"Moderate" Mitt Romney Now a "Hard Right, Full Moon Conservative"
“Moderate” Mitt Now a “Hard Right, Full Moon Conservative”
Host Chris Matthews: “How does this guy [Mitt Romney] go from hard right, severely conservative, to this new regular mainstream character he’s portraying himself as?...He ran as a full mooner, Michael. You know, he was saying ‘There’s no such thing as science.’... How can he go from Flat Earth, ‘I don’t believe in evolution,’ to all of a sudden I’m teaching biology?... It certainly was in the Grand Wizard crowd over there, okay?”
Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele: “Wait, I resent that! No. Come on, what is this ‘Grand Wizard’ nonsense? Are you saying that we’re Ku Klux Klan?”
Matthews: “Okay, I’m just saying, the far right party.”
Steele: “Give me a break! Don’t go there with me on that.”
— MSNBC’s Hardball, April 23. [Audio/video (0:54): Windows Media | MP3 audio]
vs.
“He’s a Massachusetts moderate, by record, because when he was governor of Massachusetts, he was a moderate. He was pro-choice. He got the health care bill through that Obama used for the model, etc., etc.”
— Matthews talking about Romney on Hardball, January 13.
Mitt Romney: Too Conservative to Be Trusted?
“Do you think that he has gone too far into the conservative positions, and do you think that that makes him difficult to be trusted?”
— Anchor Chris Jansing talking about Romney with ex-President Jimmy Carter on MSNBC’s Jansing & Co., April 25.
Diane Hammers Mitt With Obama’s Talking Points
“As for the Governor, the Obama campaign is working overtime to paint the portrait of a man whose riches have put him out of touch. [to Romney] The speaking fees, the Cadillacs, the story out now that there’s an elevator for your cars in the new house you’re planning in La Jolla. Are you too rich to relate?...President Obama threw down a kind of gauntlet to you over the weekend. And he said, release 12 years of your tax returns....If you have nothing to hide, why not release 12 years as your father did?”
— ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, April 16.
If It Makes Democrats Look Bad, It’s Not Real News
“Feeding the frenzy, the latest major distraction in campaign 2012 fuels outrage and ultimately an apology. But does this moment really amount to more than one person’s out-of-bounds comment?... Welcome to the world of the shiny metal object. A person no one agrees with has ignited a manufactured controversy.”
— MSNBC Daily Rundown anchor Chuck Todd, who is also the Political Director for NBC News, talking about Democrat Hilary Rosen’s swipe at Ann Romney for having “never worked a day in her life,” April 13.
“We saw the Romney campaign desperately trying to find anything to close this gender gap....So they found one thing, and boy did they move to essentially manufacture a controversy because this is not an Obama surrogate. This is a paid CNN commentator, all of those things. But they were pretty effective at using them — we know the echo chamber that’s out there.”
— Todd on Meet the Press, April 15.
Media Develop Sudden Respect for Catholic Views
House Speaker John Boehner: “Now, if the President doesn’t like that budget, where’s his budget? His budget failed on the floor of the House, zero to 414. Not one Democrat or one Republican voted for the President’s budget. Why? Because he wasn’t serious about dealing with America’s problem.”
Co-host Charlie Rose: “The Catholic bishops today said that the Ryan budget fails to meet moral criteria and disproportionately cuts programs that serve the poor and the vulnerable.”
— CBS This Morning, April 18.
After “Warm Glow” for Obama in 2008, Need Real Journalism in 2012
“The general election season is on, and the Times needs to offer an aggressive look at the President’s record, policy promises and campaign operation to answer the question: Who is the real Barack Obama? Many critics view the Times as constitutionally unable to address the election in an unbiased fashion. Like a lot of America, it basked a bit in the warm glow of Mr. Obama’s election in 2008....A strong current of skepticism holds that the paper skews left.”
— New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane, April 22.
ABC Provides New Platform for Keith’s Crazy Conspiracy Theories
“The lowest price in the last six years — the nadir of gas prices at the pump — was the day of this President’s inauguration in 2009. There has to be some connection between that being the least busy political moment of a President’s career — where you’re not going to hurt him, you’re not going to harm him that way — and the price of gas. There has to be an almost deliberate, or at least a side effect quality to that. There must be.”
— Former MSNBC and Current host Keith Olbermann during the roundtable on ABC’s This Week, April 22.
It’s So “Unfair” Some Have More Money than Others
“It’s about those with money having an easier life than those who don’t. And there’s something fundamentally unfair about that. Not everyone has access to being able to get money, to work for money....Until America becomes fair in terms of how able people are — can be to make money, until the playing field is fair, it is unfair.”
— Co-host Ann Curry talking about a new book on financial ethics on NBC’s Today, April 25. [Audio/video (0:38): Windows Media | MP3 audio]
Obama’s Gimmicky Tax Increase on the Rich: Zakaria Votes “Aye”
“I don’t have any objection to the Buffett Rule. I don’t have any objection to paying more taxes myself. But I think that we’ve once more missed a great opportunity for really solving a problem through comprehensive tax reform....Instead what we have is something more on the lines of a gimmick. All that said, if I were in Congress, I would vote for the Buffett Rule.”
— CNN GPS host Fareed Zakaria in an April 17 blog posting to CNN.com.
MSNBC: “People Don’t” Equate Conservatives to Dictators...
“What’s so interesting is how the right has done this. This charge that if you are a liberal,... then you’re just a slippery slope away from Joe Stalin and the detention camps and the gulag and everything else. But if you were to say that to a conservative,... then you’re really on a slippery slope to extreme rightism and you’re over there, you’re basically over there with Mussolini and Hitler. But people don’t do that.”
— Host Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball, April 18.
...Except, of Course, on MSNBC
“If you listen carefully to Rick Santorum, he sounds more like Stalin than Pope Innocent III.”
— MSNBC host Martin Bashir on his 3pm ET show, February 14.
A Lesson from the Refreshingly Sophisticated French
“You know who may have something to teach us about running presidential elections? Would you believe the French?...When one of the candidates lives with a woman who’s not his wife, not an issue here....[Socialist candidate Francois] Hollande is now living with a journalist to whom he is also not married. That’s okay. It might be an issue in the United States, but not here. How civilized. How French.”
— Correspondent Ted Koppel on NBC’s Rock Center, April 18.
If Only More TV Reporters Were as Biased as Bill
“Whatever the public’s overall opinion in any given year, it will have little effect, if any, on the physical reality — until and unless, say the world’s climate scientists, opinion leads to significant and drastic cuts in greenhouse emissions....A number of America’s TV meteorologists and other broadcast weatherpersons have been accused by peer-reviewed climate scientists either of being greatly uninformed about the science of the basics of manmade global warming, or, at the very least, of shying away from any mention of it during broadcasts for fear of losing ratings by driving their audience away with worrisome news.”
— ABC News correspondent Bill Blakemore writing at his ABCNews.com “Nature’s Edge” blog, April 22.
Mocking the “Not Cool” Mitt Romney
Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza: “This is important — he [Barack Obama] is cool. Mitt Romney is not cool....”
Host Chris Matthews: “Let’s not lean against Romney....Just to disprove your theory, here’s Mitt Romney up in Pennsylvania...[after clip of Romney speaking] Can you dig it? I knew that you could. I mean, is that the least cool guy on the planet?”
— MSNBC’s Hardball, April 24.
Can’t Lampoon the Near-Perfect Obama
“‘I will feast on stupid comments,’ [ABC late night host Jimmy] Kimmel said with glee about his upcoming gig [headlining the April 28 White House Correspondents Dinner], noting that out on the campaign trail ‘there seems to be a glut of dumb things being said.’...[But] ‘it’s hard to make fun of Obama in general because he’s a cool character,’ Kimmel said. ‘Outside of his ears, there’s not a whole lot.’”
— Kimmel as quoted in an April 24 Reuters article by Mary Milliken.
Stossel: I Left ABC News “Because It Sucked There”
The Heritage Foundation’s Rob Bluey: “You’ve become a very popular person on the Fox network, both in terms of your show and segments you do with Bill O’Reilly. Why did you leave ABC, though?”
Fox Business host John Stossel: “Because it sucked there. They were hostile to these ideas that have made us prosperous....I was not offered a job by Fox. I went over and begged, ‘Please hire me. I can’t stand it anymore.’”
— From the Heritage Foundation’s “In the Green Room” video, posted April 12.
Donning Bulletproof Vest for Imaginary “War on Women”
“I just want to say one quick thing about the war on women and reproductive freedom, including the attack on Planned Parenthood, that not only should — abortion is our constitutional right. We should keep it legal. And also, birth control should be available to everyone... I’m coming to lead the next march on Washington, and I’m not going to wear a bulletproof vest. My mother’s scared for me. This is an important thing.”
— Actress Cybill Shepherd on CBS This Morning, April 20. [Audio/video (0:43): Windows Media | MP3 audio]
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