On Sunday morning, ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos discussed Rolling Stone's retracted article surrounding an alleged sexual assault and gang rape at the University of Virginia. While the panelists all agreed that Rolling Stone should take a hit for publishing a false story, the discussion got heated over statistics regarding sexual assaults on college campuses. The segment began with Rich Lowry of National Review accusing Rolling Stone of having “an agenda to portray UVA as this bastion of white male privilege where basically rapists rule the social life. And the damage will never be undone. And I think if there’s any justice in the world, Rolling Stone would have to give up covering music and become the alumni magazine of the University of Virginia.”
Matthew Dowd
Despite the Republican Party taking control of both houses of Congress as well winning additional governors mansions, ABC’s Good Morning America made sure to throw some cold water on the GOP victory. On Wednesday morning, co-host George Stephanopoulos and ABC News Political Analyst Matthew Dowd pushed the line that despite the GOP's midterm victory “the Republican brand is still very damaged.”
While all three network morning shows on Monday covered the upcoming midterm election, only ABC's Good Morning America mentioned the real possibility of Republicans taking control of the Senate. Co-host George Stephanopoulos informed viewers: "And Republicans seem to be closing in on the six Senate seats they need to gain a majority....The forecaster Nate Silver, from FiveThirtyEight, puts their chances of getting the Senate at 74%."
Attorney General Eric Holder resigned this week after six years working for the Obama Administration and on Sunday morning's This Week w/ George Stephanopoulos ABC’s Matthew Dowd eagerly scolded Republicans for being “way too vociferous in their things about Eric Holder.” The so-called Republican dismissed the notion that Holder was “the worst attorney general we’ve ever had” and proceeded to drag Edwin Meese, Attorney General for President Reagan, through the mud by insisting he was much worse than the scandal plagued Obama official.
Liberals really ought to make up their minds about this.
As a general rule, it often takes little more than a stiff breeze to render left wingers confused and incoherent. The Supreme Court's ruling in the Hobby Lobby case has hit the left with the force of an early hurricane, and left wingers have responded accordingly. Textbook example of this was evident yesterday during an exchange between Democrat strategist Donna Brazile and GOP political consultant Matthew Dowd on the Sunday talk show "This Week." (Video after the jump)
After President Obama's victory lap Tuesday over the rollout of his health care law, ABC's Matthew Dowd told Republicans to let Obama celebrate and stop trying to repeal ObamaCare.
"You have to give the President ground to have some celebration," Dowd insisted. "A little bit of dancing in the end zone. I think Republicans would be really smart, let him have the touchdown, don't ask for instant replay."
ABC News Political Analyst and former Bush/Cheney advisor Matthew Dowd attempted to downplay the impact ObamaCare will have in the 2013-midterm elections. Appearing on This Week w/ George Stephanopoulos on March 30, Dowd asserted, “2014 is going to be about the direction of the country, the economy, and how people feel in their lives. It's not going to be about ObamaCare.”
Despite the bizarre prediction from the ABC analyst, conservative editor of "The Weekly Standard" Bill Kristol slapped down Dowd’s ridiculous claim and shot back that “I’m happy to have a referendum on ObamaCare… and will be good for Republicans.” See video below.]
"It is becoming clear to me -- not that it needs to be any more clear -- that the Republican establishment does not want to run against Obamacare."
And as if to prove that Rush is right, Republican consultant Matthew Dowd on This Week With George Stephanopoulos rejected Obamacare as the reason for the victory of David Jolly over Alex Sink in last week's special congressional election in Florida. On Friday, Rush Limbaugh spoke extensively on his broadcast about how establishment Republicans want to downplay Obamacare as an issue in both the recent election as well in the congressional elections this November. At first Dowd merely ignored Obamacare but when the other panelists on this show kept bringing it up, it was too much for him and his Republican consultancy reserve broke.
With the departure of commentator George Will to Fox News, the job of representing the conservative point of view on ABC’s This Week seems to have settled upon Matthew Dowd. Trouble is, Dowd is not really what anyone could fairly characterize as a conservative.
Beyond the fact that he was a Democratic strategist for decades before switching to work for former President George W. Bush in the late 1990s, Dowd’s own political views seem to be rather conventionally liberal. If there was any doubt of that proposition, Dowd dispelled it in a column published last week at the ABC News website focusing on the Obama White House’s latest pet issue: the supposed crisis of income inequality in the United States.
In a pathetic analyis piece at the Politico on Friday morning, Politico's Todd S. Purdum engaged in egregious excuse-making driven by a de facto admission that the Affordable Care Act would never have passed if the public had been told the truth about what was in it.
This is the same Todd S. Purdum who recently, as Mark Finkelstein at NewsBusters reported earlier this month, accused Republicans of "calculated sabotage" of Obamacare, and compared their opposition to the "pattern of 'massive resistance' not seen since the Southern states’ defiance of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954." His Friday exercise, which should have been headlined "The Obamacare Scam," was barely less odious (bolds and numbered tags are mine):
According to the journalists at ABC's Good Morning America, the disastrous rollout of ObamaCare has left the President in a perilous position comparable to George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina. Co-host George Stephanopoulos opened the show by announcing, "White House fumble...The fix [Obama] is offering and why one state is already saying it won't work."
Stephanopoulos connected the President to the unpopular George W. Bush, worrying, "Once those questions about [Bush's] competence took hold, his second term never really recovered. Is President Obama in that kind of a position right now?" Analyst Matt Dowd unloaded, saying of Bush that one Katrina happened,"his presidency, and the relevancy of his presidency was over. I think with that, that is exactly what we're seeing with President Obama."
As NewsBusters routinely reports, one of the tricks the liberal media employs to discredit conservatives is to seek opinions from supposedly right-leaning commentators who are really nothing more than Republicans In Name Only often sharing much the same views espoused by the left.
One such "conservative" media darling is ABC political contributor Matthew Dowd who on Sunday's This Week said, "If I were people, I wouldn't be taking political advice from Bill Kristol who selected Sarah Palin as one of his leading figures in the national Republican Party, which was obviously a disaster in 2008" (video follows with transcript and commentary):