Time magazine seems determined to write off 70 percent of the American people:

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At Jewish World Review, liberal elder statesman and veteran New York fixture Nat Hentoff responds, “Am I also a bigot? Pols clueless on Ground Zero mosque.”

If the state is confused, why shouldn’t the state-run media be as well?

Meanwhile, AP looks to divide and conquer the right, in a last-ditch effort to both prop-up old-fashioned Democratic candidates, and add a soupcon of old-fashioned journalistic drama, just as Moe Lane predicted they would yesterday.

Check out this title, “As GOP civil war rages, Democrats look to benefit:”

A Republican civil war is raging, with righter-than-thou conservatives dominating ever more primaries in a fight for the party’s soul. And the Democrats hope to benefit.The latest examples of conservative insurgents’ clout came Tuesday at opposite ends of the country. In Florida, political newcomer Rick Scott beat longtime congressman and state Attorney General Bill McCollum for the GOP gubernatorial nomination. And in Alaska, tea party activists and Sarah Palin pushed Sen. Lisa Murkowski to the brink of defeat, depending on absentee ballot counts in her race against outsider Joe Miller.

The GOP is likely to survive its bitter intraparty battles in such states as Alaska and Utah, even if voters oust veteran senators in both. But tea party-backed candidates might be a godsend to desperate Democrats elsewhere — in Nevada, Florida and perhaps Kentucky, where the Democrats portray GOP nominees as too extreme for their states.

Funny how what the Democrats portray and what AP claims to portray is exactly the same! Curious that.

Yes, conservatives are so extreme, so out of the mainstream of American politics, so toxic, that, as Ace’s co-blogger Drew M notes, Democrats have taken to calling themselves…conservatives!

Jake Tapper has a post along these same lines…Democrats turning against their leadership. He illustrates the point nicely with a bunch of Democratic ads.

There’s definitely a theme running through them….

Old and Busted: Yes We Can! We’re Democrats.

New Hotness: Independent!

This is my favorite (so far) from the new genre.

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“Independent conservative”? Dude you’re a DEMOCRAT, own it.

Now you may think, he’s from Alabama, what else do you expect him to say? Well, take a look at the one from the guy in Ohio. It’s all about illegal immigration. Ohio!

In less than two years we’ve gone from the idea that Republicans may never be a force in national elections again to Democrats turning on their leadership in order to save their own seats.

Back in 2004, Ann Coulter wrote:

When they’re running for office, all Democrats claim to support tax cuts (for the middle class), to support gun rights (for hunters) and to “personally oppose” abortion. And then they get into office and vote to raise taxes, ban guns and allow abortions if a girl can’t fit into her prom dress.

The common wisdom holds that “both parties” have to appeal to the extremes during the primary and then move to the center for the general election. To the contrary, both parties run for office as conservatives. Once they have fooled the voters and are safely in office, Republicans sometimes double-cross the voters. Democrats always do.

In a way, it’s curiously refreshing that a year after Newsweek declared on its cover that “We Are All Socialists Now” and a New York Times book review editor titled his own book “The Death of Conservatives” …we’re back to all politicians being conservatives now.

Perhaps a few of which will remain that way (fiscally at least) after November.

Finally, while AP is busy spinning dissent, ABC is apparently more than willing to manufacture some for their cameras. Fortunately, old media was being covered by new media. At Newsbusters, Bob Parks writes:

In 1989 during my first gig as an investigative reporter with the Guam Tribune, my editor sat me down and I’ve never forgotten his warning, “It’s the job of the news media to report the news, not incite it.”

Tell that to ABC News.

In a letter to David Westin, President of ABC NEWS from Andrea Lafferty, Executive Director of the Traditional Values Coalition…

Dear Mr. Westin:

I am alarmed by an experience I had with employees of ABC News during a demonstration against the proposed Ground Zero Mosque in New York on Sunday, August 22, 2010.
As the rally concluded, thousands of the participants marched the one block from the rally site to the actual site of Ground Zero.

It was there that I noticed a man in a black shirt with a phone camera, aggressively questioning a gentleman with a sign which read “No Sharia Here.” This man was haranguing the gentleman with the sign. A reasonable person would have recognized it as provocation, which exceeded the bounds of any legitimate interview technique.

“It’s the job of the news media to report the news, not incite it.”

After RatherGate, the Reuters Picture Kill scandal, the JournoList scandal, and numerous others, that idea of a journalism that seeks to first do no harm really does sound like a motto trapped in 1989.

(More photos of the ABC incident in Andrea Lafferty’s post at Big Journalism.)