Carney: It’s the CIA’s Fault… and Everybody Does It

“What? There’s gambling in this establishment?” Jay Carney should go into situation comedy. Today at the White House press briefing he did the best shtick since Kramer invented the Butter Shave.

The briefing is ongoing and the media are providing our laugh track. Wow, first someone hooks up the defibrillator and gives Bob Schieffer a jumpstart, and then Jonathan Karl decides to show up for work for a change. Suddenly everybody’s Fox News.

Jay Carney repeatedly (“and I’m only happy to repeat it”), well, repeated that the Obama administration did not exactly, positively, 100 percent say that a U.S. video mocking Islam inflamed a mob to attack our Benghazi consulate. Which wasn’t a consulate at all, really. It was something but not a consulate. Which is an important distinction… Besides, this is all a distraction.

Look you guys. Barack Obama said the word “terrorist.” He did! No really. Barack H. Obama believes in terrorists more than… than… than anybody.

The good news? Carney’s performance wasn’t even rehearsed. At all. Period.

That video thing was of course was an avenue we were exploring but… no, I’m pretty sure we didn’t say that. The Coptic Christian video maker who the administration rounded up and threw in jail might be surprised. But there you go.

So Jay was on the television news today and everything. And that fat Korean kid didn’t steal his act from Chubby Checker.

Bob Schieffer Does Have a Pulse, After All…

Benghazi has broken, you guys! Schieffer says it’s a story, and when Schieffer speaks you can hear the knees knocking in Luckenbach. Bob Schieffer? S-C-H… Geezer, CBS Sunday mornings…? Face the Nat… Yeah, that Bob Schieffer.

Schieffer via Big Journalism:

“Today, there is new information raising questions about whether there was a cover-up by the State Department to deflect criticism that it had ignored requests for more security for its people in Libya.” [Read]

By “new information” Bob means nobody had it besides Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Matt Drudge, Breitbart, and a few others. For. Eight. Months.

Anyway, Bob’s decided someone maybe should look into this whole Benghazi mess and the State Department and Hillary Clint— Waitaminute! Nobody said anything about Hillar—uh, Secretary Clinton. Has anyone suggested Secretary Clinton is guilty of any wrongdoing? Huh? Huh? Huh? Fox News? So, see, no story there.

But CBS will investigate further… Stay tuned… Fifteen months… Not a day more… We’ll get to the bottom of this… we promise…

Mediaite:

Schieffer questioned why administration officials would run with a storyline (the attack grew out of a protest) when officials in Libya had completely different information about the situation immediately. Issa underlined that as being a central question, but noted that they haven’t been able to decipher a motivation behind the administration’s actions. [Read]

That’s Darrell Issa, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, who wouldn’t, yet, have any idea whatsoever why the Obama administration would want to cover up a major al Qaeda terrorist attack in the middle of an election, after the president told everybody al Qaeda was toast.

Of course Issa is doing his best to keep politics out of his investigation of a purely political strategy on the part of Barack Obama to cover up his ineptitude and pro-Islamic sympathies during the election. Because Republicans play fair or something.

Andrea Tantaros predicted on The Five last week that Benghazi would not be an issue with the media if Clinton runs, but if the Republicans can’t make headlines out of this the RNC deserves to have stake driven through its heart.

Gosnell: The Truth Media Cannot Escape

The Gosnell trial is coming to a close in Philadelphia and the wider media have only begun to cover it, and only barely.

It would be laughable that anyone googling the trial would come up with a CBS file at the top of the stack, were it not that the horror has rendered anything remotely related to this monstrous nightmare far beyond laughable.

Some have suggested the media have evaded the trial because of pro-choice bias or the “gory nature” of the trial, or even because Gosnell is a black man. One or all of these may be at least part of the reason, but the truth is probably more shocking.

Media commentary has been around as long as the printing press. But only in the last 50 years have journalist begun to lace their personal opinions into the news. We are now used to it.

So it will surprise no one that these self-same journalists who have abetted the “If we can just save one life” meme when it comes to depriving citizens’ rights to bear arms, have cheered from the sidelines as a million babies a year have been slaughtered, for 40 years.

There are almost certainly other Kermit Gosnells operating similar death mills across the country, and, if so, how would a complicit media cover and avalanche of mounting abortion scandals?

What happens when the public finds that the “back alley abortionist” (a term almost certainly coined by a journalist) has come to Main Street? Who knows, if the public learns that these Josef Mengele-style monsters are more a rule than an exception, “life” could actually make a comeback.

Full Caf Americano

The Kermit Gosnells are easy. When the sanctity of one life is diminished in the psyche, all life is diminished. Once Ted Bundy persuaded himself that one life was meaningless he killed; the more he killed, the easier the killing became. Before long Ted found killing routine. As do thousands of doctors each year.

This is not a spiritual argument, nor should it be deeply intellectual. If something is growing inside a human womb, short of alien abduction it is probably human. So we wrap ourselves in a monumentally bad law created out of whole cloth by six rogue justices on the Supreme Court? Because Diane Sawyer supports it?

This is not a religious blog but the religious argument is even stronger: if man is a living soul, then this nation has been doing something very wicked for a very long time.

In the coming days the jury in Philadelphia will in some small way express the heart of the whole of American society on the disposition of our most precious right: life. And its decision on Kermit Gosnell will be telling.

Just how deep does this national sociopathy of “choice” run?

White House Correspondent’s Dinner: How Bad Was He?

He was so bad, the thrill on Chris Matthews’s leg ran the other direction. He was so bad, Michelle’s hair tried to book a return flight to Singapore.

Why do Republicans go to these things, anyway? You’d think Newt Gingrich would’ve gotten the hint, when they seated him next to the inbred cracker from Duck Dynasty. Even Tom Brokaw admits that the thing has degenerated into a “narcissistic freak show.”

There hasn’t been a funny headliner in two decades. Invariably, these self-important hacks hire someone to trash the president, if he’s Republican, and all but slip the president the tongue if he’s Democrat.

I was going to beat up on Conan O’Brien, but I think we have to cut the guy some slack for staying away from the ostensible reason comedians are invited to headline. O’Brien couldn’t have copped a laugh from a roomful of drunken Rotarians last night, but who can blame him?

POTUS 44 is not a man who can take a shot to the nose. So where else could O’Brien go to land a shot on someone who can take it, other than the conservative media?

The President’s own remarks last night demonstrated what conservatives already know; he is small. The man cannot take a joke, and therefore cannot make one.

In fairness, on some level it runs in the liberal gene pool. Don Imus is the last speaker who risked taking a real swipe at a sitting Democratic president. That was Imus’s now infamous “Astro Turf” comment, directed at Bill Clinton at the 1996 Radio and Television Correspondents’ dinner; and the sanctimonious media backlash was scathing.

Republican presidents in recent memory — Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — all made self-depreciating presentations about their missteps in office, only occasionally directing lighthearted remarks at their critics.

Not Barack. Barack has to destroy his detractors. Sure, he can drop a few lines about throwing bricks on the court, but one has the impression that Barack Obama is incapable of genuine self-deprecation, that he truly doesn’t get it. What’s to laugh at? I’m me… and that is a beautiful thing, man.

Marathon Bombing: Time For MSM ‘Where’s Right Wing Waldo?’ Again

Every time Americans suffer another atrocious act of terroristic violence the national media go into their Where’s-Right-Wing-Waldo meme.

Chris Matthews has made it his career new normal to be wrong about this.

They did it with Jared Lee Loughner in Phoenix, James Holmes in Aurora, and Christopher Dorner (a Hillary Clinton/Tavis Smiley fan) in So. California.

They haven’t hit the lotto so far; even at Ruby Ridge, right-wing wacko Randy Weaver turned out to be the victim of left-wing wacko Janet Reno.

If they’re ever right, Soledad O’Brien will have an on-air orgasm… Wait! Where is Soledad O’Brien? Anyone…? Soledaaaaad?

So we should have expected no less from the MSM with this week’s Boston Marathon Bombing.

Big Journalism:

An article published on CNN’s website makes an unproven claim that pressure cooker bombs like the ones used at the Boston Marathon terror attack are a “signature” of “right-wing extremists.” 

The article says (emphasis added):

A senior U.S. counterterrorism investigator told CNN that pressure cooker bombs have also been a signature of extreme right-wing individuals in the United States who he said tend to revel in building homemade bombs.

This specific claim that “pressure cooker bombs have also been a signature of extreme right-wing individuals in the United States” appears to be completely unsubstantiated. Not a single example is given even in the CNN story itself of anyone other than al-Quadea using a pressure cooker bomb. [More]

Humph!!! Show me a Tea Party extremist who doesn’t know that pressure cooker bombs are so last year!

Okay, anyone could have made and planted the bombs that wreaked havoc in Boston this week. We are not above believing that evil exists in our society among people of all political stripes.

Sure, people who have claimed to be conservative have committed atrocious acts; Timothy McVeigh comes to mind. But McVeigh was an agnostic anarchist, not a conservative. No act of mass violence in this country has ever been perpetrated by a social conservative… because it would not be, well, conservative.

Turns out, as I write, the FBI has announced a suspect in the Boston attacks.

Don’t tell me. Rush Limbaugh fan in a suicide vest, right?

HT Drudge Report

Gutfeld Eviscerates Harris-Perry, MSNBC For ‘Collectivism’ Spot

Since the mid-1950s, Hollywood and the left wing media have turned ‘communist’ into a sort of N-word for pseudo-intellectuals. No one uses it anymore.

But we think it’s due for a comeback.

MSNBC’s latest ‘Lean Forward’ spot smacks of the plain old fashioned twentieth century communist crap we grew up hating. Where is Herbert A. Philbrick when you need him?

The promotion, fronted by the cable news channel’s Melissa Harris-Perry, had Sarah Palin hot enough to thaw a glacier, and it has revved up other conservatives like we’ve not seen for some time.

Okay, the so-called mainstream media are pimping for a complete government takeover of the family, ala 1990s Hillary Rodham Clinton. Disturbing. But it is also hilarious to see a Greg Gutfeld dismember the arguments of those who Vladimir Lenin called ‘useful idiots,’ like Harris-Perry and Bob Beckel.

Excerpted from Mediaite:

Meanwhile, Greg Gutfeld saw a curious “inconsistency” in what Harris-Perry said, asking if “children belong to the community, does that include the unborn?” He answered his own question, “Of course not.” Later Gutfeld called MSNBC’s decision to run the promo the “dumbest thing” they’ve done “since hiring Keith Olbermann.”

Liberal co-host Bob Beckel tried to defend Harris-Perry to some degree, but that wasn’t so easy with the four other hosts going so hard the other way. While he said he understood what she was trying to say about children being part of a larger community, he thought that “collective is a bad choice of words” because of that word’s association with socialism.

Aside from Beckel’s small attempts to explain a more benign interpretation of what Harris-Perry said in the promo, the other hosts mostly echoed what Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and other critics of the video have been voicing since it first emerged over the weekend, only at a slightly louder volume.

Watching Beckel scramble to tack a new frame on this ancient piece of elitist garbage was side-splitting. It doesn’t ‘take a village to raise a child,’ but it does take a village idiot to explain it.

NBC should just take off the mask; no one with a brain believes the network has an objective producer or journalist in the corporation. If they keep this up — and there is no reason to believe they will not — the once venerated ‘Peacock Network’ will be sucking up National Endowment for the Humanities’ dollars like a runaway Hoover.

Okay, It’s Bob and Carl, Ted and Alan — Get Used To It!

UPDATE: NBC: Switching to Gay Guy, From Guy Who Just Looks Gay?

That title may be a little archaic for our younger readers. Okay, my wife doesn’t even remember Bob and Carol, Ted and Alice, but if Dennis Miller can lay in Wally Cleaver lines, we should be able to get by with a play on a 1960′s movie title.

As SCOTUS heard arguments on several same sex marriage cases, it was ‘coming out‘ week in media and political circles across the country. Even Hillary Clinton has evolved! Which, of course, is Obama-speak for ‘flip-flopped.’

Oh right. Like Hillary and Donna Shalala haven’t been partying since they burned their training bras. Gag me with a shovel-ready job!

Funny how evolution goes on for, like, millions of years, and then, presto! you get something really astounding. Like an ardvark… or Rosie O’Donnell.

Then Tuesday night Meghan McCain tweeted that big news was ‘being announced tomorrow,’ which we took as the possibility that John McCain is probably coming out… er… for gay marriage, that is.

Unless Meghan’s coming out. I mean, OUT, out. Which wouldn’t be a real shocker. You know, like, because, like, everybody’s doing it and, like, Mommy and Daddy, like, don’t care, and it’s like really hot and stuff.

That was my Meghan McCain. I’m a riot at parties.

And, as if we weren’t already deluged enough with information we neither care about nor want, over at NBC, Saturday Today host Jenna Wolfe went with a twofer: she’s a lesbian and she’s expecting.

Welp, there goes the fan club in Wichita. That must have been one hell of a conception night, though. Jenna, her life partner, and their OBGYN with a pot roast baster.

Tell me, who the @#!% cares whether Jenna Whatshername is straight or gay or into bestiality or whatever else her freak is, anyway?

Not that we just don’t love her death and everything.

Warren G. Harding Slept Here: Obama breaks another long-standing WH tradition, but this one’s only 92-years old

BREAKING: Poll: ‘Next Pope Will Be Catholic’

Today’s blog:

George W. Bush did it. And Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Ford, Nixon, JFK, Eisenhower, well, every president back to Warren G. Harding. Twice presidents have made short delays but otherwise every president has been punctual in submitting a federal budget to Congress.

Which is, of course, a president’s lawful duty.

But newly ordained ‘perfect American’ and second-term leg-tingler Barack Obama didn’t get the memo. Now, for the fourth time since he became golfer-in-chief in 2009, the President has once again sloughed off the job.

Big Government:

Barack Obama certainly enjoys the trappings and perks of the Office of President. The actual job of being President, however, doesn’t seem to interest him. His desire to avoid being tied to any specifics of any proposal have caused him to do what no modern President has done. He is the first President since 1921 to abdicate the task of drafting a federal budget to Congress. 

Congress established the modern budget process in 1921. Under the terms of the law, the President is required to submit a budget for the federal government no later than the first Monday in February. Obama has only met this statutory deadline once during his Presidency, a record worse than any modern President. Obama has missed the deadline 4 times. Prior to him, all the Presidents back to 1921 together missed the deadline twice. [More]

This is almost enough to make a lefty Obama flack do his job. When White House press secretary Jay Carney went all grumpy on WH correspondents yesterday, even Dana Milbank took exception.

WaPo via Drudge [Excerpts]

[W] hen Obama would release a budget (it was supposed to have been done last month), Carney leaned forward to argue.

“I challenge virtually every premise of your question,” he told Plante. “I don’t know what your question is here,” he said when Plante tried to ask it in a different way.

“Bill, how long have you been covering Washington?” Carney asked the 75-year-old newsman when he persisted in inquiring about the tardiness of the budget. “Has there ever been a presidential budget that was enacted, word for word, into law?”

NBC’s Chuck Todd broke in, telling Carney that a president never waits until after the House and the Senate introduce budgets to introduce his own.

“Well, I disagree with that,” Carney snapped. [More]

Because just because it’s true doesn’t mean we have to admit it’s true… because… because… it’s just history and everything.

Uh-O, so much for the Obama Charm Offensive.

Before his ageist snipe against Plante Carney lobbed one that was both ageist and sexist at NPR’s Mara Liasson.

To Liasson: “Mara, the way you phrase that question, you know, makes me think that you’re still working on a typewriter or something.”

To Ann Compton: Ann, you ignorant slut.

Okay, just kidding on that last one.

There’s a lesson to be learned here, however. If you’re going to throw hardball questions about the president’s laze faire work habits and epic malfeasance, be ready for an effete press secretary to get in a snit.

White House Threats: First Woodward, Now Lanny Davis!

This thing with Bob Woodward has gone viral! The legendary WaPo associate editor and journalist who came to fame during the Watergate scandal has now hit the headlines by being the first reporter in the liberal mainstream media to dare openly criticize Barack Obama. And now he has company!

Via Drudge Report:

WASHINGTON — Bob Woodward isn’t the only person who’s received threats for airing the Obama administration’s dirty laundry.  It seems anyone is a potential target of the White House these days – even former senior members of the Clinton administration. 

A day after Woodward’s claim that a senior White House official had told him he would “regret” writing a column criticizing President Obama’s stance on the sequester, Lanny Davis, a longtime close advisor to President Bill Clinton, told WMAL’s Mornings on the Mall Thursday he had received similar threats for newspaper columns he had written about Obama in the Washington Times.

Davis told WMAL that his editor, John Solomon, “received a phone call from a senior Obama White House official who didn’t like some of my columns, even though I’m a supporter of Obama. I couldn’t imagine why this call was made.”  Davis says the Obama aide told Solomon, “that if he continued to run my columns, he would lose, or his reporters would lose their White House credentials.” [More]

How about because they’re thugs, Lanny? See, you don’t just get to be Barry’s friend. You get to march lockstep with him… or else.

This should be a HUGE wake up for the Beltway and New York media who created this monster.

Wait! That’s not the story at all! This whole thing is “No big deal,” says Tucker Carlson.

But Jim Treacher at Carlson’s Daily Caller website says this:

Now they’re frantically trying to convince us this isn’t a story. Now they’re going after Woodward, calling him a diva and a tired old man and whatever else they can think of, even after he tried to distance Obama himself from it. And Davis admits that he didn’t say anything about it until now. But their instinct to protect Obama won’t do them any good. They are now the enemy. [More]

Oops! Looks like someone didn’t get the memo.

By the way, Tucker, the Woodward threat was made by Obama economic advisor Gene Sperling, over the phone — the “apology” was made via email.

Let me see? Who do I believe, Tucker Carlson, or Bob Woodward? Hmmm. That’s Tucker, with a U-C-K-E-R, right?

Media Matters: Bob Woodward is Just Getting Old

UPDATE: BOB WOODWARD: A ‘Very Senior’ White House Person Warned Me I’d ‘Regret’ What I’m Doing

Bob Woodward said this evening on CNN that a “very senior person” at the White House warned him in an email that he would “regret doing this,” the same day he has continued to slam President Barack Obama over the looming forced cuts known as the sequester. [More]

Okay, Bob Woodward is probably not a conservative. We were just having some fun last week.

Inside the Washington fishbowl we would probably describe him as a Beltway moderate. During the Watergate scandal, we seriously doubted some of his sources, but that’s in the books. C’est la vie. However, as Washington journalists go, Woodward, over the course of his career, has been a professional with some scruples for accuracy.

Which makes Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert’s intimation that Woodward has become old, senile and out of touch all the more below-the-belt. All because the veteran journalist is outing Barack Obama’s lie-narrative on sequestration? Yeah right.

Big Journalism:

The quickest way to lose favor with Media Matters for America, the Soros-backed 501(c)(3) left-wing media enforcement group, is to do anything that might politically damage Barack Obama. Not long ago, Media Matters’ Senior Fellow Eric Boehlert was pleading with Bob Woodward to save journalism.

See the tweet here.

Today, though, because Woodward’s reporting has uncovered facts inconvenient to Obama’s sequester narrative, Boehlert’s publicly mocking Woodward as “funny” and “sad” because he “doesn’t seem to understand” sequester. Boehlert then takes a direct shot at Woodward’s age with this parting shot: “time to retire.”

For the record, Woodward is only 69. [More]

Here is what Bob said this morning that has Boehlert’s panties in a bunch, from Business Insider via Drudge:

The Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward ripped into President Barack Obama on “Morning Joe” today, saying he’s exhibiting a “kind of madness I haven’t seen in a long time” for a decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf because of budget concerns.

“Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I can’t do this because of some budget document?’” Woodward said.

“Or George W. Bush saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to invade Iraq because I can’t get the aircraft carriers I need?’” Or even Bill Clinton saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to attack Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters,’ … because of some budget document?”

The Defense Department said in early February that it would not deploy the U.S.S. Harry Truman to the Persian Gulf, citing budget concerns relating to the looming cuts known as the sequester.

“Under the Constitution, the President is commander-in-chief and employs the force. And so we now have the President going out because of this piece of paper and this agreement. ‘I can’t do what I need to do to protect the country,’” Woodward said.

“That’s a kind of madness that I haven’t seen in a long time,” he said. [More]

With that statement Bob has crossed the Media Matters ethical line: not blaming the leadership vacuum in the Obama administration on the Republicans in the House.

Question: What is the difference between mainstream journalism and Media Matters?

Answer: Kneepads.