It really is amazing listening to liberal media members sometimes.
Consider The Nation magazine’s Katrina vanden Heuvel who on MSNBC’s Now Wednesday actually said, “At the moment the Democratic Party with a few exceptions is a kind of centrist party” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
MSNBC host Alex Wagner rehashed an old and much-overblown feud between President Obama and Gov. Jan Brewer (R-Ariz.) on Thursday’s Now, hyping Obama and Brewer’s first tarmac meeting since the Arizona governor allegedly wagged her finger at the president in early 2012. Wagner blasted Brewer for not giving President Obama “the respect that should be given the commander in chief,” asking her panel why the governor never apologized.
Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart took the criticism of Brewer a step further. Capehart argued that many of Brewer’s supporters saw the incident as “wagging her finger at this president who’s also black, who should not be there,” implying that many in Brewer’s “base” are racist:
MSNBC contributors Jonathan Alter and Joy Reid sound much like a good metronome: their commentary never changes, marching on at an endless, fixed pace. Alter and Reid have made a career at the Lean Forward network out of comparing Republicans to slave owners, terrorists, and drunks.
Their latest assault on the GOP came on Friday’s Now, with Reid serving as guest host in place of Alex Wagner. Discussing the latest attempt by Senate Republicans to defund ObamaCare, Alter blasted the “suicide caucus” GOP, claiming “smarter conservatives understand” that shutting down the government over ObamaCare “is suicidal.”
Earlier this afternoon, my NewsBusters colleague Kyle Drennen highlighted the Today show’s effort to hype the recent feud between Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Unsurprisingly, the folks at MSNBC were even more eager to blow the dispute out of proportion – and to predict a nasty fight between Republicans in 2016.
Now host Alex Wagner kicked off a gleeful Wednesday segment on the feud, claiming the “2016 Republican clown car has already started revving its engines.” Wagner also suggested the “spat” would expose “deep divisions within the GOP,” echoing similar remarks made by NBC’s Peter Alexander on Wednesday’s Today.
Former Governor Ed Rendell (D-Pa.) drifted a bit too far off MSNBC’s pro-Obama message on Thursday’s Now with Alex Wagner, receiving a strong left-wing rebuke after suggesting that President Obama should be willing to compromise with Republicans on upcoming budgetary battles.
MSNBC contributor Joy Reid likened Republicans to terrorists, claiming that the president’s situation is like “when somebody is threatening to bomb the stadium.” Reid rejected Rendell’s call for bipartisanship, instead pushing her offensive analogy even further:
Melissa Harris-Perry, one of the panel guests on MSNBC's "Now" program on Friday, managed to tie Detroit's bankruptcy to small government, i.e., "when government is small enough to drown in your bathtub," and to analogize it to "exactly the kind of thing that many Republicans would impose on us." Really.
The relevant transcript from RealClearPolitics, followed by comments from Erika Johnsen at Hot Air and Noah Rothman at Mediaite, are after the jump:
President Barack Obama touted benefits of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in a speech at the White House Thursday, claiming his signature health care bill is “doing what it’s designed to do.” The president also acknowledged the “glitches” that have impacted the implementation of the law, including his announced one-year delay of a so-called “employer mandate” requiring businesses with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance.
Alex Wagner, and most of her Thursday Now panel, came to the defense of the president over ObamaCare and its implementation, while blasting Republicans for being “reluctant to embrace” the unpopular bill. Wagner invited on White House communications director Jennifer Palmieri to tout the legislation’s purported benefits, but included no conservatives on her panel to challenge Palmieri’s claims.
Appearing on Thursday’s Now with Alex Wagner, MSNBC contributor Joy Reid accused Republicans of racial motivations in their opposition to the Senate immigration bill, claiming GOP lawmakers “don’t want to add more brown people to the population.” She also compared a legalization option – which some Republicans support – to “indentured servitude.”
Reid, a frequent guest on the Lean Forward network – and editor of left-leaning, NBC-owned TheGrio.com – felt what host Alex Wagner suggested was “indignation” at GOP opposition to the Senate’s version of immigration reform. She then launched a tirade against Republicans that characterized their support of legal resident status for illegal immigrants, but not citizenship, as “a very ugly, sort of, ethnic argument”:
The July 9 broadcast of Now with Alex Wagner wouldn’t be complete without a panel discussing Texas State Senator Wendy Davis – and the abortion battle in Texas. Yet, it reached a new level with New York Times op-ed contributor Beth Matusoff Merfish declaring that she was “proud” her mother underwent an abortion since “she had the wisdom and the courage to know that her own potential would be cut short by a pregnancy and to terminate that pregnancy and I think many of our mothers have similar stories and it is really important to talk about that.”
The MSNBC network is known for two things: A lack of dissent and touting the official Obama line. So, it's not surprising that the show's panel included Ben LaBolt, a former press secretary from Obama’s 2012 campaign, and Karen Finney, former DNC Communications Director and board member of NARAL Pro-Choice America.
The liberal chorus at MSNBC has made it a relentless mission to attack Republicans as unconcerned about the poor. Evening hosts Chris Matthews and Chris Hayes are just two recent examples, the former claiming the GOP “spent months...trying to keep black people and poor people from voting,” and the latter slamming Republicans for an “anti-food stamp jihad.”
The hypocrisy of these attacks may shine through this weekend, as the network broadcasts live from the Essence Festival in New Orleans, from July 5 through July 7. Now, the Essence Festival’s primary purpose is to “celebrate black culture, music and people,” a mission no one could or should criticize. But the Lean Forward network is choosing to promote their GOP-bashing agenda – which includes criticism for Republicans who want to “tear down the poor” – from a festival where the most affordable tickets are currently more than $60 per ticket, per night.
Guest-anchoring the June 25 edition of Now with Alex Wagner, MSNBC's Joy-Ann Reid took the opportunity to react to a 2-hour-old Supreme Court ruling with an appropriate amount of sky-is-falling bluster.
Reid's overwhelmingly liberal panel was distraught at the decision and agreed that this would lead to a “slow but steady erosion of voting rights in the South.” When asked his opinion about the ruling, Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, had this to say:
Alex Wagner appeared positively giddy over the House of Representative’s failure to pass the farm bill Thursday, using the bill’s defeat as an opportunity to rail against John Boehner and the House Republican caucus on Friday’s Now.
Wagner’s all-liberal panel joined in on the host’s routine GOP-bashing, with Michelle Goldberg berating the party’s “kamikaze ideology” and Eugene Robinson claiming “a huge chunk of [Boehner’s] caucus doesn’t want to pass anything.” All four guest panelists on the program got the chance to scold Republicans, in what was a vicious indictment of the party over the first ten minutes of the show.