As Michele Bachmann climbs in the polls, Obama-loving media members are working overtime to dig up and/or manufacture dirt on the conservative Congresswoman from Minnesota.
One of the new flavors of the day is that her religious beliefs might make her too submissive to be president, a silly concept the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus felt was necessary to share with her readers Wednesday:
“Do you think the Tea Party is losing some of its appeal?” So Harry Smith cued up a hardly independent guest on Sunday’s Face the Nation: Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic Congresswoman and Chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Earlier, the fill-in host was astonished House Majority Leader Eric Cantor would want to find cuts to afford extra spending for tornado recovery efforts: “One of the things you said earlier this week is that emergency funding should be offset by cuts to the budget deficit. Do you stand by that?”
Meanwhile, another round of Sunday panels meant more pleas to raise taxes. On Fox News Sunday, a frustrated Juan Williams fretted: “Republicans -- for all this talk about oh, the deficit, the debt, we have to be serious, entitlement reform – refuse to consider raising taxes.”
Calling the uproar over the new TSA screening procedures "overblown" and "immature," Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus praised the majority of Americans polled who are okay with the body scanners at airports and scolded those who stand opposed to the searches.
"'Don't tough my junk' may be the cri-de-coeur – cri de crotch? – of the post-9/11 world, but it's an awfully childish one," the columnist writes in her Nov 24 column for the Washington Post. Marcus argues that the new procedures are simply a "marginal invasion of privacy" when compared to the devastating consequences of a terrorist attack that could happen without them.
However, Marcus admits that the new body scanners are "uncomfortably graphic," some TSA workers may "go too far" in the pat-downs, and the procedures might not be fully successful.
Despairing that the current income tax rates will be extended for all income levels, on Sunday’s This Week, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus declared: “I think that the conversation right now is deranged” and “crazy.” In measuring the long-term “cost” of keeping the Bush rates for those below $250,000 versus for all, she argued:
I think that the conversation right now is deranged. We have in one room the deficit commission folks saying look at this huge hole, look at the tax increases and serious spending cuts that we need to do to fill it. And then outside the room, we're having a debate about whether we should add $4 trillion to the deficit long-term or a mere 3.3. This is crazy.
Marcus issued her characterizations after New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had made his case for raising taxes:
UPDATE AT END OF POST: Krugman tries to clarify what he said.
Although he was likely taking a swipe at former governor Sarah Palin with the reference, Paul Krugman on Sunday recommended "death panels" as a means of helping to balance the federal budget.
In a Roundtable discussion on ABC's "This Week," the New York Times columnist said of what recently came out of the President's deficit commission, "Some years down the pike, we're going to get the real solution, which is going to be a combination of death panels and sales taxes" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Columnist Charles Krauthammer scoured congressional Democrats on Friday in The Washington Post for failing to pass any appropriations bills or even introduce a bill extending any of the Bush tax cuts. The title was "The Colbert Democrats." He concluded:
As if this display of unseriousness -- no budget, no appropriations bills, no tax bill -- were not enough, some genius on a House Judiciary subcommittee invites parodist Stephen Colbert to testify as an expert witness on immigration. He then pulls off a nervy mockery of the whole proceedings -- my favorite was his request to have his colonoscopy inserted in the Congressional Record -- while the chairwoman sits there clueless.
A fitting end for the 111th Congress. But not quite. Colbert will return to the scene of the crime on Oct. 30 as the leader of one of two mock rallies on the Mall. Comedian Jon Stewart leads the other. At a time of near-10 percent unemployment, a difficult and draining war abroad, and widespread disgust with government overreach and incompetence, they will light up the TV screens as the hip face of the new liberalism -- just three days before the election.
Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus raced to her keyboard on Tuesday night to express her upset with the result of the Republican Senate primary in Delaware. In “Why Christine O'Donnell's victory is scary,” posted at 10:15 PM EDT on the paper’s “PostPartisan” blog for its opinion writers, she seemed more scared by Mike Castle’s defeat than by Christine O’Donnell’s win. 
The lengths liberals will go to trash Sarah Palin knows no bounds.
On Friday, the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus actually accused the former Alaska governor of being homophobic for calling reporters "limp" and "impotent."
As NewsBusters reported Thursday, Palin, while on Sean Hannity's radio program the day before, bashed "impotent, limp and gutless reporters [that] take anonymous sources and cite them as being factual references."
From this, Marcus divined the following utter nonsense:
George Will on Sunday used a Barack Obama quote to smack down a predictable attack on Sarah Palin made by the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus.
As the Roundtable discussion of ABC's "This Week" moved to the former Alaska governor's "Mama Grizzlies" video, Marcus voiced her unsurprising displeasure.
"I think it's the same, old, vapid, platitudinous Sarah Palin," said Marcus. "There is not a shred, not a shred of substance in this ad."
When he got his turn, Will tore Marcus apart, "On the vapidness meter, that ranks nowhere near, 'We are the ones we have been waiting for,' which was Obama's way of flattering the self-esteem of his supporters" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
George Will on Sunday accused Barack Obama of being an expert at selling snake oil.
As the Roundtable segment of ABC's "This Week" began, host Jake Tapper asked Will if the President's claim Republicans "are peddling that same snake oil that they've been peddling now for years" will resonate with voters this November.
Will marvelously responded, "No, because he is an expert on snake oil."
"This is the man who said, if we pass the $767 billion stimulus bill, which it turns out costs $862 billion, a $95 million oops, we would have unemployment at 8 percent and no higher, and it went higher," continued Will.
"This is the man who last week was out saying, 'I'm going to give $2 billion, about $2 billion, to two companies to create about 1,600 jobs.' That's $1.5 million per job. That is snake oil" (video follows with partial transcript and commentary:
The "recent unpleasantness" at the Washington Post was, to conservatives at least, entirely predictable. What decent left-leaning journalist could live among the remote, primitive tribes known as conservatives and not be driven just a little bit mad? (If the Post's editors were embarrassed, they could at least take comfort that their man hadn't "gone native.")Predictable, but no less unfortunate. The Washington Post dearly needs someone to explain conservatism to its editors and staff. Why? A look through the June 30 edition of the Washington Post gives a pretty good indication. No, not the puff piece on Obama Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. (Apparently a photo of the grown man in charge of a vast federal agency wearing a bike helmet is supposed convey competence. The caption reads - really - "Ray LaHood has worked to expand transportation safety, including emphasizing the rights of cyclists in federal transportation policy.) No, a few columns should suffice. Courtland Milloy began a piece on Justice Clarence Thomas' recent opinion defending the Second Amendment on a promising note. Thomas, Milloy wrote approvingly, "roared to life" in the opinion, citing the legal disarming of blacks in the post-reconstruction south, which left them vulnerable to the KKK and other white supremacists. So far, so good.
On the front of Sunday's Washington Post, Supreme Court reporter Robert Barnes unfurled the first liberal spin line of the battle over a new Supreme Court justice: that there's no way whoever Obama nominates will be more liberal than retiring John Paul Stevens. Barnes said "almost certainly" the court will be more conservative after Obama's second nominee is confirmed.
Can anyone imagine the media buying that spin for a second after, say, Chief Justice Rehnquist passed away? Oh, Bush can't possibly make the court more conservative. "Almost certainly," the court will be more liberal now.
Barnes completely accepted Justice Stevens laying down a marker for his half of the court, and made it the newspaper's own front-page spin: