Liberal Loathing for “Troll-Like,” Sub-Human Ted Cruz
“There’s a troll-like quality to Cruz. He operates below the level of human life....There’s something about that guy — who’s always reminded me of Joe McCarthy — and there’s something about him that is negative and menacing.”
— MSNBC’s Chris Matthews on Morning Joe, February 10.
“[GOP presidential candidate Ted] Cruz is a brute, the Crusader Warrior, armed with spike and shield and holy zeal, summoning true believers to war against the infidels. Deus vult! they cried out in those days. ‘God wills it!’...There’s malice in Ted Cruz’s swagger....Once in the Senate his goon-inspired behavior soon antagonized just about everyone, including his fellow Republicans. No one was beyond the reach of his brass knuckles, sharp elbows, and forked tongue.”
— Longtime PBS host Bill Moyers and producer Gail Ablow in an article posted February 5 at BillMoyers.com.
Washington Post Goes Hunting for Anti-Cruz Canadians
“Here in the city where Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas was born, many Canadians give less than a hockey puck about whether their native son is eligible to be the U.S. president. Many of them are just glad he’s not running for anything in Canada....’You can’t blame him for where he’s born, but you can blame him for being pro-gun and pro-death penalty,’ she [Mary Eggermont-Molenaar, current resident of Cruz’s original home] said. ‘Even my right-wing friends don’t like him.’”
— Washington Post correspondent Mary Jordan in a February 6 front-page story, “Calgary’s stand on Cruz: ‘The States can keep him;’ In land where a conservative Canadian is a liberal American, his ideas chafe.”
Don’t Forget: Rubio’s an Extremist, Too
“He’s [Marco Rubio] positioned himself, you know, quite far to the right. I mean, he’s, you know, against abortion in cases of incest and rape. He’s sort of, he’s anti-gay marriage. He has a very truculent neo-con foreign policy, so, and he’s backed away from any kind of immigration reform. So it’s really, he’s not that far away in views from either Cruz or Trump or Sarah Palin or the rest of them.”
— New York magazine’s Frank Rich on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, February 2.
NBC Anchor Grills Rubio, But “Winced” at Criticism of Hillary’s Honesty
“So, to be called ‘MarcoRobot,’ to see a headline that said you choked. That doesn’t bother you?...Was it your finest performance?”
“The governors who are your opponents talk about the experience of actually being in charge of something as opposed to, you know, being on the legislative side as a senator. What do you respond? What’s your response?...How deep is your foreign policy experience?”
— Some of anchor Lester Holt’s questions to GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio in an interview shown on the February 8 NBC Nightly News.
vs.
“I want to ask you about a moment at the town hall the other day. A young man, a Bernie Sanders supporter, stood up and said young people don’t trust you....And when he said that I winced. And I was wondering, you’ve obviously been in tough battles, political battles, but do you get your feelings hurt sometimes?”
“What frustrates you the most about perceptions about you?”
— Holt interviewing Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, January 29.
Socialist Bernie Sanders, the “Most Christian Candidate” in 2016
“Who Would Jesus Vote For? Bernie; Sanders, a secular Jew, is the most Christian candidate in this race”
— Headline and subheadline accompanying a February 17 USA Today opinion column by Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University.
Warning Bernie: Don’t “Thwart History” By Beating Hillary
“Do you worry at all that you will be the instrument of thwarting history, as Senator Clinton keeps claiming that she might be the first woman president?”
— Moderator Gwen Ifill to Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders during the February 11 PBS Democratic debate.
It’s “Crazy” for Women Not to Root for Hillary
Anchor Chris Jansing: “I guess we’re not surprised about the Bernie Sanders young people phenomenon, although it still is a problem for Hillary.”
MSNBC’s Tamron Hall: “That’s not the surprise....The big headline for me in the randomly selected group of people, the young women there did not care that Hillary Clinton could be the first woman president.”
Jansing: “That’s crazy to me. It really is.”
— Exchange during MSNBC’s live coverage, February 5.
The Media’s Scornful Farewell to Justice Scalia
Host Ari Melber: “Think about the contrast here: this man who is celebrated more widely than Washington ideology might suggest, embraced for his vigor, for his personality; and yet a man who, in his decisions, and in many of his dissents, was seen by many as cold to the plight of many people that you would want him to extend that same gregariousness to in his decisions.”
MSNBC correspondent Irin Carmon: “Right....He’s somebody whose jurisprudence certainly left out in the cold, as you say, many historically-oppressed people.”
— Exchange during MSNBC live coverage, February 14.
“Sometimes it seemed he worked overtime to earn your hate. He gloried in it. He wrote cruel, demeaning things about whole groups of Americans — and even if you didn’t belong to one of those groups, Scalia was the fifth vote on what many of us consider towering historic injustices, from Bush v. Gore to Citizens United.... As reprehensible as so many of his views were, we will be wrestling with him for decades to come.”
— Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick in an article posted February 14.
“Died in a ranch in Texas. God bless America.”
“Wish I could be a fly on the wall for Scalia’s chat with the Devil.”
— Pair of tweets from The New Yorker’s managing editor Silvia Killingsworth, posted within minutes of the announcement of Scalia’s death on February 13.
Scream Racism If Obama Doesn’t Get to Name Liberal Replacement
“In a nation built on slavery, white men propose denying the first black president his Constitutional right to name Supreme Court nominee.”
— New York Times editorial writer and essayist Brent Staples in a February 14 tweet, since deleted.
“After years of watching political opponents question the President’s birthplace and his faith, and hearing a member of Congress shout ‘You lie!’ at him from the House floor, some African-Americans saw the move by Senate Republicans as another attempt to deny the legitimacy of the country’s first black President....
“‘I guess many of them are using this in the strictest construction that Barack Obama’s serving three-fifths of a term or he’s three-fifths of a human being, so he doesn’t get to make this choice,” Mr. [Bakari] Sellers [a former state representative in South Carolina] said. ‘It’s infuriating.’”
— Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin in a February 18 front-page New York Times story.
“The conservative base has never accepted that a black Democrat could be a legitimately elected President, and after 7 years of having to live with a President the majority of white voters voted against, Republicans are going to use this [Scalia’s replacement] as a chance to throw a nationwide temper tantrum.”
— Salon.com’s Amanda Marcotte in a February 15 post.
“Anything he does, they go up against. They oppose the man, no matter what he does....It’s almost like they’re not being patriotic, it seems to me....And I have to say it — I know it’s not popular to say it — but his color has something to do with it.”
— Co-host Joy Behar on ABC’s The View, February 16.
Scoffing at Scalia’s Judicial Approach
“The problem with originalism is that it, the document, the Constitution did not anticipate abortion, it did not anticipate the arrival of the iPhone, it did not anticipate the arrival of jet travel and many, many other topics, including police rights and pulling over a motorized vehicle, that we could not have anticipated.”
— Breaking news anchor Brian Williams via phone on MSNBC on February 13 an hour after Scalia’s death was announced.
The Most Fawning Obama Interview. Ever.
CBS’s Gayle King: “When I think about the Obamas, even your dates make national news. They become news stories. Do you know there’s a movie out called First Date. It’s coming out. I saw it. And the thing that struck me, you’re driving a raggedy car with a hole in it.”
President Obama: “This is true.”
King: “And I’m thinking, ‘And you’ve got a second date after driving that car?’”
Obama: “Because I’m so smooth.”
— From CBS’s pre-Super Bowl interview with the Obamas, February 7.
Of Course, There’s No Such Thing as Liberal Media Bias
“People talk about the liberal media and they say the whole media is liberal and the whole establishment is liberal. It’s not true.”
— MSNBC host Rachel Maddow during live coverage of the New Hampshire primary, February 9.
Opposition to Obama Shows Depths of America’s Racism
“[Barack Obama’s election] awakened a right-wing energy in this country, because nobody really expected that we would ever have elected a black man to be President. And when that reality was established, I think it shocked a lot of racist forces in this country. I think a lot of the hurdles, problems that Obama has faced is really very much based upon the fact that there is a force in this country that says no black man should ever be at the helm of this country.”
— Singer/left-wing activist Harry Belafonte on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, February 14.
Hollywood Celebrities: Valentine’s for Bernie...
“I wrote a little Valentine’s Day poem for you. Would you like to hear it? ‘Roses are red, violets are blue. It’s time to elect a socialist Jew.’”
— HBO’s Bill Maher on Real Time, February 12.
...But Nothing But Venom for Ted Cruz
“Oh, Ted Cruz is always the worst....I said it because he is. Because he’s smart and evil. The other ones are true dummies, like Rubio, you know? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He just says the words. But Ted Cruz is diabolical. I mean, he always — he’s smart. What I really hate about him — and this is what a true cynic is — he’s smart but he knows what to say to his dummy base that they will believe.”
— HBO host Bill Maher on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, February 9.
“He’s [Ted Cruz] very scary. I actually think Trump, in the end, would be more electable than Cruz because Cruz is a fundamentalist Christian and it would almost be like electing the analog of an Imam — someone whose first guiding principle would be the scripture rather than the Constitution.”
— Author Stephen King in a February 15 interview with The Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern.
PUBLISHER: L. Brent Bozell III
EDITORS: Brent H. Baker, Rich Noyes, Tim Graham
DEPUTY RESEARCH DIRECTOR: Geoffrey Dickens
RESEARCH ANALYST: Mike Ciandella
NEWS ANALYSTS: Scott Whitlock, Kyle Drennen, Matthew Balan and Curtis Houck
INTERN: Nicholas Fondacaro