The Leftist mainstream press has been on its heels for months now for its biased and erroneous reporting. The more it’s criticized for biased reporting, the more biased it becomes while declaring itself unbiased. Next time Leftist journalists take (or fake) umbrage over President Donald Trump’s criticism of the mainstream press, pretending they think his criticism of bias is an attack on the foundation of our republic, or when a “progressive” talking head goes all middle-school snotty on a guest for his or her criticism of press bias, remember their responses–if you can–to these comments from Barack Obama and his water-carriers who routinely accused Fox News of being a de facto fake news network and shill for the Republican Party:

Obama:

“We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated…. [Y]ou had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition—it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world. But as an economic enterprise, it’s been wildly successful. And I suspect that if you ask Mr. Murdoch what his number-one concern is, it’s that Fox is very successful.”

“If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you’ll see more of them doing it.”

“I’ve got one television station entirely devoted to attacking my administration.”

Implying that negative views of him result from the misrepresentation of him on FOX News, Obama said, “They’re responding to a fictional character named Barack Obama who they see on Fox News or who they hear about through Rush Limbaugh.”

“I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls.[T]he way I’m portrayed 24/7 is as a freak!” 

Obama refers to fictional character Uncle Jim to imply that FOX News is inaccurate: “Uncle Jim, who’s been watching Fox News, thinks somehow I raised taxes.” 

“Look if I watched Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me either. You’ve got this screen, this fun-house mirror through which people are receiving information.” 

Again accusing FOX News of disseminating false stories: “…Fed by Fox News, they hear Obama is a Muslim 24/7, and it begins to seep in.”

“There’s a reason fewer Republicans are running around against Obamacare—because while good, affordable health care might still be a fanged threat to the freedom of the American people on Fox News, it turns out it’s working pretty well in the real world.”

“And if all you’re doing is watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh and reading some of the blogs that are churning out a lot of misinformation on a regular basis, then it’s very hard for you to think that you’re going to vote for somebody who you’ve been told is taking the country in the wrong direction.” 

Obama’s team:

Obama communications director Anita Dunn: “We’re going to treat them the way we would an opponent. As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Anita Dunn also said that FOX News operates “almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.”

White House senior advisor David Axelrod on This Week with George Stephanopoulos in 2009: “It’s really not news—it’s pushing a point of view. And the bigger thing is that other news organizations like yours ought not to treat them that way, and we’re not going to treat them that way.”

In an interview with ABC News in 2009, White House spokesman Josh Earnest described FOX News as “an ideological outlet,” saying, “We figured Fox would rather show So You Think You Can Dance than broadcast an honest discussion about health insurance reform.”

In CNN’s State of the Union, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel shared Obama’s view of  FOX News: “I suppose the way to look at it and the way…the president looks at it…It’s not a news organization so much as it has a perspective.”

Recently, Sebastion Gorka, military analyst and deputy assistant to Trump, was interviewed by CNN’s smug, disdainful Jake Tapper who was reduced to a mine-is-better-than-yours playground taunt in this exchange:

Gorka: The last 16 years, to be honest—disastrous. The policies that were born in the beltway by people who have never worn a uniform, the people who were in the White House like Ben Rhodes… helped to create the firestorm that is the Middle East, that is ISIS today. So, we are open to new ideas because the last 16 years have failed American national interests and the American taxpayer.

Tapper: There were plenty of people who wore a uniform who advised President Obama and advised President Bush.

Gorka: Not people as influential as Ben Rhodes who had a master’s degree in fictional writing. That is disastrous.

Tapper: Well, I’m sure [Rhodes] would put his graduate degree against yours any day of the week.

Yes, a news anchor actually said that.

In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Gorka called CNN on the carpet for the absence of substantive “reportage.” When Gorka asserted that CNN’s coverage of the White House was corrupted by the desire to increase ratings, a contemptuous Cooper responded, “Okay, I’m just going to ignore the insults because I don’t think it really gets us anywhere.” Apparently, an obtuse Cooper didn’t notice that in his retort he actually did respond to the “insults.”

After the interview, Cooper ridiculed Gorka, referring to him as the “Hungarian Don Rickles.” This from the anchor who in May said to a Trump defender, “If [Trump] took a dump on his desk, you would defend him.”

Cooper better never criticize Trump for lack of decorum.

MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle embarrassed herself as well. In answer to her question about where Trump would be during the August congressional recess, Gorka said, “[I]n the last 25 weeks, you’ve seen [Trump’s] leadership, from the Southern border, to NATO, to Warsaw, to the economy, to the stock market. We’re crushing it, and he can do that from anywhere.” For no apparent reason other than childishness, Ruhle responded, “Alright, well, the White House doesn’t ‘crush’ a stock market, but I do appreciate your time.”

Maybe I’ve forgotten, but I can’t recall hearing Special Report’s Bret Baier ever responding to a  guest like the adolescent Tapper, Cooper, or Ruhle did.

Some will argue that many of Trump’s tweets are inappropriate, distracting, or worse. Some will argue that Gorka’s comments were unnecessarily provocative (that said, it doesn’t take much to provoke self-righteous, brittle, thin-skinned “progressives”). Neither of those issues is my concern here. My concern here is with the hypocrisy, arrogance, and bias that now corrupt the Fourth Estate. Many on both sides of the political aisle believe a free and fair press remains a critical cultural institution. Many, however, also believe the absence of objectivity, neutrality, or impartiality in most mainstream press outlets (as in many other cultural institutions, especially academia) pose a danger to the republic, and that should concern all Americans.

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-and, please-

“All of life is partisan.” ~ Saul Alinsky

In the 24 hours since Josh Earnest announced that President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle would not attend the funeral of renowned U.S. Supreme Court Justice, much virtual ink has been spilled about the appropriateness of this choice. Even a number of liberals have expressed puzzlement and disappointment. In light of the ceremonial duties that Obama has performed, including pardoning turkeys, throwing baseballs, and visiting dictators, it is passing strange that he won’t attend Justice Antonin Scalia’s funeral.

Obama sought and won—twice—the highest office in the greatest nation in history and then spurns the funeral of arguably one of the greatest legal minds ever to grace the U.S. Supreme Court—a claim that even Justice Scalia’s ideological foes acknowledge. Justice Scalia’s public service did not begin with his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. He also served another ten years in various governmental positions. Not even forty years of highly esteemed public service merits Obama’s presence at his funeral. As many times as President Cool has exposed the depth of his contempt for his ideological opponents, for convention, and for true principles, he manages to dig a little deeper, confounding even his allies.

A Leftist writer tried futilely to defend Obama’s indefensible, childish, and partisan decision by saying Obama’s presence would be a distraction. Isn’t a world leader’s presence at funerals always a distraction? Wasn’t it a distraction when Obama appeared at Former U.S. House Speaker Tom Foley’s funeral, or U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye’s, or U.S. Senator Robert Byrd’s, or U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy’s, or Walter Kronkite’s?

In light of Obama’s divers dubious actions, including this most recent egregious symbolic insult, surely Obama can’t expect Americans to believe these statements of his:

• We, the People, recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which only asks what’s in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.
• What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility—a recognition on the part of every American that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world; duties that we do not grudgingly accept, but rather seize gladly.
• Let us remember we are all part of one American family. We are united in common values.
• Those of us who have the privilege to serve this country have an obligation to do our job as best we can. We come from different parties, but we are Americans first.
• What the American people hope—what they deserve—is for all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to work through our differences; to overcome the numbing weight of our politics.
• We want everybody to act like adults, quit playing games, realize that it’s not just my way or the highway.

Perhaps his light-hearted quip most truly reveals his political philosophy:

That’s the good thing about being president. I can do whatever I want.

I am reminded of a recent Chicago Tribune front-page headline that read: “Politics imperils court’s prestige.” Perhaps it should be rewritten: “Politics imperils presidential prestige.”

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Written by Stoyan Zaimov

The Rev. Franklin Graham has warned that the “blood of children” will be on President Barack Obama‘s hands if he does indeed decide to veto the defund Planned Parenthood bill that was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday.

“President Obama has said he will veto the bill — if he does, it will be at his own peril and the blood of those children who are butchered at Planned Parenthood will be on his hands,” Graham warned in a Facebook post on Sunday.

The evangelical preacher said that the passing of HR 3134, which would strip Planned Parenthood of $500 million in taxpayer dollars for a period of at least one year, is a “great step.”

“I’m thankful that those supporting this bill stood firm. It still has to pass the Senate, so we need to continue to pray,” Graham added.

Public anger toward Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion business, has been growing over the summer after the release of several undercover videos by the pro-life group the Center for Medical Progress. The videos purport to show that Planned Parenthood employees have been involved in illegal and unethical practices surrounding the sale of aborted baby parts.

Protests were held at hundreds of Planned Parenthood clinics in August, with pro-life supporters demanding the organization be stripped of public funding.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest affirmed last week, however, that Obama would seek to veto any effort to defund the group, which is among his largest supporters.

“We’ve been quite forthright about the president’s opposition to any effort to wholesale defund Planned Parenthood,” Earnest told reporters Wednesday.

Earnest further argued that it would be “cynical” to use the videos as a reason to defund Planned Parenthood.

“What has injected this issue into the political dialogue of late, the graphic videos that emerged on the Internet the last couple of months, Planned Parenthood has apologized for the content of those videos and they should. They were shocking,” the White House spokesman added.

Graham, an outspoken critic of abortion, has been highly critical of the abortion-providing organization.

Back in August he slammed Democratic U.S. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada for suggesting that Republicans attempting to bring the bill to defund Planned Parenthood up for a vote have lost “their moral compass.”

“You’ve got it backwards Senator Reid. You lost your moral compass years ago! You openly support abortion — the murder of babies in their mothers’ wombs — and now by backing Planned Parenthood you obviously support the dismemberment and sale of baby body parts,” the evangelical said.

This article was originally posted at the ChristianPost.com.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said “Every public official in our democracy is subject to the rule of law. No one is above the law. That applies to the president of the United States and that applies to the county clerk of Rowan County, Ky., as well.”

Really? That applies to the president? Well, did it apply to President Barack Obama when he instructed Attorney General Eric Holder to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which was the law of the land—a bipartisan law passed by huge majorities in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives and signed into law by Bill Clinton?

Did those who now oppose Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis‘ actions also oppose Attorney General Eric Holder’s refusal to defend the Defense of Marriage Act?

What about the refusal of Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez and state-attorney’s general in Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to defend DOMA?

What about the refusal of California Governor Jerry Brown’s and California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ refusals to defend Prop 8.

The Obergefelle decision, in which 5 unelected justices imposed same-sex faux-marriage on all of America, was as little grounded in the text and history of the Constitution as Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade. Does defying a lawless act constitute lawlessness?

Those who oppose Kim Davis’ actions ought to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in order to better understand when civil disobedience is justified:

One may well ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.

Despite what some conservatives argue, neither religious liberty nor civil disobedience is  reserved for just those employed in the private sector.

When Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice would no longer defend the duly enacted DOMA law, he said, “decisions at any level not to defend individual laws must be exceedingly rare. They must be reserved only for exceptional – truly exceptional – circumstances.’”

My friends, such a time is this.

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It was an honest mistake. We’ve all been there. You call the IT department and get nothing but the run-around, right? All you want to do is get back into your Outlook, but no dice. This is the situation in which poor Lois Lerner found herself in 2011. Her computer crashed and she lost gobs of emails. Gone forever—apparently Lois didn’t have Carbonite. And wouldn’t you know it, none of the 67,000 unhelpful emails which the IRS has turned over to congressional investigators were lost! Only the ones which involve Lerner’s efforts to use the Internal Revenue Service to intimidate conservative groups were lost.

The additional wrinkle, which is just being discovered now by the Heritage Foundation and others, is that Lerner is only 1 of 6 IRS colleagues to suffer the exact same technological break-down. The IRS has known about this difficulty since February, but was somehow too busy to mention it until now.

Among those who suffered a technological failure was Nikole Flax; she served as former chief-of-staff to IRS Commissioner Steven Miller. Commissioner Miller was one of the IRS employees fired during the uncovering of the intimidation scandal. A cleverly-filed FOIA request has shown that Flax gave Lerner the approval to get together with DOJ officials, in order to explore criminal charges against conservative groups. The Congressional committee investigating the IRS scandal discovered last week that Lerner sent over 1 million pages of data to the FBI, including confidential taxpayer information. Not only was Lerner discriminating against conservative groups on their applications for tax-exemption, she planned to solicit the help of the Feds to pursue criminal charges against them.

Of course this is just an honest IT mistake, right? I mean, it could have happened to anyone. It’s got to be Murphy’s Law at work since the computers of 6 individuals (all affiliated with the current investigation) were affected. Coupled with the fact that the emails which were irretrievably lost just happened to be those which Congress was hoping to read, it seems pretty cut and dry to me. According to the new Minister of Disinformation, Josh Earnest, the idea that these emails were lost on purpose is “far fetched”. (Incidentally, when did WH Spokesmen begin adopting stage names?? Josh’s is particularly ironic.)

After 6 years of the Obama-ganda machine, a pattern has emerged. It always begins with some sort of scandal which gets uncovered; not by an actual media investigation, but by independent efforts on the part of a citizen journalist or a non-profit organization armed with a crafty FOIA request. The Administration then tries to ignore it for a couple of news cycles. If the story doesn’t go away, they craft an implausible story to explain what happened. The more implausible, the better. At this point, the lapdog media immediately begins peddling this explanation as completely credible; usually taking the opportunity to fill in any perceived gaps in the story which the Administration missed in its initial roll-out. If questions still persist, the questioner is either labeled a lunatic or a racist.

This is orchestrated in textbook Alinski fashion: a crazy explanation becomes the honest answer, an honest inquiry becomes a crazy explanation. George Orwell would have been drooling over such an ironic juxtaposition. The switcheroo works because it trades on the power of Ridicule, one of Alinski’s favorite tools. He discovered that people don’t like to be ridiculed. This is even more true today, when everyone is raised to abhor conflict and even the losing team gets a trophy. The weaker we become, as a society, the more power Alinskian tactics will hold.

Since most people today have a phobia of being ridiculed, they will accept an alternative to ridicule more readily than mockery, even if that alternative is a bald-faced lie. A surprising number of people would rather treat something outlandish as if it were plausible than to be branded a lunatic, even though they stand on a logical foundation. The only way to counteract this technique is to ignore the ridicule. A liar can’t redefine reality if his target refuses to give the redefinition any legitimacy. We have seen them use this game plan during the birth certificate controversy, the Tea Party-Congressional Black Caucus spat on the steps of the Capitol, Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the Trayvon Martin case, the Bergdahl Trade, and again with the IRS Scandal.

The fact that we don’t have citizens rioting in the streets is because they have been kept in check by the power of social ridicule…well, that and the militarized thugs in DHS who keep buying ammo by the truckload.

This article was first published at the ClashDaily.com website.