As Planned Parenthood boss Cecile Richards prepared to testify to Congress about the filthy business she leads -- thanks in large part to an infusion of a half-billion dollars in federal funds every year – her marketing team tried to change the subject to everything else.
Right before the hearing, Planned Parenthood posted a video stuffed with feminist celebrities, including has-beens like Kathleen Turner, explaining why they stand with Planned Parenthood.
Liberal websites were thrilled with new Daily Show host Trevor Noah for comparing Donald Trump to a series of African dictators, including Uganda’s notorious Idi Amin, alleged to be responsible for more than 100,000 deaths during his reign in the 1970s.
"What I'm trying to say is Donald Trump is presidential. He just happens to be running on the wrong continent," said Noah, a native of South Africa.
Perhaps the only anti-gun blowhard less surprising than Geraldo Rivera after a mass shooting is ex-CNN host Piers Morgan, still prattling on about how his biased journalism in Britain stopped school shootings for good in the UK.
In the London Daily Mail, Morgan emptied out a thesaurus of synonyms for evil on the National Rifle Association, claiming like Ed Schultz that they love it when people get shot to death on campus:
Fox News personality Geraldo Rivera went on a Facebook rant within hours of the mass shooting in Oregon. America is a “gun sick nation,” and Second Amendment “BS” aside, he wrote, “the gun lobby controls the country, and allows armed maniacal lunatics to roam free and kill.”
By Friday morning, Rivera was egging on President Obama to get tougher on the National Rifle Association: “You blame the gun lobby? Why not take them on? Confront the NRA and call out every hack who ever took money from them.”
David Rutz at the Washington Free Beacon discovered The Washington Post scrambled to change a blog post gushing over NBC late-night host Seth Meyers, and how his attempt to ape Jon Stewart “explains everything you need to know about the Planned Parenthood controversy....grab your headphones and be confused no more."
Aaron Blake, managing editor of the Post political blog “The Fix,” told the Free Beacon, “We updated the post to more accurately reflect Meyers’s clear point of view on this issue.”
Longtime Washington Post book reviewer Michael Dirda broke out the superlatives on Thursday for communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, and the Bruce Cook biography that served as the basis for a new Trumbo-glorifying movie starring Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad, geopolitically).
Dirda oozed “by the time of his death from lung cancer in 1976, Trumbo already seemed half-legend, half-saint: To Cook, he wasn’t just the Oscar-winner who broke the blacklist, he was a man who, no matter what, kept faith with himself, his friends and his ideals.”
If there was a contest for who would try hardest among the networks to ignore the House hearing with Planned Parenthood boss Cecile Richards, the winner was the PBS NewsHour. They gave it 66 seconds, with 18 seconds of a Richards soundbite and 13 seconds of GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio.
What was especially weird about it was how there was really no serious attempt to explain the subject of the hearing beyond the incredibly vague “how fetal tissue is used for research.” That’s not even “how fetal tissue is acquired from abortion providers for research.” Not even Jordan’s soundbite specifies what’s on the Center for Medical Progress videos:
Washington Post reporter Ben Terris has a funny way of noting Carly Fiorina has broken out of the also-rans in the Republican presidential race. She’s now hot enough on the trail to being suggesting she has a “Mitt Romney problem,” or a Hillary Clinton problem. Too robotic. Not warm enough. Even....didn’t cry enough?
Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza is one of those self-impressed Watergate babies who thinks everything the media report brings great value to society. His latest article was titled "Trust in the media is at an all-time low. That's a terrible thing for all of us."
It is?
NBC touted a spin out of its latest poll: “The GOP's Planned Parenthood Problem.” Carrie Dann and Andrew Rafferty oozed “After months of controversy in the wake of a series of sting videos about its operations, Planned Parenthood is -- as popular as ever.”
What? “Yep, you read that right: In fact, Planned Parenthood is the most popular entity in our brand new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, registering a positive rating of 47 percent compared to a negative rating of 31 percent. That's virtually unchanged from the last time our pollsters asked about the group in July, even though a majority (65 percent) of Americans now say that they have heard about the videos, which pictured Planned Parenthood employees discussing the use of tissue from aborted fetuses.”
On Monday, overly glum Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel cited questions to Hillary from NBC’s Chuck Todd about her e-mails on Meet the Press. As Todd cited an “alternative theory” to explain Hillary’s private server, that she knew Republicans were out to get her, she darkly called it “another conspiracy theory.” Weigel wrote:
"The media's willingness to believe the worst about Clinton, and the long political history it can draw from, has been the single toughest external problem for her campaign. Call it Clinton's Razor: In analyzing her answers, the media usually chooses the one that assumes the worst intentions.
Some of us have shaken our head at the usual New York Times reaction to a Mark Levin best-seller. It tops their best-seller list without the Times ever reviewing it. This has held for the new book Plunder and Deceit, now at number 2 on their chart this Sunday. But it was hilarious/appalling to see the quality of tomes they’re reviewing instead. In Sunday’s Times Book Review, it was....the book Selfish by Kim Kardashian West. It’s a picture book of her own selfies.
Beware when The Washington Post calls someone a “moderate.” It probably means they’re a liberal ranter. In Sunday’s newspaper, a book review by Post writer Michael Rosenwald of a book called Arms by a Canadian journalist named A. J. Somerset who loathes American gun culture. It's titled "Wisdom of a Gun-Owning Moderate."
For example: “The color white plays an important role in this history: Somerset writes that ‘race war has long been the drunken uncle of American gun culture.’” He claims “Guns are all about keeping black people down”.
Gay humorist David Sedaris, who became famous for his “Crumpet the Elf’ Christmas-bashing on NPR and then his contributions to the NPR show This American Life, has a new essay in The New Yorker that ably illustrates the gay-lefty ambivalence about marriage: they want “gay marriage” at the same time they have contempt for it as unfashionably conventional.
"I was all for the struggle, mainly because it so irritated the fundamentalists. I wanted gay people to get the right to marry, and then I wanted none of us to act on it. I wanted it to be ours to spit on. Instead, much to my disappointment, we seem to be all over it."
On Saturday, NPR’s Weekend Edition celebrated atheist author Philip Pullman and the His Dark Materials trilogy he wrote for middle-schoolers, a sort of anti-Narnia series. Anchor Scott Simon celebrated the 20th anniversary of the first book in this trilogy and interviewed Pullman as he sat a BBC studio in Oxford, hinting they have "maybe the mark of real excellence."
They call it “bacha bazi,” translated as “boy play” – Afghan militia men throwing boys into sexual slavery. What’s worse yet, the U.S. military has turned a blind eye to this obscene practice. The front page of The New York Times carried the headline "U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies."
Soldiers who tried to stop this abuse act actually being punished by the U.S. military. A photo caption read: “Dan Quinn was relieved of his Special Forces command after a fight with a U.S.-backed militia leader who had a boy as a sex slave chained to his bed.” Quinn beat up the abuser.
Here’s another sign of reporters trying way too hard to make President Obama and Pope Francis some kind of political twins.
Gary Emerling at the U.S. News & World Report website wrote an article headlined: “Pope Francis Just Echoed Obama's 'Offensive' Prayer Breakfast Remarks: The pontiff said all religions are susceptible to extremism and violence, just like Obama said in February.”
NBC’s resident Catholic pundit Maria Shriver proclaimed on MSNBC on Wednesday afternoon that Pope Francis has now made it possible to enter a Catholic church without it being “kind of embarrassing.”
This is someone who might feel it “kind of embarrassing” that Grandpa had her Aunt Rosemary lobotomized, or that her movie-star husband had affairs (and a child) with the household help. She was telling all this to Brian Williams – the freshest embarrassment of NBC News.
MSNBC.com sure knows how to change the subject from baby-parts sales for their friends at Planned Parenthood. It’s somehow headline news that the abortion giant has made a set of YouTube videos about getting consent before sex. Because their brand isn’t supposed to be about committing more than 300,000 abortions annually. They’re a reproductive health group bettering society, apparently.
The headline was "Planned Parenthood videos show what consent looks like."
The Obama years may be winding down, but our Obama-loving media never stops being hypersensitive about the man. CNN’s latest poll asked respondents “Do you happen to know what religion Barack Obama is?”and “Where was Barack Obama born, as far as you know?”
A major American media outlet asking these basic biographical questions after Obama’s been president for six and a half years seems to be asking “How inadequate are we?” But what they’re actually fishing for is a “crazy conservative fringe” argument now that Donald Trump is on top of the GOP presidential race.
