Falling to your own media malpractice makes you irresponsible, not a “victim.” It doesn’t make you a “target” when other people publicly note the absence of your journalistic integrity. Politico missed this bit of logic recently when it attempted to blame conservatives for the misdeeds of various members of the media, most recently NYT’s Natasha Lennard.

… these critiques may just muddy the waters enough to do some damage to both the media and the fledgling anti-Wall Street movement.

Joe Biden has traveled across the country, threatening Americans with “rapes and murders” if congress didn’t pass Obama’s jobs bill, the same jobs bill that Democrats killed in the Senate (so are on the hook for said “rapes and murders?”). He didn’t like the questioning he received from Human Events’s Jason Mattera on the subject, so now the White House is taking aim at Mattera with an investigation.

Joe Biden’s office has complained to the Senate press gallery about a confrontation the vice president had with a conservative journalist last week on Capitol Hill.

Biden aides asked whether Senate rules were broken in the wake of the contentious exchange between the vice president and the reporter.

[...]

Biden’s office has also contacted the standing committee of correspondents, which oversees the gallery, regarding whether Mattera broke the rules by ambushing him.

Heather Rothman, the chairwoman of the gallery’s standing committee, said the matter is under review.

“We’re aware of the concerns,” said Rothman, a reporter for BNA. “It’s being discussed.

“We’re aware this occurred and the vice president’s office [has made] contact,” she added, noting the standing committee itself hasn’t met to deliberate the issue.

The Hill says Biden was “lured” into the interview. No, he thought Mattera was another back-patting reporter with a satchel full of softballs, not an actual journalist who doesn’t trade principle for access like so many of today’s media. How difficult is it to answer why you’re fear-mongering with “rapes and murders” all week?

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Appearing on Larry King Live last evening to honor the retiring host, former vice president Al Gore spoke publicly for the first time since the National Enquirer reported he was investigated for soliciting sex from a masseuse in a Portland, Oregon hotel.

It was all a misunderstanding. I was indeed staying at the Hotel Lucia that night.  Checking my e-mail on the lobby computer, I found an anonymous message, with attachments, claiming prominent climatologists I’d been working with had been fudging numbers.

Visibly disturbed, I printed the material and started for my suite to study it in private when the night manager asked if he could help.  In jest, I replied, yes, find someone skilled in massaging climate data and send that person to my room.

Later, someone knocked on my door.  It was the masseuse.  She told me she had never massaged data before, but she thought shiatsu and a light touch on the keyboard would do the trick.  When I explained the mix-up, she laughed.  We talked a bit, and she left.  End of story.

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The arrest yesterday of ten Russian “moles” here recalls World War II and the late 1940s in the United States when so many Left-duping Soviet agents were embedded in our government that they almost took over the White House.

That’s right, the White House.

We know this now because of the Venona project. the secret operation that enabled us to intercept and read Russian coded messages. It was kept secret until the late 1990s. Also, the breakup of the Soviet Union enabled scholars to learn more from previously closed Russian archives. As the recent arrests show, the Russians are still at it.

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We finally have proof that life exists beyond the confines of planet earth, although not necessarily intelligent life. How else can one explain Joe Biden other than to postulate that he comes from another planet, if not an alternate universe? The Vice President’s stunning observation about Iraq last certainly defied any form of earthly logic:

“I am very optimistic about Iraq. I mean, this could be one of the great achievements of this administration.”

Of which administration? Of the administration led by the fellow who, as the junior Senator from Illinois, opposed the surge that turned the war around? That administration? Let us time travel back to 2007, when then-Senator Barack Obama offered his sage opinion about the surge:

We can send 15,000 more troops, 20,000 more troops, 30,000 more troops – I don’t know any expert on the region or any military officer that I’ve spoken to privately that believes that is going to make a substantial difference on the situation on the ground.

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Doesn’t it strike you as odd that of the two most recent losing Democratic presidential tickets, in 200 and 2004, the erstwhile vice-presidential candidate has become either a pariah in his own party (Joe Lieberman) or, well… this guy:

That would be John Edwards, ambulance-chasing poseur, fraudulent populist and all-around bad belly.  Even his long-suffering wife, Elizabeth, has finally had enough.

Hard to believe a major political party would run a first-term senator, little-known outside his home state, and then not vet him, isn’t it?  Even harder to believe that the Mainstream Media would later consciously and deliberately cover up his extramarital hanky-panky and love child while he was a candidate for the 2008 presidential nomination, and instead give us the myth of the good family man, with the wife suffering from incurable cancer, the champion of the Little Guy and the man who proved, once and for all, that there really are Two Americas — and that he lived in both of them. (more…)

The president of the United States is a “light-skinned” man “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”  That, at least, is the carefully considered opinion of soon-to-be-former Senate majority leader Harry Reid, quoted in a forthcoming book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, Game Change, about the 2008 election of Barack Obama.  The thing is, Hapless Harry meant it in a good way.

At least he did until now, when the news of the explosive statement found its way into The Washington Post and Politico.  Already reeling in his hopeless, doomed-as-Chris-Dodd campaign for re-election this fall, the Sage of Searchlight no doubt thought he was being complimentary in his usual clueless, white-guy-of-a-certain-age way.  After all, when Harry was growing up, “Negro” was the polite term you used to show you weren’t a racist, and as for light-skinned, well, we all knew what that meant.  Why, the next thing you know, Unhorsed Harry will be describing Obama as “a credit to his race.”

The authors write: “Reid was convinced, in fact, in fact,that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination.”  Gee, that sounds a lot like what Geraldine Ferraro said, and her reward was practically being drummed out of the Democrat Party.

This isn’t the first time the scrappy little Mormon boxer has found himself on his keister over race.  He had some ‘splainin’ to do when the seat-warming, monument-building senator from Illinois, Roland Burris, explicitly charged him with racism for trying to block indicted Gov. Rod Blagojevich from appointing an African-American to replace Obama in the senate.  Watch and listen to Harry dance as David Gregory grills him on Meet the Press:

But there’s bigger game afoot than one pathetic little man’s attempt to cling to his rapidly diminishing power.  With Dodd and Byron Dorgan having defenestrated themselves, Sens. Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin, two of the nastier people in the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, are busily greasing the skids for obvious Democrat losers like Reid, Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu and other endangered-species types. (more…)