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.

On Sunday's NBC Meet the Press, host David Gregory used the death of former South African President Nelson Mandela to lecture American politicians: "Mandela refused to be consumed by hatred and insisted on working toward a common purpose with his political foes. That, seems to me, is what is missing from this era of argument in Washington." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

However, Gregory portrayed President Obama as the victim of such polarization, rather than one of its instigators: "The election of our 44th president was similarly an example of how countries can overcome their past....Yet, President Obama has struggled since he made history. He still aspires to achieve political consensus on some of the country's most pressing challenges."

For someone who loves to make pop culture references, Chris Matthews can't seem to get them right. On Friday night, the Hardball host sneered at Rick Santorum comparing his fight against ObamaCare to Nelson Mandela's struggle against apartheid. A cocky Matthews derided, "That's like Snoopy fighting the Red Dragon." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] As any Peanuts fan will tell you, Snoopy fought the Red Baron.

On March 28, 2013, the MSNBC anchor mocked pro-Second Amendment voices as just like Nazis. He compared, "You know that scene in Casablanca when the French police captain shoots the Nazi, Major Strasser?" Of course, Humphrey Bogart's character shoots the Nazi, not the French captain. In another segment on Friday, Matthews used Mandela's death to shill for his book.

At the Daily Beast, Michael Moynihan attempted to overcome the tendency of journalists and celebrities to make Nelson Mandela a secular saint. Moynihan recalled that when Margaret Thatcher died, these same people denounced her for here "indulgence" of right-wing dictators like Agosto Pinochet in Chile, who allowed his country to become a democracy.

ABC called her reign an “elective dictatorship.” NBC reported several times that “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” became a popular iTune after she passed away, and CBS predicted the funeral would be a "tense and controversial affair." It's safe to guess these networks wouldn't dream of recalling Mandela’s associations with despots like Fidel Castro and Muammar Qaddafi, as Moynihan insisted they should:

The media's determination to pin anything negative on Texas Senator Ted Cruz apparently knows no bounds.

Even as the establishment press, with Politico's Reid Epstein being one of the more recent examples, attempts to give President Obama the Mother of All Free Passes for the disastrous rollouts of HealthCare.gov and Obamacare in general, Cruz, currently perceived as a strong 2016 presidential prospect, somehow deserves to be associated with comments left at his Facebook post on Nelson Mandela's death. At least that's what Anneta Konstantinides at ABC's "The Note" seems to want readers to believe; otherwise, why would she engage in the effort at all? Excerpts follow the jump (bolds are mine; HT Twitchy):