Tim Rutten is a left-wing, hack writer from L.A. He is always good for contemporary left wing trope but the other day we discovered that he is also good for the sort of uninformed blathering that leftists of his ilk pretend is American history. Chiefly that of America’s religious history and the so-called “wall of separation between church and state.”

In a June 1 piece about Mitt Romney, Rutten regaled us with his “reading” of Mitt’s current political reality. Rutten proposed that any question about Mitt’s Mormonism was somehow a threat to the United States.

Before I get to Rutten’s warped take on U.S. history, let’s take this business about the attacks on Mitt’s Mormonism.

To make his point, Rutten proves himself keen on unduly enlarging the supposed attacks on Mitt Romney’s Mormon religion from both today and in his earlier run for the White House. While there were attacks on Romney for his religion in 2008, those attacks were relatively minor and never really made much headway against his candidacy.

Certainly there are many thousands of Christians that don’t think Mormonism is a Christian religion. I believe that it is a correct assessment, too. But so what? Whether Mormonism is a Christian religion or not has nothing whatever to do with Mitt Romney’s suitability for becoming president of the United States. Only a small minority of Republican voters hold Romney’s Mormonism against him. I’d guess that number would dwindle to even less should Mitt become the GOP nominee, too. (more…)

Yes, that is really the title of his post. You’d think one glance at one of my year-end reviews of the L.A. Times would somewhat dispel that notion. And it would . . . for honest people.

But such a label does not easily fit Eric Boehlert, Senior Lotion Fellow at Media Matters, who asks how the L.A. Times can possibly allow one of its bloggers, Andrew Malcolm, to display something less than complete respect for the legend known as Barack Obama:

So my question is a simple one: Why does one of the largest newspapers in the country allow its political writer to routinely disrespect the president in a casually insulting way? To portray the president as some kind of punk. . . . [W]hy does the Times allows one of its high-profile political writers to continually adopt a hateful Rush Limbaugh and Fox News-like tone and personally degrade the presidency?

Indeed. Don’t they know that opinion people at major newspapers need to be kept in line? At least when they’re criticizing liberals.

Boehlert is upset because Malcolm has been allowed to call Barack Obama things like this:

* ”the United States’ Democratic Smoker-in-Chief”
* “the Real Good Talker”
* “Smoker-in-Chief”
* “the community organizer”
* “ex-state senator”
* “The Smoker”
* “the nation’s top talker”
* “what’s-his-name in the White House”
* “Duffer-in-Chief”
* “the ex-senator from Illinois”

Those are all pretty good, I’d say . . . and accurate. (more…)

I love to grab a weekend lunch at the fabulous Tomboy’s Burgers in Manhattan Beach, and when I’m there I always pick up one of the discarded LA Times front sections lying by the bottles of Tapitio hot sauce.  “Maybe this time,” I think as I munch fries, “I’ll find that they’ve clued in, that I can re-subscribe and once again walk out to my driveway and carry back a real paper each morning.”  But every single time I come away wondering when this great metropolitan newsroom became the newspaper equivalent of Jonestown.  I envy the guy holding its Kool-Aid concession — he’s going to be making a mint right up until they finally shutter the place forever.

So it was no surprise that I nearly spit out my mouthful of cheeseburger when I read Tim Rutten’s opinion piece about how the Citizens United decision will destroy our nation by interpreting the First Amendment to actually mean what it says.  There, on the Los Angeles Times’ editorial page, was one of the dying fishwrap’s premier columnists arguing furiously that it should be perfectly acceptable for the government to toss someone into jail for talking about a politician.

This week’s Supreme Court decision granting corporations the right to spend unrestricted amounts of money supporting or opposing candidates in federal elections is so strained in its reasoning and so removed from the realities of American life that it would be grotesquely comedic, were its implications not so dire. (more…)