“And I don’t even have to do a Google search to know for a fact that when President Bush was in office, there was nobody on staff at the Times, and certainly nobody writing off the opinion pages, who was allowed to so casually insult the office of the presidency on a regular basis.”
— Eric Boehlert of Media Matters for America (link safe for work and sanity; it goes to Patterico) attempting to smear, to use one of Media Matters’ favorite words, Andrew Malcolm of the L.A. Times’ Top of the Ticket column.
Of course, the L.A. Times of the past always treated President Bush in a genteel, kid gloves fashion.
Well, except for these examples quickly found by Matt Welch of Reason, whose post also provides our headline above:
- “Bubble Boy”
- “willfully blind”
- “distracted and incompetent”
- “homegrown authoritarian”
- “Torturer-in-Chief”
- “a bad dream, a shameful, inexplicable interlude in American history”
- Enabler of “the so-called Big Lie theory of political propaganda, articulated most infamously by Adolf Hitler.”
- “if you dilute civilian control of the military, you end up with fascism or a Latin American-style military junta….we’re already well on the way to having that kind of regime.”
- “being a citizen in George W. Bush’s America is like being a passenger in a car driven by a drunk driver.”
- “I don’t hate George Bush. But I sure hate what he’s done to my country.”
Incidentally, that [former L.A. Times] columnist above, Rosa Brooks, has since gone on to take a job in Obama’s Pentagon.
But then, Boehlert’s smear is par for the course; as James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal noted shortly after Media Matters debuted in 2004:
See the problem here? Brock’s new shop is devoted to faulting conservative opinion journalists for expressing conservative opinions. What the Media Research Center does is entirely different; it analyzes liberal bias in the news media, which are supposed to be objective.
If liberals are willing to spend $2 million funding a Web site that does nothing more than expose conservative commentators for engaging in conservative commentary, can we really afford to trust them with our tax dollars?
In 2009, Glenn Reynolds added:
Remember, Media Matters’ sole reason for existence is to give journalists who are already hopelessly biased a certain degree of comfort in their already-held views. So it’s not about convincing anyone who pays actual attention. . . .
Heh, indeed.™
(H/T American Power and Theo Spark.)
Update: Heh, indeed.™
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