In the week when a new James Bond film is coming out, it’s fitting that two lefty writers are both shaken and stirred by recent Republican blasts at media bias. In a Sunday article for Salon, Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson charged that “since the 1950s, Movement Conservatives have fought the fair examination of their ideas. They embrace a worldview in which a few wealthy men control the economy and dominate society. This idea repels most Americans…Movement Conservatives have gained power only by obfuscating reality. They make war on the media because it sheds daylight on their machinations. Transparency threatens their power.”

Also on Sunday, Washington Monthly blogger David Atkins declared that the MSM are “facing an existential threat” and urged them to not give in: "Republicans [are] increasingly unashamed to tell grandiose lies and respond to any press criticism with derogatory insults and whines about media bias as well as blackmail threats to cancel appearances if the questions are too tough…If the press chooses to assuage and give comfort to the GOP, it will lose what little credibility it has left."

The New York magazine writer-at-large and former New York Times columnist and theater critic says Jeb's problems included not only Dubya’s war in Iraq and pre-9/11 “national-security failures” but also the supposedly unsavory, extreme-right types that 41 and 43 attracted to the GOP, thereby contributing to its ruin.

Though Michael Tomasky is not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, he has a (liberal) layman’s curiosity about the workings of the human brain and mind which causes him to wonder how Ben Carson can be a “brilliant” surgeon but “an across-the-board nincompoop” when it comes to politics.

In a Monday column, Tomasky wrote, “Usually, if a man (or woman) is a good and knowledgeable and sure-footed doctor, or lawyer or department chair or any other position that could have been attained only through repeated displays of excellence and probity…[h]e or she might be right wing or left wing…but [he or she] won’t be an idiot…But Carson is a political idiot…From science to foreign policy to the Constitution to virtually any political or historical or policy topic on which he chooses to speak, he says something that has no basis in real-world fact.”

As most NewsBusters readers know, conservatives argue that reporters tend to be liberal, and that their liberalism influences their reporting. A common lefty counterpart, which Paul Rosenberg expressed in a Saturday article, isn’t that most journalists are conservative, but rather that Republicans have manipulated them into ignoring (and thereby facilitating) right-wing extremism.

“For quite some time now,” wrote Rosenberg, “conservative Republicans have realized that by moving right and attacking the media for any criticism, they can turn the media into a tacit ally, forcing them to treat preposterous claims as serious ideas, or even proven facts.”

Since even some conservatives thought that Hillary Clinton won Thursday’s Benghazi hearing, it stands to reason that lefty bloggers would be happy with the way things turned out.

In fact, not all of them waited until the hearing was over. Early in the afternoon, when Clinton still had several hours of testimony before her, Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall observed that “Hillary…looks poised; [Republicans are] radiating spittle.” As the hearings rounded third and headed for home, Esquire’s Charles Pierce sniped, “This was a performance piece for the people residing within the conservative media bubble…who already are too smart to be fooled by the Hildebeast and her alleged facts because Mark Levin has told them that they are too smart to be so fooled."

Liberals, hinted Waldman in a Monday American Prospect column, need to remember that the legislative journey of a thousand miles begins with a few steps. Waldman acknowledged that even if “modest gun control” measures such as expanded background checks were to pass, the U.S. would “still have more gun deaths than any other industrialized country,” but that’d be better than the status quo.

Waldman likened that prospect to what he said is the important (though hugely insufficient) improvement in our health-care system that’s resulted from Obamacare. He called the Affordable Care Act “a reform, not a revolution” (though plenty of conservatives might argue that “revolution” would be more fitting).

In 1988, the Year of Dukakis, Rep. Peter Kostmayer (D-Penn.) told Congressional Quarterly that his party’s advice for liberal interest groups was, “Just shut up, gays, women, environmentalists. Just shut up, and you will get everything you want after the election. In the meantime, just shut up so we can win.” (They didn’t win.) These days, believes lefty pundit Marcotte, it’s the Republican establishment that’s trying to shush the party base…and the base doesn’t like it.

“Hiding their true motivations is the rule, not the exception, when it comes to the right,” wrote Marcotte in a Thursday column for Salon. “Conservatives will give you any reason under the sun for their views, except the real one…[But] increasingly, conservatives are rebelling, eager to say what they really think, even if it hurts them politically.”

Rupert Murdoch is in a pickle, and the famously abrasive lefty writer Taibbi is loving every minute of it. In a Tuesday article for Rolling Stone, Taibbi portrays Murdoch as “desperate… because he senses his beloved audience of idiots” abandoning Fox News in favor of Donald Trump, “a onetime Fox favorite who is fast becoming the network's archenemy.”

Taibbi argues that Fox News must routinely dumb itself down in order to stay popular; Murdoch and Roger Ailes, he writes, “know they've spent a generation building an audience of morons. Their business model depends on morons; morons are the raw materials of their industry, the way Budweiser is in the hops business…[But] you have to keep upping the ante to make it work. Trump is…going to places now that make even Rupert Murdoch nervous.”

Is the Republican party actually two parties? In a sense, believes The Washington Monthly's Martin Longman, who contended in a Monday post that the forty or so congressmen who constitute the Freedom Caucus “are best understood in the parliamentary sense as being a party in their own right. In our system, they are still called Republicans, but in any other system they would be a minor party that has allied itself with another larger party to form a majority.”

Longman asserted that this unofficial party is so ideologically bonkers that it doesn’t deserve a role in resolving the central issue facing the House: “As long as the so-called Freedom Caucus of Republicans continues to demand a continuance of government shutdowns and debt ceiling brinksmanship, they do not belong in the majority and should not have any say in who the next Speaker will be…The Freedom Caucus has to be sidelined.”