Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein insulted conservative Republicans during an appearance on Thursday’s Morning Joe on MSNBC. Responding to a New York Times opinion piece that likened the current GOP to the Republican Party of Joe McCarthy, Bernstein actually suggested that President Obama may be the one to moderate the GOP: “[T]he great contribution of Obama might be to help create a responsible Republican Party in the end.”
Co-host Joe Scarborough asked for an explanation, so Bernstein elaborated on how the president could achieve that end: “By what we're seeing now and the rejection of the Tea Party and the realization that you have to have a mainstream party and that Obama has made monkeys out of this wedge that is now on the defensive.”
Tea Parties
Political anaylst Charlie Cook bills himself as "non-partisan and independent." But on today's Morning Joe Cook couldn't curb his enthusiasm for Chris Christie. Cook said of Christie that there is "testosterone coming out of every more pore in his body" and that Christie's attitude "inoculates him against being called a RINO, pantywaist liberal Republican."
For good measure, Cook said he would "pay money" to see Christie reach down the throat and pull the lungs out of Tea Party member daring to call Christie a liberal! View the video after the jump.
On Tuesday's NBC Today, chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd eagerly forecasted Republican defeat in the Virginia governor's race and that all the blame for the loss would be ascribed to conservatives: "There are a lot of anti-Tea Party Republicans who think the Tea Party has done damage to the Republican Party who are going....'You've got a Tea Party that took over the Virginia Republican Party and look at how that's going.'" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Touting the possibility that the Virginia GOP "could be swept this year" in all statewide offices, Todd concluded: "I think there's going to be a lot of 'I told you sos' on where the internal split of the Republican Party is. Virginia could be Tea Party losses. New Jersey, moderate Republicans winning."
In her closing "Clear the Air" commentary on the November 4 Martin Bashir program, substitute host and longtime Florida resident Joy-Ann Reid rewrote the political history of Republican-turned-Democrat Charlie Crist, who announced today that he will run for the governorship in the 2014 election cycle.
Reid suggested that Florida Democrats should get over their suspicions about the turncoat and get behind Crist to better ensure that the governor's chair is flipped over to Democratic control. In doing so, however, Reid virtually threw liberal African-American and loyal Democrat Kendrick Meek under the bus:
On October 31 the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard reported the following: “The Internal Revenue Service shared highly confidential tax information of several Tea Party groups in the IRS scandal with the Federal Election Commission, a clear violation of federal law, according to newly obtained emails. The public watchdog group Judicial Watch told Secrets Thursday that it was former scandal boss Lois Lerner who shared the information on groups including the American Future Fund and the American Issues Project.’”
So far none of the Big Three (ABC, NBC, CBS) networks have reported the latest IRS scandal finding. In fact, they’ve stopped reporting on the IRS scandal altogether.
We have Obamacare for one reason and one reason only: For a brief, ghoulish period in recent history, Democrats controlled the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives.
We don't have Obamacare because the public was clamoring for it. We have it because Republicans lost elections.
When it comes to liberals standing up to indefensible rhetoric from others on the Left, the Daily Beast's Jamelle Bouie illustrates how NOT to do it.
Oh, sure, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) was wrong to compare the Tea Party with the KKK but "it would be needless political correctness to dismiss the Tea Party as completely unrelated to the Klan, or at least, the reactionary currents that gave it life," Bouie insisted in his October 23 piece, "Grayson's Folly: What the Tea Party and the KKK Have in Common." Bouie did his best armchair psychiatrist impression in diagnosing the supposed xenophobic and reactionary neuroses of American conservatives (emphasis mine):
Some media figures just can’t let go of the idea that opposition to ObamaCare is fueled by hatred of the president himself. On Wednesday’s The Cycle, co-host Toure engaged in some Matthewsian ranting against opponents of the health care law.
Near the end of a roundtable discussion about the failures of Healthcare.gov, Toure redirected everyone’s attention to what he saw as the major issue: [See video below the break.]
All three networks on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning avoided discussing Congressman Alan Grayson's smear of the Tea Party as just like the Ku Klux Klan. In a new fund-raising e-mail, the controversial Democrat linked the grass roots organization to violent racists, complete with a burning cross.
CBS and NBC made no mention of the attack. The reporters on Good Morning America ignored the story. But if viewers looked very closely at the bottom of the screen they would see a one sentence crawl: "Florida Congressman compares Tea Party to KKK." Yet, Grayson's slam was surprisingly questioned on the very liberal MSNBC. Anchor Thomas Roberts on Wednesday pressed Democratic Congressman John Yarmuth: "Would you agree that the President should condemn that type of solicitation?" [See video below. MP3 audio here.]
Apparently PBS has decided to make like MSNBC and spend more time dissecting the Republican Party’s problems real, imagined, and/or overblown. On Monday’s PBS NewsHour, anchor Judy Woodruff announced that the program would begin “a series of conversations about where the Republican Party goes from here.” The first installment, a discussion with former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), amounted to a lot of hand-wringing over the Tea Party.
Throughout the interview, Lott tried to keep the focus on positive steps Republicans can take, but Woodruff kept calling his attention back to the alleged problem of the Tea Party. The anchor reminded Lott that “you have factions in your party, I mean, all the way from the Tea Party to folks who sympathize with the Tea Party all the way to some moderates.” Interesting how she split the Tea Party into two groups while putting “some moderates” in one group.
In an interview with former Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday's NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie proclaimed a "civil war" in the Republican Party and persistently urged him to blame it on the Tea Party. Instead, Cheney began the exchange by explaining: "I think the most radical operator in Washington today is the President. I think he's trying to take the country in a direction that is fundamentally different than anything we've seen before." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Guthrie was undeterred and continued to stoke GOP division: "And you would think that might be a unifying moment for the party but instead you have Senator Lindsey Graham this weekend calling the shutdown 'a political gift to Democrats'....Mitch McConnell said, 'I think we fully acquainted our new members with what a losing strategy is.' That suggests there is a real rift."
Hours after President Obama lectured Republicans about governing, CNN boosted his agenda by ordering conservatives and the Tea Party to "lighten up" on Thursday's The Situation Room.
"So while the President is calling for a change in behavior and tone here in Washington, listen to this from CNN's Fareed Zakaria writing in today's Washington Post. He takes direct aim at what he calls the extreme rhetoric of the right," noted The Situation Room host Wolf Blitzer. Zakaria explained his withering indictment of conservatism and smacked the "extreme" Tea Party.