Conservatives & Republicans

Imagine if any Republican president in the past fifty years had said the following: "I get letters, people say, you are an idiot -- (laughter) -- and here’s what you didn’t do, and here’s the program that is terrible, and all kinds of stuff. But this gentleman, he said, I voted for you twice but I’m deeply disappointed. And it went on and on, chronicling all the things that hadn’t gotten done."…

Pundits occasionally opine that someone or other is the face of a given political party. Paul Waldman of The Week implies that Donald Trump would be a fitting choice as the Republican party’s face, presumably drawn by a cartoonist, since Trump is “a walking caricature…created from everything Republicans believe” about matters such as money and patriotism. “Trump is the essence of contemporary…

Reacting to the media coverage thus far of the deadly church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, Fox News contributor Bernard Goldberg joined Thursday’s O’Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel and eviscerated the liberal media for having “a long, detestable history” of using instances of innocent lives being senselessly lost “as an opportunity to bash conservative media.”

Anger, sadness, and disgust have been nearly universal responses to Wednesday night’s apparent act of racist terrorism in Charleston, S.C., but Jeb Lund doesn’t think such reactions make sense coming from conservatives. In a Friday screed, Lund argued that the Charleston shootings shouldn’t have surprised anyone, given that “American movement conservatism has already made these kinds of killings…

O’Reilly Factor host Bill O’Reilly engaged in a heated battle with South Carolina Democratic Representative Todd Rutherford on Thursday evening over Ruthford’s dubious claims that he made hours earlier about how the alleged gunman in the deadly Charleston church shooting had sought guidance from “things like Fox News” as it supposedly offers “hate speech.” The roughly three-minute exchange…

In a Thursday item on NBC News's web site, Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, and Andrew Rafferty asserted that "just like the issue of gay marriage, the Pope and the Catholic Church have gone from being wedge issues that benefitted the GOP in 2004 to ones that now favor Democrats." The three journalists cited Associated Press's reporting on Pope Francis's new encyclical on the environment, and concluded…

Appearing with journalist Carl Bernstein on Wednesday’s CNN Tonight to promote the upcoming episode of CNN’s The Seventies on Watergate, former CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather decried the Republican Party’s “strong turn to the right” and blamed the size of party’s 2016 field on the Watergate scandal and the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, as seen in this March 10 Associated Press report, has claimed for several months that "No Classified Material (was) Sent via Her Personal Emails" from a home-based server she said "would remain private." That claim, like so many other representations Mrs. Clinton has made, fell apart earlier this week, when, as Fox News reported, it was…

In a Wednesday column, Tomasky alleged that the “real job” of the House select committee looking into the September 2012 Benghazi attack is “to get [Hillary] Clinton” and declared that “this ‘investigation’ now constitutes openly and defiantly urinating on the grave of Amb. [Chris] Stevens.” Tomasky commented that Trey “Gowdy’s investigators have come up empty on the consular attack itself, but…

"People who think he's a joke and a fool need to be careful because by the end of the campaign, the joke may be on them." That's how Joe Scarborough summed up the surprisingly respectful analysis of Donald Trump's candidacy on today's Morning Joe.  Introducing the segment, Scarborough suggested that if Trump sticks to a Perot-like populist message, he could get 15% of the primary vote. When Joe…

ABC’s World News Tonight aired on Wednesday night anchor David Muir’s interview with 2016 Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush and, while the aired portions touched on issues such as Iraq and political dynasties, other topics were passed over included the economy, distrust in government, and ObamaCare. Instead, Muir attempted to drag Bush to the left on immigration when asking about a path…

It seems as if the establishment press has ruined virtually everything connected with journalism. The whole idea of "fact-checking" is certainly no exception. The thoroughly misnamed Politifact pioneered this particular form of disinformation. The Associated Press, apparently determined to give that web site a run for its money, devoted a writeup to "fact-checking" (i.e., virtually ridiculing) a…

On Wednesday's CBS Evening News, Jan Crawford hyped the latest "dust-up between the musician and the politician," and underlined that "rare is the Republican candidate who isn't told to stop the music – even if...they paid licensing fees." She asked a GOP strategist, "Why is it it's always Republicans who are getting slammed by the musicians for using their songs?"

The media’s tendency to use the Pope to criticize Republican candidates and officials was on display Wednesday afternoon as MSNBC’s Live with Thomas Roberts and Bloomberg’s With All Due Respect took shots at the 2016 GOP presidential field and, specifically, Catholics Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum (in the case of the latter show) for opposing Pope Francis’s upcoming encyclical on global warming.