Just NBC the Hack Work

Layers and layers of fact checkers and editors.

As we mentioned when Martin Bashir had his scatological meltdown on MSNBC, it wasn’t an improvised speech; he was reading off the teleprompter, which meant that there had to be some sort of chain of command to get his words programmed into the ‘prompter. Multiple people likely saw Bashir’s monologue and signed off on it, if only with just an approving nod. It’s why nobody thought to question Melissa Harris-Perry overseeing a program whose panel ridiculed Mitt Romney’s adopted African-American grandson.

Similarly, no one at NBC News this morning had the brains, the simple common sense really, to rethink this analogy from Mark Murray, NBC’s senior political editor:

“America has never come easy”: Last night’s speech also ended on an emotional — and upbeat — note when Obama recognized Army Ranger Cory Remsburg, who was almost killed in Afghanistan and continues to recuperate from a brain injury. “My fellow Americans, men and women like Cory remind us that America has never come easy,” the president said. “Our freedom, our democracy, has never been easy. Sometimes we stumble, we make mistakes; we get frustrated or discouraged. But for more than 200 years, we have put those things aside and placed our collective shoulder to the wheel of progress.” That story could also apply to Obama himself: Nothing in his seven years on the national political stage (2007-2014) has come easy. The 2008 race for the Democratic nomination. Even that general election. The health-care law. The re-election campaign. And now the president’s current situation in which he finds himself bloodied and bruised after the botched health-care rollout. Perseverance is an important quality for any president. Bill Clinton was usually able to talk his way out of sticky situations. But Obama’s M.O. is to grind it out. That, more than anything else, was the message he wanted to send last night — both he and the country are grinding it out.

As Mollie Hemingway writes today at the Federalist, “It’s amazing that any human would look on the sacrifices of Cory Remsburg and think of any president of recent memory, much less Barack Obama. It’s also just astounding that someone would have absolutely no compunction about expressing said thought.”

Click over to see the appropriately disgusted response from the right that Hemingway rounds up, and concurrently, the perplexed responses from the president’s defenders over Murray’s analogy. Hemingway links to a tweet from Jon Favreau, Obama’s former chief speechwriter, he of the “Peace in our time” facepalm-worthy gaffe in his boss’s second inauguration speech, who gives his thumbs up to the analogy, as did tyro MSNBC pundit Ronan Farrow.

The cluelessness of the left on this topic isn’t all that surprising — “Progressivism,” “Liberalism” and leftism in general have thought of themselves as being the “moral equivalent of war” for well over a century now, punching back twice as hard against those who wish to preserve small government and the vision of the Founding Fathers, residents of suburbia, the middle class in general, and, really, anyone who stands in their way of their self-anointed vision. As Robert Knight wrote in the Washington Times on Friday, “For Democrats, scorched-earth politics is war by other means — GOP, conservatives don’t grasp foes’ take-no-prisoners approach.”

Which helps to explain why military analogies such as Murray’s that champion their goals come easy to them. It’s why FDR’s cronies could describe the Depression itself as  “war — lethal and more menacing than any other crisis in our history” — an analogy which must have come as a surprise at the time to America’s World War I and surviving Civil War veterans. FDR would look at the Blue Eagle logo of his National Recovery Act program (which would serve as the inspiration for the name and original colors of the Philadelphia Eagles football team) and declare, “In war, in the gloom of night attack, soldiers wear a bright badge on their shoulders to be sure their comrades do not fire on comrades. On that principle those who cooperate in this program must know each other at a glance.”

Seventy-five years after the Roosevelt administration’s analogies, it’s why Time magazine could Photoshop the American flag out of the Marines atop Mount Suribachi on Iowa Jima and replace it with a tree to promote radical environmentalism — which Al Gore has been championing using war analogies of his own since the late 1980s.

This how the left thinks, and for NBC, their news division is largely a closed ideological shop. As with all of the outbursts at MSNBC, the paranoid id of NBC News, who’s there to tell them it’s not a good idea?

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Flashback: Speaking of leftwing military analogies, one year ago, “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party,” thundered John Dickerson, CBS News’ political director, in a headline at Slate, then still part of the Washington Post’s conglomerate of Websites. During the all-too-brief government slimdown in September, the New Republic illustrated Dickerson’s fascistic allusion thusly:

Update: “Murray is now doubling down on throne-sniffing,” Ace of Spades writes, describing the worldview of Murray and the rest of the New Class as:

No one has ever struggled like us, scrabbling and clawing our way all the way from going-nowhere pit of the upper middle class to the exalted lowest rungs of the upper class.

We like ourselves a whole heck of a lot.

Progressives — making Narcissus look like a piker since 1913.