Campaigns & Elections

Paging Dr. Ron Reagan, Jr. . . . On Morning Joe today, Carl Bernstein insisted Sarah Palin was "ignorant," but couldn't remember why.  When pressed, he claimed she didn't know where Russia was.  Oops. Bernstein began by denouncing Palin as a "demagogue."  When Joe Scarborough asked him why he had written a column branding Palin as "ignorant" the day after McCain announced her as his…

On Monday's CBS Early Show, after reporting claims from Ron Reagan Jr. that President Ronald Reagan may have had Alzheimer's Disease while in office, co-host Erica Hill asked other son Michael Reagan about those accusations: "And your brother has said this is just his own feeling....Could it be possible there may have been something else? Could he [President Reagan] have had dementia?"…

Joe Scarborough did invite folks to "rub it in my face if I'm wrong," and there will surely be many who would like nothing better than to oblige him  . . . Today's Morning Joe saw considerable consensus around the view that Sarah Palin's response to the Arizona shootings "probably ended her political career." Donny Deutsch was first to float the notion.  Joe Scarborough embraced and…

According to Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh has "a man-crush" on New Jersey's Chris Christie. The GMA host interviewed the governor on Thursday and hit the Republican on not cutting unemployment fast enough and on his handling of December's blizzard. Regarding the state of New Jersey's turnaround, Stephanopoulos touted the talking points of…

(See the Update within the post.) It's not too difficult to determine where the sympathy of the Associated Press's Christopher Wills resides in the aftermath of the Democrat-controlled legislature's passage in Illinois of steep, "temporary" four-year income and corporate tax increases. Wills cited neighboring states as "gleefully plot(ting)" to take business away from Illinois, claimed that…

On MSNBC's "Jansing & Co." today, anchor Chris Jansing and liberal columnist Karen Hunter took turns ripping apart Sarah Palin's call for civility in an Internet video posted yesterday morning in the wake of the Tucson shooting. The morning after President Barack Obama delivered a well-received speech at a memorial service for the victims of a rampage that left six dead and Congresswoman…

Call it a libel squared . . . Ed Schultz has suggested that Sarah Palin employed the term "blood libel" to describe the way her critics have tried to hold her responsible for the Arizona shootings "as an appeal to an extreme Christian conservative base for 2012." Citing no evidence for his grotesque allegation, Schultz first floated it during his opening monologue on his MSNBC show this…

MSNBC's Chris Jansing featured the liberal Jonathan Capehart on Wednesday to attack a newly released Sarah Palin video as "anti-Semitic." The Washington Post editorial page writer berated Palin for complaining about the media's attempts to link conservative speech to last week's shooting in Arizona. In the video, the former Alaska governor rejected this as a "blood libel." Capehart smeared…

On Sunday, New York Times political reporter/columnist Matt Bai wondered if we are at the start of a “terrifying new” moment in political violence in “A Turning Point in the Discourse, but in Which Direction?” Bai argued that the act of Republican politicians saying standard political things was somehow fueling the rhetorical flames. He at least appeared evenhanded at the beginning. Within…

MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell continued her crusade against Sarah Palin today, reiterating the fallacious contention that the former Alaska governor is at least partly responsible for the shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona that left six dead and a congresswoman critically injured. On her eponymous afternoon program, Mitchell criticized Palin's "campaign tactics" in an interview with former…

According to Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos, there's "no evidence" that the Arizona shooter was motivated by political ideology. But, that didn't stop the ABC host from speculating during a discussion with possible Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty. After allowing that "crazy voices" inside Jared Loughner's head probably prompted the rampage, Stephanopoulos …

NewsBusters has exhaustively documented the ways in which the liberal media and Dem politicians have sought to exploit the Arizona shootings, seeking to pin blame on a range of Republicans and conservative media figures. It was thus nothing short of surreal to listen to MSNBC analyst Mark Halperin this morning.  Surveying the situation, Halperin praised the media and politicians for their…

Reporting on the political fallout of the Tucson shooting on Monday's CBS Early Show, congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes declared: "Now some are questioning whether the increasingly angry tone in politics could have contributed to a culture of violence." Cordes noted how "members of Congress took their soul searching public, Sunday," followed by sound bites of two Democrats lamenting…

The irresponsible propagandists posing as journalists at the Associated Press are going to a frequently visited well tonight -- the one where any violence committed against a Democrat or liberal must somehow and in some way be due to a climate of hostility created solely by conservatives, Republicans, and more recently, Tea Party activists. Never mind that the person who allegedly shot…