The Washington Post sounded just like a Democratic Party rag, getting out a hanky at the news that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid won’t run for re-election. The front-page headline was “Reid laying down gloves after 28 years in Senate: From hardscrabble childhood, he rose to pinnacle of power.” Inside, the headline was “Democrats’ master of manuever will not seek reelection in 2016.”
Post congressional correspondent Paul Kane tenderly eulogized Senator Reid as if he’d already passed away.
The Washington Post is positioning the Senate conservatives as “scary” in Monday’s editions. Online, the headline was “New Senate majority leader’s main goal for GOP: Don’t be scary.”
Liberal congressional reporter Paul Kane relayed that Democrats think that appeasing “far-right conservatives” will lead to Republican defeats in 2016:
Apparently, The Washington Post can’t use the word “liberal” without feeling slightly nauseous. Its coverage of the $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill included a front-page story headllined “Democrats’ Warren wing sends message.”
Reporter Paul Kane waited until the story skipped to page A-20. On the front page, it was all “populist” euphemism
The liberal legend of Jon Stewart began with his October 15, 2004 appearance on CNN’s “Crossfire,” where he rhetorically sentenced the show to death. He proclaimed, “It’s hurting America. Here is what I wanted to tell you guys: Stop... You have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.”
CNN announced it was canceling the show two months later, as network president president Jon Klein told the New York Times "I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart's overall premise."
Just like the Huffington Post underlined Rick Perry’s “big loss” on a Tesla plant, Saturday’s Washington Post highlighted “Christie loses Atlantic City bet” on an Atlantic City casino. The subheadline was "The casino hailed as a 'game-changer' by New Jersey's governor two years ago is shuttered, creating more problems for his possible 2016 presidential run."
But the front page of last Thursday’s Metro section carried this headline about potential Democratic presidential contender Martin O’Malley in Maryland: “The glitter-is-gold side of O’Malley’s legacy.” That came under a color photo of O’Malley taking a selfie at a casino opening in Baltimore.
Liberals are angry that President Obama won a second term, and yet they didn’t get the liberal agenda items they wanted passed in 2013, including gun control and amnesty for illegal aliens. The complaint at the end of the year is that this was the “least productive Congress” in 66 years, production always measured by the amount of legislation passed.
But the media complaint here isn’t about just any legislation. It’s about a liberal wish list. Washington Post reporter Paul Kane lamented the “shrunken ambitions” of congressional Democrats in a front-page story. “Back in 2009, during the heady days of hope and change, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) introduced 90 pieces of legislation. In 2013, amid gridlock and dysfunction, he sponsored just 35 bills. None of them became law.”
The Washington Post is painting the Tea Party as all “threat” and no benefit to the Republicans. Paul Kane’s Wednesday story is headlined “Tea party threat again hangs over Republicans’ efforts to take Senate.” Conservatives think some incumbents are “insufficiently strident” against Obama.
Kane played up several times how the GOP whiffed in “seemingly winnable” states with Tea Party candidates, demonstrating complete amnesia about how liberal national media outlets piled on the Angles, O’Donnells and Akins with partisan aggression.
When ultraliberal Henry Waxman ran the House Government Reform Committee, The Washington Post didn't often suggest he was a fierce partisan or ideologue. Instead, former Washington Post managing editor Robert Kaiser praised him in a book review headlined "Moustache of Justice." (The Waxman lovers even have a mug.)
Kaiser cooed, “Henry Waxman is to Congress what Ted Williams was to baseball -- a natural....Waxman has been one of the most effective members of Congress for 35 years....This is the voice of David, whose career has featured the slaying of one Goliath after another.” This is not how the Post is treating Waxman’s "feverish" successor Darrell Issa.
Here's today's sign the Washington Post is a Democrat rag. This story is on A-4: "Health-care law may backfire for some on Medicaid: Expansion threatens to oust thousands in states with generous programs." This story is on A-1: "Democrats seek infusion of new faces."
Paul Kane's front-pager passed along the DCCC's new strategy of finding "problem solvers" that...don't know how to solve problems yet. The central character is Kevin Strouse, a former Army Ranger with no set positions on the issues. "Immigration? Tax policy? 'Certainly I have a lot of research to do,' Strouse acknowledged" as he announced a House run in Pennsylvania. This is the Tea Party takedown?
On Saturday, Washington Post reporters Lori Montgomery and Paul Kane fretted, with the help of several leftists they quoted, that sequestration might not cause enough pain. Given that the so-called "cuts" under discussion are really "reductions in projected spending growth," that is a legitimate fear if your perspective is that government shouldn't ever shrink under any circumstances.
Rush Limbaugh was correct on Tuesday when he noted that the Post let the "sky is falling" mask slip in it report. Several paragraphs, followed by a bit of Rush's reaction, follow the jump.
"Obama budget makes deep cuts, cautious trades," blared the February 15 print edition headline for Washington Post staffer Lori Montgomery's page A1 story on President Obama's 2012 budget plan. "[The] Focus [is]on education, energy and research," a subheadline approvingly added.
In the lead paragraph, Montgomery hailed Obama's spending blueprint as "full of surgical cuts and cautious trade-offs."
By contrast, a Republican plan for the spending blueprint for the rest of 2011 was cast as a "plan with drastic -- and painful -- cuts" in a page A13 headline*.
That story, by Post staffers Shailagh Murray and Paul Kane insisted that House Republicans are selling the plan as "one intended to be viewed as radical and painful."
The first vote cast by the 110th Congress on January 4, 2007 was for election of Speaker of the House. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) won all 233 Democratic votes (including her own). All 202 Republicans voted for Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio. Two years later Pelosi secured 255 (including her own), and there was only one Democrat, one Rep. Gutierrez who did not vote. Minority Leader Boehner received every Republican vote, save for his own and three other Republicans who didn't vote.
By contrast, yesterday's vote for Speaker witnessed a total of 20 Democrats -- 10 percent of the party caucus -- defecting from the Pelosi line. Eleven voted for Blue Dog Democrat Heath Shuler (N.C.) while the other eight generally liberal Democratic defectors voted for other Democrats. And that doesn't include liberal Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon, who made sure to absent himself from the chamber so as to not have to register a vote.
It was certainly an inauspicious way for Pelosi to enter the new Congress as minority leader, yet when the Post reported the story, it elected to bury the news in a 6-paragraph digest item on page A8.