On Wednesday, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd decided to invent a running commentary from House Speaker John Boehner on how Republicans stink at talking to women. “Some of these punks and losers in the Tea Party who have joined up with us do not have a clue how to smooth talk dolls,” she imagined him saying at an Italian restaurant.

Some could argue it's a little rich for Dowd to mock contempt for women when she's written a book titled "Are Men Necessary?" Dowd, who claims to be Catholic, went on a tear late in this burst of allegedly humorous fiction agaist Republicans having a "square, uptight Mother Superior past" and being "18-karat idiots trying to curb birth control." As if that sounds anything like Boehner:

Taking journalistic hypocrisy to ever-headier heights, Politico's Todd Purdum spent hundreds of words Wednesday evening bemoaning the potential impact of an incident which both sides involved say never happened, and acted as if incivility only comes out of the mouths of conservatives and Republicans.

Earlier Wednesday, the website's Tal Kopan relayed news that Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin "said in a Facebook post that a House Republican leader told off President Barack Obama during a negotiation meeting, and that GOP leaders are so disrespectful it’s practically impossible to have a conversation with them." The supposed statement to Obama by a GOP leader, which both White House spokesman Jay Carney and House Speaker John Boehner say never was made, and which Durbin could not have observed or heard because he wasn't there, was: "I cannot even stand to look at you." Durbin, it must be recalled, ultimately was forced to apologize for comparing U.S. troops at Guantanamo Bay to "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings," in 2005.

Brent Bozell isn’t the only conservative opinion leader to focus on how the latest NBC-Wall Street Journal poll was used by NBC as “absolutely devastating to Republicans.” Rush Limbaugh found “it just dispirited every Republican who heard about it. And it ignited and made joyously happy every Democrat and every media person who heard about it.”

But at The Huffington Post, liberal pollsters Mark Blumenthal and Emily Swanson analyzed other polls and showed they differ from the NBC “devastation.” They say focusing on blame is the “least reliable gauge of public opinion about the ongoing crisis.”

I'm really getting sick and tired of conservatives being accused of racism by liberal media members all because they don't agree with Barack Obama's policies.

On Tuesday, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Cynthia Tucker actually tweeted, "I knew some whites would have difficulty w/ a browner America but didn't know they'd wanna destroy the country over it":

Monday's CBS Evening News unsurprisingly ginned up the ideological struggle inside the Republican Party as it covered the ongoing partial government shutdown. Chip Reid spun the face-off inside the House Republican caucus as being between "staunch" Tea Party-aligned representatives inside the House and "mainstream" Republicans.

Reid later played up how House Speaker John Boehner could "face a dilemma" if the Senate came up with a compromise to end the shutdown, and that Boehner "can either allow the House to vote, which will likely split the Republican Party in two and create a major backlash from the Tea Party; or...he can refuse to allow a vote, which could lead to default." [MP3 audio available here; video below the jump]