From the establishment media, the raw and sickening hate just
keeps on coming. Vicious, vile, despicable, and deranged, the media
minions demonstrate their appalling lack not just of class but of
basic humanity.
Such is the obvious conclusion from participating again as one
of the judges in the Media Research Center’s “Best Notable
Quotables of 2012,” the indispensable organization’s
25th annual awards for the year’s worst reporting and
commentary.
Consider this gem, actually begrudging somebody the success of
near-miraculous, life-saving surgery:
Newsweek/Daily Beast
assignment editor Allison Yarrow: “Can you imagine being
that organ donor? I mean, it’s such a difficult decision to say “I
want to give my body to someone else after I’m dead.’”
Newsweek senior writer Ramin
Setoodeh: “To Dick Cheney? I would never give my heart to
Dick Cheney. It would freeze over.”
Yarrow: “I would never do it. I’d say ‘give my
heart back.’ Exactly….”
Host/columnist John Avlon: “Seriously, the ill
will toward Dick Cheney getting a heart transplant is
stunning.”
Yarrow: “He may be one of the most evil people
in the world.”
Then there was David Chalian, former political director for ABC
News and then Washington Bureau Chief for Yahoo! News, caught on an
open microphone talking over a picture of Ann and Mitt Romney:
“They are happy to have a party with black people drowning.”
On MSNBC Live, anchor Thomas Roberts had this to say on Dec. 14,
2011 (too late for last year’s MRC contest):
Plus, what Mitt Romney has in common with the KKK. Details on a
rare Romney campaign blunder ahead…. So you might not hear Mitt
Romney say ‘keep America American’ anymore. That’s because it was a
central theme of the KKK in the 1920s. It was a rallying cry for
the group’s campaign of violence and intimidation against blacks,
gays and Jews. The progressive blog Americablog was the first to
catch onto that.
Former CNN correspondent Bob Franken weighed in on MSNBC a few
weeks later:
These seem to be appeals to the extreme white wing of the
Republican Party. That is to say that there continues to be among
many conservatives a real resentment against blacks…. I think this
is very intentional, it is pandering, there’s sort of a wink-wink
that this base should be reminded that Barack Obama, President of
the United States, is one of them, an African-American. Yes, I
think this is very intentional. I think this is part of a hateful
campaign that is being very methodically run in the hope it’s going
to appeal to voters who would love to see us return to the good old
days of Jim Crow.
Well, Franken sure has us pegged, at least partially. I bet
every conservative in America does have a real resentment against
at least one black — by the name of Barack Obama. But that’s okay:
We resent his white half as much as his black half.
Of course we all know about MSNBC’s Touré complaining about
Romney’s “niggerization” of Obama by using the word “anger” twice.
Never mind that Touré’s use of that word makes us angry,
twice over. I wonder if our own anger means we are secretly
black?
Moving right along, the ever-obnoxious Paul Krugman wrote this
on October 15:
Mitt Romney doesn’t see dead people. But that’s only because he
doesn’t want to see them: if he did, he’d have to acknowledge the
ugly reality of what will happen if he and Paul Ryan get their way
on health care…. A literal description of their plan is that they
want to expose many Americans to financial insecurity, and let some
of them die, so that a handful of already wealthy people can have a
higher after-tax income.
Krugman is literally a menace to decent society. Then
again, so is his New York Times colleague Charles
Blow(hard), speaking on MSBNC (gee, notice a pattern at that
network?):
This is the kind of man that Mitt Romney is. This man does not
have a soul. If you opened up, you know, his chest, there’s
probably a gold ticking watch in there and not even a heart. This
is not a person. This is just a robot who will do whatever it
takes, whatever he’s told to do, to make it to the White House. And
he will take whatever push in the back from whatever nasty person
is pushing him and move him further in that direction.
No heart, huh? Maybe he donated it to Cheney!
At least Cheney and Romney aren’t as bad as Rick Santorum,
though — at least not in the eyes of MSNBC’s Martin Bashir, who,
quoting George Orwell’s 1984, compared the Pennsylvanian
to “the forces of darkness and treasonable maggots who collaborate
with them” — or maybe to the guy in 1984 who denounced
those maggots (it’s not exactly clear). Bashir then cited a
critic’s gibe that Santorum “has one of the finest minds of the
13th century,” before adding his own conclusion: “If you
listen carefully to Rick Santorum, he sounds more like Stalin that
Pope Innocent III.”
Compared to that, it was almost a compliment when the New York
Times’ Bill Keller told, yes, MSNBC, that “Sometimes Santorum
sounds like he’s creeping up on a Christian version of Sharia law.”
Yeah, conservatives especially liked the part of Santorum’s
platform approving of wife-beating in response to denial of sex —
but only because the invisible ink in the platform noted that
former New York Times editors-in-chief could be substituted for
wives at any time during the beating process.
Paul Ryan of course wasn’t exempt from vitriol. The oft-loved
Maureen Dowd wrote that “Ryan should stop being so lovable. People
who intend to hurt other people should wipe that smile off their
faces.” Not to be outdone, Esquire’s Charles Pierce — a
prior winner of the MRC’s single worst quote of the year when in
2003 he wrote that if Mary Jo Kopechne had lived, “Edward Kennedy
would have brought comfort to her in her old age” — described Ryan
as a “zombie-eyed granny-starver… an authentically dangerous
zealot… a smiling, aw-shucks murderer of opportunity, a creator of
dystopias in which he never will have to live.”
Back to Ryan’s running mate, MSNBC’s Jonathan Alter, living in
an alternative universe, said that if Mitt Romney is
“elected President, a lot of people will die.” Joy Behar said that
“people like [Todd] Akin and Ryan and Romney… are trying to kill us
and destroy us.”
The only thing not clear is whether the killing comes before or
after the destroying. It depends on which edition of The
Conservative Handbook you consult.
Then again, not everything is darkness and death for these media
morons. Sometimes they find it in their heart to hand out
compliments — and, being of a generally sunny disposition, I like
ending on a nice note, so here’s the inimitable Chris Matthews
showing sympathy for Harvard Law graduate Mitt Romney:
This guy’s done everything right. He’s raise his family right.
He’s fought his way all the way to the top of the Harvard Law
Review, in a blind test becomes head of the Review,
the top editor there. Everything he’s done is clean as a whistle.
He’s never not only [sic] broken any law, he’s never done anything
wrong. He’s the perfect father, the perfect husband, the perfect
American. And all they do is trash the guy.
Wait…. What’s that you are saying? Did I get that wrong? Oh, my
gosh, Matthews wasn’t talking about Romney after all. He was
talking about some foreign exchange student named Barry. My
mistake. Either way, it gives me a thrill going up my leg just to
know that such perfection exists in this world full of Stalinists,
maggots… and former vice presidents too ornery to die before
Newsweek itself croaks its last, fetid breath.
