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Only Nixon could go to China, according to one of the more enduring political truths of the last half-century.

Just as only a man of color with undeniable credibility in the black community can publicly utter an undeniable truth -- it's not only police who are killing black people in this country, though you'd never know it from much of the media coverage.
 

At 30, MSNBC guest host Luke Russert  is young enough to gush over Bill Nye the Science Guy by saying he used to watch his Nineties PBS show when they had a substitute science teacher in class. But in this December 23 interview, Nye got weird and insisted no one on TV says the words “climate change.” Is this guy a scientist? This is like saying no one on TV says the word “politics.”

“We have a situation where no one in regular television will say the phrase ‘climate change,'” Nye proclaimed., calling out several MSNBC meteorologists by first name. “Nobody will mention this phrase.”

Since last week, NewsBusters has been presenting each category from the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015,” our annual awards for the year’s worst journalism. Today, the “Hopeless Haters Award,” for the worst quotes denigrating the conservative GOP presidential candidates. Winning the top slot: MSNBC Morning Joe regular Donny Deutsch, who on March 23 slammed just-declared GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz as “scary,” “slimy” “dumb” “ignorant” and “dangerous.”

President Obama considers the Republican party an international outlier, and so does MSNBC's Steve Benen. (That’s “outlier,” not “outlaw,” though, who knows, for them that may be a distinction without a difference.)

After quoting Obama’s recent comment that the GOP is “the only major party that I can think of in the advanced world that effectively denies climate change,” Benen, who’s also the primary blogger for the Maddow show's website, wrote in a Monday post that “hearing Obama talk about this got me thinking about other ways in which the contemporary GOP is an international ‘outlier.’”

One of the more tiresome cliches of political coverage is the “secret weapon.” Twenty years ago, Hillary Clinton was promoted as her husband’s “secret weapon.” Now it’s the reverse. Peter Nicholas of  The Wall Street Journal wrote a story aping the Clinton spin, headlined “Hillary Clinton’s ‘Secret Weapon’ Could Escalate Campaign Rhetoric.”

Bill has been described by reporters as a secret weapon and a not-so-secret weapon, as if no one knows what he brings. Eight years ago, Hillary's mom was the "secret weapon." Surely, daughter Chelsea has also been the secret weapon. Nicholas seems to think Slick Willie is a weapon first and foremost against Trump....and less so against Sanders. 

“At the very top of my naughty list” for the year, the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes announced on the Christmas Day edition of FNC’s Special Report with Bret Baier, are “the mainstream media.” Hayes cited how “the coverage of President Obama and Hillary Clinton in particular this past year has been abysmal,” pointing to the failure to correct Obama’s “unequivocally wrong” assertions about Guantanamo and how, re Benghazi, “the media basically celebrated the fact she had won a victory over those mean and evil Republicans.”