, that their perceived unwillingness to compromise is something that would have made Osama bin Laden proud. The exact quote being that were he alive, bin Laden “could not have come up with a more clever strategy for strangling our nation.”

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Have you ever heard someone say that a rape victim was “asking for it” by dressing a certain way, entering a certain place, or behaving a certain way? You’d rightly dismiss them as sociopaths or enablers or sociopaths. However, a growing number of media figures– Mediaite,  Time’s Joe Klein, and now even FNC’s Bill O’Reilly– would have you believe it’s a valid assertion, if we’re to apply their logic concerning Floridian Koran-burner Terry Jones.  Instead of framing the recent murders in Afghanistan as a shocking overreaction to an insensitive expression of free speech, these personalities and publications focused their ire and blame on Jones.

Terry Jones

“This Terry Jones idiot has blood on his hands;  he had to know fanatical Muslims would go crazy,” O’Reilly stated. Ah, yes, because as we all know, the only possible response from the Muslim world would be violence; that’s not an ugly, condescending stereotype at all!  I’m no fan of Sharia, but to insinuate Jones “should have known” that someone would take anger beyond any acceptable societal standard without personally knowing any of the individuals who killed is just like saying that a rape victim “should have known” that the sight of her would cause her assailants to fly into an uncontrollable lustful rampage.

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Our pals at the Media Research Center bring the Christmas cheer with a highlight reel of the year in liberal media bias.  Enjoy:

Joe Klein is one angry man. In fact, Joe’s so pissed-off I think he could shoot the next Twelve Angry Men sequel all by himself. Why is poor Joe so unhappy? Because we—well, actually, mostly you conservative women out there—are just so bleeping ignorant, that’s why. As an avid Tea Party supporter, I’ll be the first to admit I’m just a mindless dolt who consistently misspells the racist, dimwitted signs I bring to the rallies. Still, I’m not nearly as ignorant as you female Tea Party supporters. I mean, you’re really bleeping dumb!

But don’t believe me. Just read irascible Joe’s latest rant, “Ignorance as Authenticity,” immortalized for all time—or at least for a week or two—in Time. Mined from which, I bring you this nugget of angry Joe gold:

There is no way she [Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell] could ever be confused with a member of the elites; there is no way she could be confused with an above average high school student. Her ignorance, therefore, makes her authentic–the holy grail of latter-day American politics: she’s a real person, not like those phony politicians. In that sense, she—and the lifeboat filled with other Tea Party know-nothings—follow in the wake of our leading exemplar of ignorant authenticity, Sarah Palin (who seems every bit as unaware of public policy—she certainly never talks about it—as she was when a desperate and petulant John McCain chose her to be his running mate). There is something profoundly diseased about a society that idolizes its ignoramuses and disdains its experts.

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With fresh examples of the intellectually absurd, ethically compromised work of the in-the-tank members of the JournoList now being made complete fun of by the rational wing of the blogosphere, it’s time for this friendly reminder to the ‘Listas and their employers that we’re far from finished with the subject:

Terrific novelist, overrated political pundit: that’s Time Magazine’s Hobbit-like Joe Klein, one of the more senior members of the kiddie-corps JournoList, and someone who should have known better than to be on it, instead of embarrassing a once-great magazine.

The existence of the JournoList should surprise no one.

I don’t know everybody on the list, but many of the names are easy to recognize and these are all the usual suspects. “JournoLists” combining with a common goal, to spread a leftist agenda.

That Paul Krugman agrees with Joe Klein, who agrees with JeffreyToobin, who agrees with David Brock should shock no one.

The Diamond brothers, Thomas Walsh and Lucky Luciano -- ahead of their time

As a journalist I would never in a million years think to plan, organize, compile and collate stories among those whom I see as my competition. I want to beat them on stories, I want to break stories they don’t have and I want to report on angles they had never thought of. I like to do that here on Big Journalism I can read the other articles and admire the work I see and always try to come up with something better. I believe in competition. I love competition.

Besides, I might have a tough time finding a couple dozen conservatives in the media to collude with, much less the 400 or willing mainly Upper West Side white males who were part of the JournoList. I’ve have seen a hundred times more diversity at a Tea Party rally. (more…)

Second place looms large and it is quite an honorable — or maybe onerous — award on our top ten most left-biased working American journalists list. Amusingly our number two guy even graduated from a school that foretold his future work. From the bowels of New York’s exclusive Hackley School comes our number two most left-biased journo, Time Magazine’s Joe Klein.

Klein is another one of those far left writers that imagines himself to be unconventional in his politics when the truth is he is a left-winger all the way down the line without a scoshe of non-conventional thinking.

For instance, in his book, The Natural, of his politics Klein wrote, “… the conventions of journalism prevent me from fitting too neatly into one political niche (although as a columnist for the New Yorker and Newsweek my predilections are obvious).” Far from not “fitting too neatly” into the left’s “niche,” that niche fits him like a glove. For the better part of thirty years, Klein has been revealing his ill-fitting niche to the reading public and we couldn’t be more grateful for his niche-like, nichieness.

So let’s start by finding an example of Klein supposedly being nicheless, shall we? How about in 2007 when Klein attacked the left-wing blogosphere as being too vitriolic. Did that piece show that he was able to criticize his own? Did it show he isn’t just a knee-jerk leftist? (more…)