Steven Levingston

WashPost Unloads Both Barrels on Ed Klein's Anti-Obama Book
By Tim Graham | June 21, 2012 | 9:03 AM EDT

The Washington Post suddenly discovered Ed Klein’s best-selling anti-Obama book The Amateur on the front page of Thursday’s Style section. Reporter/book blogger Steven Levington announced the book "contains scenes that did not occur or that were vastly misconstrued, according to those who Klein says were present."

Levingston completely ignored the most headline-grabbing allegations in the book, that in a recorded interview, Rev. Jeremiah Wright said Obama pal Eric Whitacre tried to buy his silence in 2008. Instead, Levingston went on a tear against Klein’s 2005 book about Hillary Clinton.

Surprise! WaPo Hearts 'Irrepressible' Meghan McCain's Memoir
By Matt Philbin | September 7, 2010 | 12:29 PM EDT
She's the heir to the House of Maverick - the Republican the liberal media establishment can love, who's just as embarrassed by those icky conservatives as any network anchor or newspaper columnist.

Like her senator and erstwhile presidential candidate dad John, Meghan McCain is a willing weapon for the media to use against her fellow Republicans. But unlike "the Maverick," there's little chance she'd ever be a threat to the real good guys - liberal Democrats. 

To Washington Post Nonfiction Books Editor Steven Levingston, Meghan McCain is a "free-thinking college grad" (she's educated, you see; she's one of us) joyfully bucking what she calls conservative "groupthink."

In the Sept. 1 Post, Levingston reviewed "Dirty Sexy Politics," McCain's memoir of her father's 2008 presidential campaign. The book, he wrote, "is as much a scathing critique of the Republican Party as it is a passionate tale of life on the campaign trail." And Levingston proceeded to relate that critique with undisguised relish.

"McCain takes repeated jabs at the intolerant ethos of today's Republicans," Levingston wrote. "She rails at feeling left out: The party, she says, has been hijacked by the right wing and has rejected - to its detriment - the moderate politics that she and millions of other young conservatives espouse."

Because she dresses trashy, swears like a sailor and "has gay friends," McCain has run afoul of the "intolerant ethos of today's Republicans."

Beck-Bashing WaPo Book Critic Acts Offended, As If He Didn't Imply Violent Tea Party Uprising
By Tim Graham | June 16, 2010 | 4:54 PM EDT

On his radio show, Glenn Beck responded to Washington Post book critic Steven Levingston’s audacious claim that Beck’s new novel The Overton Window may be a terrorist’s inspirational handbook. Beck objected to the idea that it’s ridiculous that Tea Party protesters would be nonviolent. "Show me the violent Tea Party, Washington Post. Show them to me."

Levingston wrote: "Molly and her crowd assert their Second Amendment right to bear arms and are well stocked with weapons. They even make their own ammunition. Their insistence on nonviolence appears as disingenuous as anything out of the mouth of their nemesis, the insidious manipulator of reality Arthur Gardner."

In response to Beck on his Political Bookworm blog, Levingston weirdly claimed Beck had taken his review out of context: