In a contest for the most consistent media fool of the year, Bloomberg's Mark Halperin would be an early favorite to take the top prize for 2015.
This year, Halperin has already had at least three instances of outrageous hackery. As will be seen, for sheer hypocrisy, his most recent is arguably his worst.
When they can't go directly after something a Republican or conservative candidate says, the establishment press attempts to make a big deal out of dumb things their aides utter or publish.
Leftist apparatchiks usually have no such worries. The latest example of an item which would be prominently in the news if a Republican or conservative had written something equally dense comes from Lanny Davis, longtime Clinton family apologist and career Democratic Party hack. In a column appearing at the Hill, Davis whined about the supposedly awful "media frenzy" which occurred two weeks ago at a Hillary Clinton event with supposedly "everyday Americans" in Hampton, New Hampshire. Davis compared the travails and indignities the poor, put-upon Mrs. Clinton suffered to ... well, readers will see who after the jump (bolds are mine):
When it comes to taking questions from representatives of the legacy media, Hillary Clinton has been making herself rather scarce, and Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas thinks that’s just peachy.
“The day when the political media was instrumental in getting a candidate's message out is over,” wrote Kos in a Thursday post. “Candidates now have myriad vehicles to communicate their message straight to the voters without having it wrung through the old media's filter…So yes, if you're Hillary Clinton, you damn right ignore the dinosaur press corps. Fuck them.”
The folks at MSNBC exhibited a sick sense of "humor" on Friday.
As Gateway Pundit's Kristinn Taylor reported Friday afternoon, the network posted "a video to MSNBC’s Facebook page that mocks police over a criminal dragging a police officer by a car as he attempted to flee ..." The post asked the following question, which was also tweeted: "Does it count as a police chase if you take the cop along for the ride?"
B.B. King passed away Thursday night at the age of 89. The legendary musician is being remembered fondly by Twitter users the world over and, as such, is a trending topic on the social-media site today. But in an explanatory note for why he's trending, Twitter curators apparently had to make it all about President Obama.
UPDATE, April 6: An email sent by "Virginia Commonwealth University News" insists, despite the November 2014 tweet originally found at the link about Bryan's "GoFundMe" effort, that Alix Bryan "has not been employed by Virginia Commonwealth University." Accordingly, the text in this post's final sentence now refers to Bryan's claim in her WTVR bio and at her LinkedIn profile to have received a "Master’s in Multimedia Journalism from Virginia Commonwealth University."
Opening up a new frontier in the left's ongoing effort to intimidate opponents into silence, a Virginia TV reporter tweeted on Wednesday that "I have reported the GoFundMe for Memories Pizza for fraud. Just in case." In doing so, social media reporter Alix Bryan of CBS affiliate WTVR-TV in Richmond, Virginia, effectively admitted that she had no factual basis upon which to file such a report — but did so anyway.
To the surprise of very few, after she was publicly criticized for this disgraceful behavior, Bryan went to a wide variety of failed defenses before she ended up very inadequately "apologizing."
Update, April 3: The Indiana man who claims to have been hacked now admits that he wasn't, but says he was "joking" about robbing Memories Pizza, and is threatening to sue those who exposed his (ahem) public comments.
Those of us following the Memories Pizza story won't have trouble remembering it as the years go by, thanks only partially to the Walkerton, Indiana store's fairly unusual name for a pizzeria.
What will also easy to recall are the "memories" of the unhinged and threatening leftist behavior that accompanied its owner's simple statement that, if the request ever arose, they would have to turn down catering a same-sex "marriage" because participating in or supporting such a ceremony violates their firm Christian religious beliefs — and the press's attempts to cover up what their journalistic malfeasance unleashed.
Something hasn't seemed right about the Memories Pizza story from the get-go. Now I know why.
In a Tuesday report, TV Station ABC 57 cited the Walkerton, Indiana business's Crystal O'Connor as saying that, in the station's words, they "don't agree with gay marriages and wouldn't cater them if asked to." In other words, they've never been asked to. The non-story which ignited a national firestorm is the result of a dangerously irresponsible ambush. The reporter involved admitted as much in a tweet late this morning:
The press won't roast New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for this, but it should — at a very high temperature.
Today, Mr. Self-Righteous, who in the past has suggested that anyone who is pro-life, against same-sex marriage, or for the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment as written and adjudicated should leave his state, banned all "non-essential" state travel to Indiana, home of a recently enacted religious freedom law similar to that found in roughly 19 states — make that soon to be 20, with Arkansas imminently getting on board:
In Chicago, incumbent Mayor and longtime Democrat fixture Rahm Emanuel floated the idea of renaming one of its airports after President Obama. After all, according to Emanuel, both of Chicago's major airports, O'Hare and Midway, are "named after battleships." No they're not, as will be seen after the jump.
The Chicago Tribune's Bill Ruthhart failed to recognize Emanuel's startling gaffe until the fifth paragraph of his story. Even then, he treated his breathtaking ignorance as some kind of routine, unimportant mistake. If you have a hard time imagining the Trib giving a Republican or conservative committing a similar whopper such an easy time of it, join the club.
CNN is reporting tonight that the White House considers the "Of course, death to America" comments made by Iran’s Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as merely statements "intended for a domestic political audience."
That clueless take would be headline news everywhere right now if this were a Republican or conservative administration. The National Journal's John Kraushaar's tweet reporting that statement, and one reaction to it, follow the jump:
Meredith Shiner is currently a Yahoo News political reporter. Before spending three years at Roll Call, where she was considered "a leader in the newsroom," she toiled at the Politico for two years. Shiner is a graduate of Duke University, and "grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago."
I have provided these resume-level details to emphasize how utterly incomprehensible it is, as well as downright scary, that a woman with this kind of background and experience could have published, reacting to Ted Cruz's speech announcing his presidential candidacy, the following tweet (HT Instapundit):