(Politico) The issue of race and American politics, never far beneath the surface during Barack Obama’s historic 2008 campaign, is making a loud, overt and surprisingly early appearance in the 2012 presidential race.

And no one knows — least of all Obama himself — what impact the race card, always a wild card, will have on the president’s reelection prospects.

I’ll suggest it backfires, particularly if Team Obama and their sycophants attack Romney’s Mormonism.

In the past several months, Newt Gingrich has drawn sharp criticism for labeling Obama the “food stamp president” and for suggesting poor kids in New York’s majority-minority school system burnish their work ethic by picking up mops. First lady Michelle Obama bridled at the perception that she’s an “angry black woman.” Obama’s Chicago-based campaign has pushed back against stories that he’s more or less given up on the white vote.

Except, Newt wasn’t just talking about Black people: the majority of food stamp recipients are Caucasian. Michelle Obama is the one who brought up the angry black woman thing in order to create racial division. And Team Obama was the one who said they had given up on the white vote.

But nothing has illustrated the potentially explosive political impact of race — an issue that Obama has downplayed throughout his career — like the firestorm around the image of Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer wagging her finger at the first black president of the United States.

If there were any illusion that 2012 would be the post-racial election most Americans hoped for, it vanished with that single shake of a finger and 30 seconds of sniping lost to history in the turbine roar of Air Force One.

Got that? The duly elected Governor of Arizona, Jan Brewer, is an evil racist simply because she wagged her finger in the face of a disrespectful half-black President. By that definition, we could call Obama a sexist, since he was disrespectful to Brewer and walked away.

But, what else does Obama have to run on? He certainly can’t run on his record. He doesn’t like to talk about his signature legislation, the Stimulus and Obamacare. He can play with the economic numbers all he wants, but people are hurting, and things are not getting better. The housing industry is still a major mess. Real world prices are rising. Disposable income is very low. Consumer confidence is low. There are historic numbers of people who have given up on the job market. The recession supposedly ended in June, 2009, yet, here in 2012, nothing seems to have changed.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

Polk Award-Winning Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings made a startling set of admissions on CSPAN, recently. Not only did he admit that most “journalists” are liberals, but he implied that they really aren’t interested in just reporting the facts of stories. Instead he said they are filled with a liberal “moralistic righteousness” and their goal is to “afflict” those they disagree with.

In the discussion, Hastings laid out how he sees his work as a journalist. “I think any journalist worth his salt often has a real moralistic kind of righteousness to them somewhere in their soul… and we talk in grand terms about ourselves, you know, afflicting the powerful and comforting the afflicted,” he told the CSPAN host.

Not much “objectivity” going on there, is there?

In the video segment featured by Townhall, Hastings is initially asked about his “prestigious” Polk Award and this discussion led CSPAN’s Brian Lamb to ask Hastings about the ideological mindset of Polk Award winners. This brought Hastings to his admission.

Of course, if one has to explain how “prestigious” an award is, one should suspect it ain’t that prestigious! Prestige is something that others should assign to you, not something you should assign to yourself.

Now, you might recall Mr. Hastings as the man whose 2010 Rolling Stone article eventually led to the firing of General Stanley McChrystal. Hastings caught some off-record carping by McChrystal’s staffers the revelation of which made the General look bad to his political leaders. Even then, many might have questioned Hastings’ actions by actually publishing those unguarded and casual, off-record conversations. It smacked of agenda or gotcha journalism.

But as we see in this interview, as far as Hastings is concerned, that is what journalists are supposed to do. They are supposed to approach their work with a “moralistic” agenda guiding them. They aren’t supposed to just publish the facts and let readers decide. They are supposed to “afflict the powerful” and that with all the left-wing political ideology such a crusade implies.

For those of you not able to see the video, here is the meat of the discussion:

Brian Lamb: “Is it fair to say that the Polk Award winners are usually liberal journalists?”

Michael Hastings: “Um, probably. I mean most journalists I know are liberal.”

BL: “Activist journalists. I mean activist people, would you consider yourself an activist?

MH: “I think any.. no, no… I think any journalist worth his salt often has a real moralistic kind of righteousness to them somewhere in their soul. And I think that’s a, you know, we’re gonna protect the — and we talk in grand terms about ourselves, you know, afflicting the powerful and comforting the afflicted.”

One can just feel Hastings’ discomfiture with his admission as he struggles with his reply. With his first thought that he doesn’t consider himself an “activist,” he seems to have a vague feeling he shouldn’t be admitting all this, but he does it anyway.

Naturally we aren’t surprised by the whole affair.

Finally, I know what many of you are going to say. Many of you are going to be rolling your eyes asking me if I think this is new. Of course I don’t think that the sentiments that Hastings related is in any way “new.” But what is unusual is to see a “journalist” admitting out in the open like this to his and his fellow’s blatant bias. That and it is my job to report on these things, so please stop with the “are you surprised” rejoinders, will ya?

If you want a case of clear bias, the Washington D.C. affiliate of CBS will surely fill the bill for its bias against pro-life supporters. On January 23 the DC affiliate featured on its website a photo slide show of pictures taken at the March for Life rally held annually at the nation’s capitol. Curiously, though, there wasn’t a single photo of any pro-lifers. Instead the photo essay featured only photos of abortion-supporting protestors that stood on the sidelines taunting the pro-life marchers.

The photo slide show initially featured seven photos of abortion supporters such as one of marchers holding signs saying “Family Planning Saves Lives Worldwide,” one featuring women holding signs saying that abortion should be kept legal, and another showing a woman sporting an abortion on demand sticker.

Upwards to 50,000 pro-life supporters turned out in the DC cold to participate in the March for Life, yet apparently CBS could only find the small handful of pro-abortion supporters to photograph.

Pro-life advocates like Jill Stanek were incredulous and it wasn’t long before the comments section on the CBS website exploded with pro-lifers crying foul. Dozens of unhappy commenters remarked on how badly the bias of CBS galled them.

Finally a day or so later, CBS altered its slide show and added some photos of some of the actual participants of the pro-life march. The slide show now features 7 photos of pro-lifers and an equal amount of pro-abortion supporters.

Interestingly, though, there was no notice and no explanation by the CBS affiliate that it altered/added to the slide show and no explanation why the slide show had no pro-life photos for the first few days it was live on the web.

Pro-lifers can take heart that they were heard by the TV station causing it to take action to correct the sleight. But the fact that CBS put up a slide show of photos taken at a pro-life rally but didn’t feature a single photo of any pro-lifers pretty much shows the bias from which the TV station came when it initially posted the webpage.

But even with the alteration, we still see CBS’ bias. After all there were 50,0000 pro-life supporters and a paltry few hundred pro-infanticide supporters yet CBS gives them equal treatment as if they were the same.

Yep, the bias still reigns.

The gauzy puffery that the Old Media slathers upon the Occupy Wall Street movement has helped keep most Americans in the dark about how nasty, how violent, how outrageous, and even how incredibly lacking in integrity this movement is. On the conservative blogs the truth is well known, of course, but the fact that few Americans seem to know how bad the OWSers are shows that as conservatives we are not effectively getting our message out there.

For the initial two years of its existence the Old Media spent its every waking moment destroying, maligning, and out right lying about the Tea Party movement. Even today you’ll see an occasional swipe at the Tea Patiers made by some hater from the left and the Old Media is happy to “report” the slander, naturally.

You might remember when Obama operative Anna Park tried to start a counter movement that she prosaically called “the Coffee Party” during the heyday of the Tea Party. You may also recall that those Old Media mavens, while daily lying and lambasting the Tea Partiers, fell all over themselves to play up the silly and quickly failed and forgotten “Coffee Party” effort.

Similarly, when the Occupiers hit the scene, the Old Media went into paroxysms of ecstasy over the whole thing. Even today, after conservatives have so effortlessly ripped away the veneer from the absurdity and essential anti-Americanness of the OWSers, the Old Media is still slathering OWS with unearned and illicit praise.

Most Americans are unaware that real communists and socialists and other anti-American groups form the core of OWS. Few Americans understand that these people are drug addicts and criminals that have indulged every imaginable crime at these events. From property destruction to child abandonment to rape to gun crimes, just about every crime imaginable from small to large have been committed at these events. People have even died at these things!

There is even a website dedicated to chronicling the arrests made at OWS events. As of the writing of this article they had noted 5,975 arrests at OWS events across the nation. And this is a left-wing hosted website, too. You see they are proud of these arrests.

Compared to the several years of Tea Party events, the OWS events have been a criminal’s paradise. Not only have the Tea Partiers never had any arrests, or fights, or criminality, at their events they’ve even left every park they used cleaner than they were when they started their events!

Just because the OWS movement is dying down right now — maybe only due to the winter cold — that doesn’t mean the outrages of the OWSers is slowing. Just recently a church that made the foolish mistake of helping these criminals found its facilities vandalized. A $12,000 baptismal fount was stolen along with laptops and other items. These creeps even urinated on Church property. There have been other churches that have been vandalized when they tried to assist the OWSers, too.

With all the criminality that has occurred at these supposedly peaceful events, the public should have long ago turned against OWS. Yet polls still show that Americans have not turned against OWS. Why? Because the Old Media has told them how great it all is and has made a concerted effort to hide the truth from people.

By contrast, the Tea Party’s image has been thoroughly battered with Americans. Is it any surprise with the near daily barrage of hate the Old Media bludgeons the Tea Party with?

If no other example is believable to show how the Old Media establishment is sold out to the far left, the difference in the way it has treated the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement is solid proof of that bias.

Sadly, even after we’ve exposed all the criminality at the OWS events in conservative media outlets from newspapers to TV to blogs, the fact that Americans still have not turned foursquare against the Occupiers shows that we have made little headway in reaching the country with the truth.

The Chicago Sun Times has received your message loud and clear, dear readers. As much as admitting that they are biased and they know it, the long-time Windy City staple has decided that hence forth it will no longer endorse candidates for political office.

In a Sunday editorial, the 71-year-old paper announced its new policy amusingly touting the Old Media’s party line that it engages in “unbiased news coverage” and that newspapers today wish to “appeal to the widest possible readership.”

“They want to inform you, not spin you,” the editorial avers. Yet, the editorial goes on to admit that it has heard from readers who seriously doubt that dedication to unbiased news coverage. And when you note that over the last several decades few national news papers have endorsed a Republican for President — most especially the left-leaning Chicago Sun-Times — it is easy to doubt that purported dedication to just-the-facts reporting.

The Sun-Times is so dedicated to helping Democrats get elected, it even endorsed disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich for reelection. Yes, even after his troubles were well known by even the most uninformed Illinois voter. After reelection Governor Blagojevich ended up being convicted on several counts of fraud and influence peddling when he tried to sell the Senate seat that Obama gave up to become president. Blago will begin serving a 14-year sentence in a federal prison this February.

Yet, even before Blago’s convictions for selling the Senate seat he was involved in numerous scandals and still the Times endorsed him any way saying. “There’s no denying the cloud of scandal over his administration,” the Times then wrote. Going on, the Times said, “We’ve chosen to give him the benefit of the doubt and endorse him for a number of reasons.”

It is a bit hard to escape the feeling that the “number of reasons” the Times endorsed the corrupt Blago was spelled D-E-M-O-C-R-A-T!

One has to doubt the commitment to vetting candidates, anyway. All too often the editorial board’s entire decision rests solely on the candidate questionnaires as opposed to any deeper study of candidate’s records or campaigns. Worse, when it comes to judges the Sun-Times most especially would just rely on the left-wing endorsements of the Chicago Bar Association, a horribly biased source for information on judges.

The Times did make an interesting point in its announcement, but only by accident, it appears.

… many American newspapers were unabashedly partisan, and not necessarily only on the editorial page. Not unlike news shops on cable TV and the Web today, they catered to a core of readers who thought very much like them.

This is a good point to make, though it is doubtful that the Times gets it as thoroughly as one might expect. You see, in the salad days of local newspaper wars, each city had two, four, or even more newspapers and each paper was well known for its support of a party or candidate. Readers could scan these papers and get all sides of the endorsement game in order to make their own decision. But these days few newspapers take anything other than the left-wing line on endorsements and the reading public can no longer get both sides of the issue.

The fact is, endorsements are meaningless if every reader can predict based along partisan lines which candidate the paper will pick far in advance of a paper’s “carefully considered” endorsement!

Certainly we can applaud the Sun-Times’ decision to dispense with these predictable endorsements that surprise no one. Perhaps this is the beginning of a sea change in the newspaper industry, led by the Times? If so it would be a welcome change, indeed.

I suppose we couldn’t get past the one-year anniversary of the crime against Democrat Representative Gabrielle Giffords without some Old Media outlet blaming the supposed “heated” political rhetoric of the day for her shooting. On Sunday we saw NPR doing just that. The fact is, no matter how many times they say it, politics and the “heated rhetoric” thereof had absolutely nothing at all to do with Giffords’ shooting. The linking of the crime to politics is just not legitimate.

On this one-year anniversary, NPR’s Linton Weeks was all about the improvement of our “civil discourse,” and full of lament that it just isn’t happening. Perhaps it is a noble sentiment, but he marred that nobility by beginning his piece with a false allusion once again tying the Giffords shooting to the “political atmosphere” of the day.

“When a gunman opened fire on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords,” Linton wrote, “some people were quick to blame the episode on the overheated political climate.”

With that false allusion we also know what NPR meant to do. It meant to blame conservatives for Giffords’ shooting.

He went on to say:

At the time of the attack, there was a high tide of political rhetoric across America and a low ebb of social civility. The New York Times reported that the shootings “raised questions about potential political motives” and that the Pima County, Ariz., sheriff was blaming the tragedies on “the toxic political environment.”

According to The Times, national reaction was immediate. “Democrats denounced the fierce partisan atmosphere in Gifford’s district and top Republicans quickly condemned the violence.”

To the extent that “some people” did indeed immediately jump to the conclusion that the rhetoric of the Tea Party, conservatives and the Republican Party was at fault for the Giffords shooting, Linton is correct.

The second news of the shooting went nation wide, liberals and the Old Media (but I repeat myself) began blaming the right’s political passion for causing shooter Jared Lee Loughner to lose his mind and perpetrate the murderous rampage that resulted in Giffords’ shooting.

Shockingly, one Democrat group even began to use Giffords’ shooting as a fund raiser, blaming conservatives for their “violent imagery” during the political debate.

This false linking of Giffords’ shooting to conservatives has not stopped, either. Only a few months ago ABCs Diane Sawyer began a report on Giffords with the false analogy of the “Tea Party hate” to the crime as if conservatives somehow caused the shooting.

But it is all an illegitimate linkage. When the facts later became known about shooter Loughner, we found out that he had absolutely no political ideology at all. He was not a Tea Partier, he was not a conservative, and he had no connection to the political right. The truth is he had no coherent political ideology at all and he was not involved in the political debate of the day. In fact, we found out he had been obsessed with Giffords for several years before the Tea Party even started. A mental disorder fueled his obsession with Giffords not politics.

The truth is, despite the constant refrain from the Old Media, the purported “violent rhetoric” of America’s center right had no affect on Loughner’s criminal actions at all.

So, the whole point here is that linking the “political atmosphere” in 2011 to Loughner’s crime is not a legitimate one to make. But there is a reason why this same meme is added to the recounting of Giffords’ shooting every time it is brought up. It redounds harshly on conservatives because it is their political rhetoric that always becomes the thing to blame for the crime. And the Old Media loves to pin the blame, falsely, on the conservative right.

(Politico) The number of officers killed in the line of duty jumped 13 percent in 2011 compared with the year before — and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder condemned the increase as “a devastating and unacceptable trend” that he blamed on illegal firearms.

The number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty rose to 173 this year, from 153 in 2010, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund announced Wednesday. This year’s figure is 23 percent higher than 122 killed in the line of duty in 2009.

So, the guns themselves are illegal? Er, no

Holder said “too many guns have fallen into the hands of those who are not legally permitted to possess them,” in explaining the increase.

So, what does Holder propose to do?

“This is a devastating and unacceptable trend. Each of these deaths is a tragic reminder of the threats that law enforcement officers face each day,” Holder in a statement. “I want to assure the family members and loved ones who have mourned the loss of these heroes that we are responding to this year’s increased violence with renewed vigilance and will do everything within our power — and use every tool at our disposal — to keep our police officers safe.”

You know what else is a devastating and unacceptable trend? Hundreds of Mexicans being killed by guns allowed to walk into Mexico illegally, thanks to operations under the Department of Justice. Also, an AG that lies about it.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

Each year, with the onset of Christmas, we are treated to another gauzy, fluff piece about how great Kwanzaa is by yet another PC spewing columnist. This year, among many others, we find aggrandizement such as that in The Record from New Jersey with, “Kwanzaa sheds light on pride, heritage; Celebration of African-American culture spreads,” and the Huffintgon Post with its titled, “Kwanzaa Detroit 2011: Events Celebrate Holiday’s 7 Values .” We even find such helpful sites as TeacherPlanet.com’s, “Kwanzaa Resources for Teachers.” Yes, the world is filled with celebratory lionization of Kwanzaa.

Several years ago, the Houston Chronicle got in the act with a piece by Leslie Casimir titled “Learning about Kwanzaa from the holiday’s creator.” This one, though, was a bit off the usual track of the how-great-is-Kwanzaa theme because this particular piece celebrated the inventor of the faux holiday, Maulana Karenga, himself. So, instead of merely celebrating this manufactured holiday Casimir amazingly made a hero of the rapist, race monger and violent thug who created it! To Casimir, Kwanzaa creator “Maulana Karenga” was a hero.

Casimir waxed all a’glow about how wonderful Karenga was and her column found a gullible parent who, with kid in tow, went to see the man at a local community center.

Thomasine Johnson needed to get the record straight about Kwanzaa, a cultural holiday steeped in African traditions that celebrates family, ethnic pride and community.

With her 11-year-old grandson in tow, the Missouri City interior designer on Saturday brought her video camera to S.H.A.P.E. community center to hear from Father Kwanzaa ” Maulana Karenga ” in the flesh.”

But just like the manufactured holiday he invented out of whole cloth, this “Maulana Karenga” is also a false front created out of fluff and nonsense. As it happens this supposedly great man’s real name is not really “Maulana Karenga,” but is instead Ronald McKinley Everett, AKA Maulana Ron Karenga. We’ll soon see that subterfuge, reinvention and smoke-and-mirrors are “Karenga’s” stock in trade.

Casimir gave us her version of the history of this “holiday.” It has only a short history, at that.

Created in 1966 by Karenga, a professor of black studies at California State University at Long Beach, Kwanzaa was born out of the black freedom movement of the 1960s, when the Watts riots rocked Los Angeles. It starts the day after Christmas and ends on the first day of the new year.

I love how Casimir employed the euphemism “black freedom movement” for the group that Ronald McKinley Everett “Karenga” belonged to when he created Kwanzaa. In the 60s, “Karenga” was in an organization called US (as in “us” — blacks — against “them” — whites), a black power militant group that he founded, one that frequently clashed in violence with police and even other black power groups. Members of his group even killed two Black Panthers in 1969.

Sounds like they really cared about “freedom,” eh? And what a role model for the kiddies. Yes, kindly professor Maulana Karenga. What a great guy.

Casimir seemed not to understand why people would doubt this man, though.

Still, many people don’t know much about Kwanzaa or the elusive Karenga, who shuns giving interviews to the mainstream press.

Well, it’s not surprising that he doesn’t want to give too many interviews what with his disgusting record as a violent felon and sexual criminal and all. You see, Karenga has a long criminal record. A look at his real history finds that in 1971 Everett served time in jail for assault. By then Everett had changed his name to Maulana Ron Karenga and began to affect a pseudo African costume and act the part of a native African — even though he had been born in the USA.

It wasn’t mere assault Karenga was convicted of, either. It was the sexual assault and torture that he perpetrated against some of his own female followers. The L.A. Times then reported that he placed a hot soldering iron in one woman’s mouth and used a vise to crush another’s toe, of all things.

As writer Lynn Woolley wrote of Professor “Karenga”:

And so this is Kwanzaa. The militant past of the creator is now ignored in favor of the so-called seven principles of Nguza Saba ” principles such as unity, family and self-determination that could have come from Bill Bennett’s “Book of Virtues.” The word “Kwanzaa” is Swahili, meaning something like “fresh fruits of harvest.”

No one remembers the part about “re-Africanization” or the sevenfold path of blackness that Dr. Karenga once espoused. Hardly anyone remembers the shootings, the beatings, the tortures and the prison terms that were once the center of his life. It’s just not PC to bring that sort of stuff up now that Kwanzaa is commercialized and making big bucks.

But, Casimir offers us Karenga’s prattle anyway, treating it as the advice of a sage:

“As part of the black freedom movement, we were using this to return to our history and culture,” Karenga said.

He spoke to a crowd of about 100 people ” young and old ” at the Third Ward community center, headed by Deloyd Parker, an avid promoter of Kwanzaa’s Afrocentric traditions and beliefs.

“We have to wake up that history, we have to remember ourselves in a more expansive way,” Karenga said. “To liberate ourselves as ghetto dwellers.”

In a day when the black middle class numbers in the millions and when more whites than blacks voted for a black man for president, for “Karenga” to claim that blacks are still relegated to the “ghettos” smacks of race baiting and trying to “keep hope alive” so that he can continue to cause hatred between whites and blacks.

Sadly each year the Old Media is all too happy to assist him in that “holiday” endeavor.

Happy Kwanzaa, indeed!

But maybe not everyone is fooled by the faux holiday created by a criminal? This year, for instance, Kalamazoo, Michigan decided to dispense with its public Kwanzaa celebration. In fact, few cities worry over much about this so-called holiday.

Even some African Americans are not fooled into accepting Kwanzaa. As Jenice Armstrong from Philadelphia wrote in 2010, the “truth is that Kwanzaa has never caught on with the majority of black Americans.”

Of course if it weren’t for an Old Media establishment that had given this Karenga’s criminality a wholesale whitewashing, this faux holiday could never have gained the little traction it got in the first place. Put it this way, imagine if famed Ku Klux Klan member David Duke had created a holiday. Do you think the Old Media would have happily sold his creation to a misinformed public without mentioning Duke’s personal history? Not a chance, and rightfully so.

One of the Old Media’s favorite ways of attempting to hide the ideological track of a story is to somehow forget to mention to which party someone in the news hails or owes fealty to. In this case it is what they don’t report that misleads. This week we find a classic what-they-don’t-say story concerning the judge that blocked sections of South Carolina’s new immigration law.

For those unaware, U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel temporarily blocked segments of South Carolina’s new immigration laws because he claimed that some of its provisions impinged on federal prerogatives, things over which the state has no jurisdiction.

The South Carolina law was opposed in court by Obama’s left-wing, activist Department of Justice headed by Eric “Fast And Furious” Holder and a gaggle of civil rights groups and Judge Gergel agreed with these attackers issuing an injunction to stop implementation of the provisions in question.

The Old Media reported a lot of details in the story, of course. We learned all about who opposed the provisions, who scoffed at the injunction, in what District Judge Gergel hailed, and in some of the reports we even get to hear what Republican South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley had to say about it all. But one thing few of these news outlets seemed to report might help readers understand the decision better.

Judge Richard Mark Gergel is an Obama appointee.

So we have an Obama appointee — Eric “Fast And Furious” Holder — attacking a state trying desperately to deal with the illegal immigration problem that other Obama appointees won’t deal with and an Obama appointee — Judge Gergel — agreeing with Obama appointee Holder that the struggling state needs a rebuke.

Yet, the Old Media doesn’t see any need to tell us that Obama appointees are agreeing with Obama appointees against a Republican Governor, here? The fact that Judge Gergel is an Obama appointee isn’t relevant?

Imagine that.

Yes, it somehow slipped Politico’s notice that Gergel is an Obama appointee. The Associated Press made the little oopsie, too. Oh, and Reuters must have given their editors the week off for Christmas or something because they missed this fact. AFP missed it, too. Oh, and Bloomberg forgot to mention Gergel’s Obama connection. Naturally The New York Times didn’t bother with this little fact. Shockingly, the L.A. Times somehow neglected the fact that Gergel was an Obama man. It slipped right past the steely eye of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. Even Fox News missed it.

Did anyone note that Judge Gergel was an Obama man? At the time I wrote this only some SC political blogs and a site called the International Business Times bothered to let its reader know that Gergel is an Obama appointee.

Now, we all know that every time we have a Republican president and one of his appointees turns in a judgment that opposes the liberal mindset, the fact that the judge is a GOP appointee is always prominent in the story.

But, gosh darn it, the fact that Judge Gergel is an appointee of the most liberal president in American history just didn’t seem relevant to the Old Media today.

It’s just a little Merry Christmas present to the Old Media’s President Obama.

Ho, ho, ho.

On Monday morning a story whipped through the liberal blogosphere (and unfortunately one generally conservative news source) that had the left gleefully attacking the Tea Party Movement. They were thrilled, you see, to find a Tea Partier advocating for the assassination of President Obama and his entire family. Only they didn’t. Find such a Tea Partier, I mean.

Keith DeHavelle outlined this great example of how the left wing blogs glommed onto this story of an idiot that wrote on his Facebook page that Obama and his family should be assassinated and then assigned it to a “Tea Party darling” when in truth neither the nut in question nor any part of the story itself is connected in any way to a Tea Party group or Tea Party sentiment.

The story began when unsuccessful candidate for the Carson, California City Council, Jules Manson, decided it would be a great idea to post on his Facebook Page all about his hope that Obama and his family would be assassinated.

.

In an acute example of how erudite this Jules Manson is, he wrote, “Assassinate the f—ing n—er and his monkey children.”

I hope this ignoramus realizes he just committed a federal crime.

Anyway, it wasn’t long before this guy’s Facebook account was canceled and pulled off the web for its hate-speak. Rightly so, too.

But as the morning rolled on the left-wing blogs went nuts defining this guy variously as a “Tea Party Darling,” a libertarian supporter of Ron Paul, along with other labels. Unfortunately, they seemed to have a little trouble taking the time to find out about the real facts about this guy before posting.

Worse was the incorrect description by the New York Daily News — usually a conservative news source — that called Manson “A rabid Tea Party wannabe politician.”

The truth of what Manson “is,” however, is a bit different.

It turns out that Manson explained quite clearly on his own webpage that he does not identify with either of the two main national parties.

I am a mechanical engineer working usually within aerospace and defense industry. For a long time I switched between the two parties but found they were not representing the best interest of the general public. I believe honoring the constitution, a contract between the government and the governed, is key in a free democracy. I recently became a member of the Libertarian Party because they mirror many of my views. Such views include smaller government, less taxation, representation for the people, a free market system which allows small business to prosper, and individual liberties and rights. This means I am a constitutional conservative for reforms to return representation back to the public where it belongs. At the city level, such as Carson, this can be done by banning all campaign financing and requiring each candidate to fund their own campaign. This is key to restoring democracy. I believe this can and must be done.

There is also nothing on any of his various webpages and blog posts that identified him as a Tea Partier.

The best coverage of this seems to come from a left-winger blog called Angry Black Lady Chronicles. Left-wing or no, the poster there did a good job tracking down all the particulars of the story and comes to the proper conclusion that this nutcase, Manson, has no connection whatever with the Tea Party movement. As DeHavelle notes, Manson has statements showing him to be anti-Tea Party, even. Not only that but Manson was the editor of SupportAtheism.com. So, he’s not religious, either. This guy seems to be quite far from the Tea Party movement.

Sadly, what we see here are all sorts of bloggers and news sources leaping to a story, labeling a kook, but not taking the time to get down to the truth before hitting that post now button. We saw this when that criminal, mental case shot Gabrielle Giffords, as well. That shooter was labeled a Tea Partier even before anyone even knew his name. How one can claim they know a person’s entire history before they even know a name… well, that one was never explained to me.

While this particular bad actor’s name was known ahead of time, too many leapt to their keyboards to lay claims as to what he “was” and was not before any of them bothered to learn anything about him. That is bad form no matter who does it.