Even though Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum describes Charles Krauthammer as a “hardcore conservative,” he suggested in a Friday post that Krauthammer is too enlightened to be on the same page as most right-wingers regarding Obama White House scandals.

When Krauthammer argued recently against the effort to impeach IRS commissioner John Koskinen, he commented that on matters including the IRS/Tea Party flap and the Benghazi attack, Republicans, despite not persuading the majority of the public of Obama-administration “malfeasance,” had had “the facts and the argument” on their side. Drum wrote, “Does [Krauthammer] really believe this? Or does he know it's baloney but figures he needs some kind of acceptable cover to get Republicans off their Ahab-like zeal for investigating nothingburgers?” According to Drum, Dr. K does indeed understand that it’s baloney.

Regarding the mainstream media’s superficial coverage of religion, is the sticking point excessive evenhandedness or simple ignorance? Two lefty bloggers differed Friday on that issue.

First, Paul Waldman wrote on The Washington Post’s Plum Line blog that reporters don’t like asking the presidential candidates “about the specifics of their faith and how it might influence their day-to-day decision making…because they’re worried that it will come off sounding like criticism of the candidates’ beliefs.” Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, however, countered that journalists worry not about appearing biased but rather about getting overmatched by politicians who are well-versed in Scripture, exegesis, and so on.

Imagine an Abortion Pride Day parade in which women march while pushing empty strollers and baby carriages. That’s not far off from what Mother Jones pundit Drum recommended in a Wednesday post.

Drum suggested that women who’ve had an abortion and believe they made the right choice ought to say so publicly, and that they should view out gays and lesbians as role models in that regard: “As long as gays stayed largely closeted, it was easy for most people to think there weren't very many of them…[but] as more and more gays came out, that view was forced to fade away…The same is true of abortion…When it turns out your next-door neighbor had an abortion? Or the waitress at the diner you go to for lunch? Or your doctor? Then it gets a little harder to think of it as something unusual and sort of icky. It's just something people do.”

Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly used Wednesday evening's edition of The O'Reilly Factor to hammer “haters on both sides” of the political divide during a segment entitled “Hating President Obama.”

He began by stating: “At the height of the Iraq War, the vilification of President Bush the younger was off the chart,” with “the left in America accusing him and Vice President Dick Cheney of lying to get us into the war.”

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones claims that Obama’s executive action was meant to “gain Latino support for Democrats and provoke an insane counterreaction from Republicans” and concludes that Obama “succeeded brilliantly on both counts.” Meanwhile, Ed Kilgore of the Washington Monthly notes that “the Republican Party was actually competitive among Latino voters a decade ago,” but adds, “Now that it’s obvious the party has chosen to…bow to the nativist impulses of the conservative ‘base,’ the question is how much worse can it get?”