By Tom Blumer | December 29, 2015 | 11:46 PM EST

Just one week after CNN's Don Lemon shut down a guest who dared to raise the issue, there is now an agreement across the ideological spectrum that if Hillary Clinton is going to use her husband Bill as a campaign surrogate and go after her opponents' real or imagined sexism, then, as the headline at liberal Ruth Marcus's Monday evening Washington Post column says, "Bill Clinton's sordid sexual history is fair game."

Meanwhile, a Wall Street Journal editorial, while citing Marcus's column, agrees: "if Mrs. Clinton wants everyone to forget about Bill’s harassment of women, she ought to stop playing the sexism card, or drop Bill as surrogate, or both."

By Curtis Houck | December 29, 2015 | 8:00 PM EST

A week after he cut the mic of conservative guest Kurt Schlichter for bringing up Bill Clinton’s history of sexual misconduct, CNN host Don Lemon found himself trying to shut down another guest during Monday’s CNN Tonight when conservative radio host and CNN GOP debate co-moderator Hugh Hewitt argued that Donald Trump should use his Twitter account to educate millennials on the former President’s past.

By Mark Finkelstein | December 29, 2015 | 6:41 PM EST

Judging by Nicolle Wallace's performance on today's With All Due Respect, it looks like establishment Republicans are going full bore against Ted Cruz. Here was Wallace talking about her personal experience with Ted Cruz: "I worked with him on the [2000 Bush/Gore] recount in Florida, and the recount was sort of ground zero for the biggest egos in both parties in the whole country, and he rose to the top in terms of hubris and egomania."

Co-host John Heilemann was flabbergasted: "you're saying that among all of your colleagues in the recount effort, that he was the biggest ego?  Is that really what I heard you say? Wow! That is an incredible thing to say."

By Curtis Houck | December 29, 2015 | 3:46 PM EST

During his latest phone-in interview Tuesday morning, Donald Trump appeared on NBC’s Today where co-host Savannah Guthrie attempted to convince Trump that former President Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs (and specifically what occurred with Monica Lewinsky) were merely “alleged” and thus might not be fair to bring up in a campaign involving Hillary Clinton.

By Curtis Houck | December 29, 2015 | 11:58 AM EST

On Monday, the major network evening newscasts all alluded to Donald Trump criticizing Bill and Hillary Clinton by bringing up Clinton’s numerous bouts of sexual misconduct from the 1990's, but chose not to remind viewers of what those scandals actually were and instead deflected away from that by touting the Clintons going for a walk over the weekend with daughter Chelsea and granddaughter Charlotte. 

By Rich Noyes | December 29, 2015 | 9:11 AM EST

Starting last week, NewsBusters has been revealing the winners and top runners-up for each category in the MRC’s “Best Notable Quotables of 2015,” our annual awards for the year’s worst journalism. Today, the “Ku Klux Con Job Award,” for smearing conservatives with phony racism charges. Winning this category: Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, who on April 8 let loose a litany of complaints about the modern-day GOP, and claimed they were “really the party of Jefferson Davis.”

By Tom Johnson | December 28, 2015 | 10:06 PM EST

In his new documentary, Where to Invade Next, Michael Moore jaunts around Europe showcasing what he deems enlightened social and economic policies, including Italy’s lengthy paid vacations, Norway’s treatment of prison inmates, and France’s school-lunch program. New York Times reviewer Stephen Holden observed that Moore’s “examples…are cherry-picked to make American audiences feel envious and guilty.”

On Monday, Salon ran an interview with Moore in which he talked about the movie as well as the U.S. presidential campaign. One of his comments: "I also think it’s a little gauche for Americans to point out to anybody in the world what their problems are at this point…I think we need a little time in the timeout room, you know what I’m saying? A little chill-down from running around the world: ‘You need democracy! Now you need democracy!’”

By Tom Blumer | December 28, 2015 | 8:08 PM EST

According to NewsBusters' own Blonde Gator, Hillary Clinton has, in the 8-1/2 months since she declared her candidacy, committed 51 gaffes and goofs. That's an average rate of six per month. Imagine how many there would be if Mrs. Clinton genuinely campaigned among the people instead of among preselected groupies.

One of her latest gaffes, which occurred last week at an elementary school in Iowa, was a humdinger. Predictably, the establishment press almost completely ignored it, while a couple of journalists who noticed the center-right's reaction tried and failed to excuse it.

By Curtis Houck | December 28, 2015 | 5:37 PM EST

Reviewing the new drag queen-centered Broadway show Kinky Boots in Monday’s New York Times, critic Ben Brantley chose to dedicate a few paragraphs to the bizarre suggestion that the show should make one think “that maybe all those grumpy guys who populate the Republican debates might be a lot looser if they traded in their navy suits for rainbow-colored ball gowns.”

By Tom Blumer | December 28, 2015 | 2:06 PM EST

While the establishment press lies in wait for Republican and conservative candidates to make some kind of off-color or foolish statement — or one that can be twisted to become one, even if it originally wasn't — it consistently ignores howlers made by leftists and liberals. The list of President Barack Obama's gaffes alone, all totally or almost completely ignored by the press when they were made, is quite long.

The most telling gaffe is the kind made in all seriousness by its deliverer which betrays a level of cluelessness not thought humanly possible from a supposedly educated and informed adult. Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders committed one such gaffe in a Saturday morning tweet.

By Tom Johnson | December 27, 2015 | 1:32 AM EST

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.’”

By Tom Johnson | December 26, 2015 | 12:12 AM EST

Bill Scher runs a website called Liberal Oasis, which makes it unsurprising that his Monday RealClearPolitics column celebrated President Obama’s avoidance (so far) of the “second-term curse” that supposedly afflicted George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and some of their predecessors in the White House.

Scher exults that Obama “has not been knocked off course by scandal” and lauds him for “master[ing] the art of scandal management, while his Republican opponents lost credibility by transparently politicizing every investigation…Instead of following the facts before drawing conclusions, [Republicans] proclaim the worst—and then fail to prove their allegations. That’s why the pursuits of wrongdoing in Fast and Furious, Solyndra, the IRS audits and Benghazi have all fizzled.”