Free Republic

Things got testy between Joe Scarborough and Howard Dean on today's Morning Joe over the issue of the Dem party moving left. In a particularly unkind cut, Scarborough accused Dean of spouting "Carl Bernstein nonsense," while Dean tried to shut Scarborough down, bleating "blah, blah, blah." Adding spice to the mix, Mika Brzezinski made clear her great regard for lefty Senator Elizabeth Warren, saying she'd make a "formidable" presidential candidate. The fracas was detonated by a discussion of a Wall Street Journal op-ed by a centrist Dem group called "The Third Way," which argued that following proposals from Warren and...

Poor Carl Bernstein: he's suffering a bad bout of MSM nostalgia. He longs for the good old media days when the news was dominated by the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the then three broadcast networks. They could slam Republicans with impunity, without any conservative media counterweight. In covering the shutdown, today's media culture, kvetches Carl, is just too darn fair and balanced in its treatment of those lying, McCarthyite Republicans. That's why President Obama and the congressional Dems' poll numbers are surprisingly bad. Such was Carl's complaint on today's Morning Joe. View the video...

Remember when the media rushed to talk about transparency in the Barack Obama “Hope and Change” era? Good times, good times. Leonard Downie, who once worked as the executive editor of the Washington Post and wrote a novel about Washington corruption and the Iraq War, finds a bigger and non-fictional problem in the successor to George W. Bush. Downie gives the Post a preview of his report from the Committee to Protect Journalists which outlines the Obama war on reporters and their sources: “A memo went out from the chief of staff a year ago to White House employees and...

President Obama knows he's in trouble when Andrea Mitchell—Andrea Mitchell!—proclaims the IRS and AP scandals to be among "the most outrageous excesses I've seen" in all her years in journalism [which pre-date Watergate]. The strength of Mitchell's statement drew gasps from Scarborough and Brzezinski. Then Ron Fournier, former AP editor now with the National Journal, darkly described the White House being "consumed" if it turns out someone there or in the Obama campaign had been aware of the IRS targeting of conservative groups. It happened on Morning Joe today. But hey, President Obama still has his hangers-on. Take good old...

When it comes to investigative reporters, how do you change a bulldog into a lapdog? Easy: change the occupant of the Oval Office from a Republican into a Democrat. Witness Carl Bernstein's pitiful performance on today's Morning Joe. The man who teamed with Bob Woodward to bring down Richard Nixon now credulously claims that he "can't imagine" that President Obama is possibly involved in the IRS targeting of conservative groups. Bernstein instead blames the "hyper-partisanship" in Washington. Yeah, cause politics were so kumbaya in 1972, Carl. View the video here.

Carl Bernstein claimed that because he's Jewish, he could accuse "Jewish" neo-cons of talking George W. Bush into starting an "insane" war against Iraq. Joe Scarborough wasn't so sure. Jewish neo-cons? The single most salient statement from the pre-war period was that by CIA Director George Tenet, who personally told President Bush that Saddam Hussein's possession of WMDs was a "slam dunk." So which temple does Tenet attend? What? He's Greek Orthodox? Never mind. Joe Scarborough offered a strong rebuttal to Bernstein's allegations. View the video here.

As we take time on July 4th to celebrate the liberty we cherish as American, it's important to recognize the critical role a free press plays in surfacing the truth "we the people" need to exercise our civic duty. All politicians promise transparency but the lure of retaining power is more likely to produce fog and spin than clarity and truth. A competent, assertive, and impartial press is as important today as it has been at any point in our history. To acknowledge the 40th anniversary of Watergate break-in and the critical role that the journalists Bob Woodward and Carl...

"Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein now claim, in a Washington Post piece, that President Nixon was “far worse than we thought,” and accuse him of conducting five “wars”: against the anti-war movement, on the media, against the Democrats... The facts of Watergate have been wildly exaggerated. Neither in financing techniques nor in the gamesmanship with the other side was the Republican campaign of 1972 particularly unusual. And it was puritanical compared with what appears to have been the outright theft of the 1960 election for Kennedy over Nixon by Chicago’s Mayor Daley and Lyndon Johnson."

The MSM has been too soft on Republicans, too uncritical of Boehner & Co. The press needs to start reporting that the Republican plan for the economy would be a "disaster." Oh, and for good measure, Americans are racist. They don't care about the unemployed because they wrongly assume a disproportionate number of them are black and Hispanic. Yeah, that's the ticket . . . according to Carl Bernstein on Morning Joe today. View video here.

Just a minor historical footnote, but arguably an interesting one . . . A man whose Watergate reporting made his career and led to Richard Nixon's downfall has declared that Pres. Gerald Ford did the right thing in pardoning Nixon. Carl Bernstein made the--to me at least--surprising statement on today's Morning Joe, in the course of a discussion of Jeff Greenfield's new book about various what-ifs in history. View video here.

Paging Dr. Ron Reagan, Jr. . . . On Morning Joe today, Carl Bernstein insisted Sarah Palin was "ignorant," but couldn't remember why. When pressed, he claimed she didn't know where Russia was. Oops. Bernstein began by denouncing Palin as a "demagogue." When Joe Scarborough asked him why he had written a column branding her as "ignorant" the day after McCain announced her as his running mate, Bernstein simply couldn't remember. At a loss for words, Carl claimed "she didn't know where the hell" Russia was on a map. Watch the video after the jump and note Mike Barnicle's mortified...

oh, the great wizard of smart Carl Bernstein on Morning Joe with his version of Palin Derangement Syndrome

Generations past and present of the Washington Post heaped abuse on Sarah Palin today. Appearing on Morning Joe, Carl Bernstein called Palin "ignorant," a "demagogue" and a "flake." Current WaPo editorialist Jonathan Capehart chimed in to second Bernstein's emotion "100%." Pat Buchanan stepped in to explain Palin's appeal. View video here.

Publisher Peter Osnos, who admits to personally working with former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan on his new book, What Happened, began his career as an assistant to I.F. Stone, the pro-communist "journalist" named as a Soviet agent of influence who was the uncle of Weather Underground communist terrorist Kathy Boudin. But the connections don't end there. Boudin's son Chesa was raised by Barack Obama associates Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were Boudin's comrades in the communist terrorist group, after Kathy Boudin went to prison for her involvement in an armed robbery and assault that took the...

Carl Bernstein isn't just, on the basis of his Watergate-busting fame, a liberal icon. He's also a certified Hillary Clinton expert, having devoted years to researching and writing a definitive biography of her, A Woman in Charge. So his comments tonight on Hillary's graceless reaction to her stunning defeat at the hands of Barack Obama carry special weight, and are likely to reverberate through Dem circles. Here's Bernstein's brutal take, appearing on CNN . CARL BERNSTEIN: One of the worst nights of Hillary Clinton's life. She had a chance at the end of the evening to be magnanimous, to say...

Hillary Clinton is once again facing questions about inappropriate campaign contributions.  Anyone with knowledge of recent history is not shocked.  The Clinton’s have a long history of questionable campaign fundraising. Many, however, will once again try to paint this history as “old news” and as irrelevant to the current campaign.  But this pattern of behavior calls into question both her judgment and ethics and is directly relevant to her campaign for president.Carl Bernstein’s recent sympathetic Hillary biography gives some insight into how this pattern developed.  According to Bernstein, when her future husband Bill was running for Congress in 1974 he...

Some people would later say that Vince Foster – tall, with impeccable manners and a formal mien – worshipped Hillary Clinton from the start, or that he had been awed by her from the time they met, or that he had never met a woman like her who was so whip-smart and almost sassy. What is unquestionable is that he and Hillary grew incredibly close. For the next 20 years the relationship would confound Foster’s wife (but not Bill Clinton), their colleagues at the Rose law firm in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the White House, and women who had known...

FROM CARL BERNSTEIN TO THE BROADDRICK RAPE: Connecting the DotsHILLARY CALLS NEW BOOKS 'CASH FOR REHASH.' (NOT SO FAST, MISSUS CLINTON.) by Mia T 6/04/2007 "There's not a sex act mentioned in the book. What is important is Hillary savaging the women." (Carl Bernstein)     Howard Wolfson doth protest too little. Yawn in tow--or is it a smirk?--the clinton flack is making the rounds trying to convince us that the two new hillary books about to hit the stores, "A Woman in Charge," by Carl Bernstein of 'Woodward and'/Watergate fame, and "Her Way," by former New York Times reporter...

If George W. Bush had gone to law school and later flunked the bar exam, you can imagine that fact would have become a virtual part of his name in the MSM, as in "George Bush, who failed the bar exam, today criticized a law that . . ." But it came as news to me when Carl Bernstein mentioned on this morning's "Today" that Hillary flunked the Washington, DC bar exam back in the '70s. OK, I'm not the most knowledegable guy, and the fact of Hillary's failure is not news -- after years of hiding the embarrassment, she...

<p>Famed Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein has been given access to a trove of papers amassed by Hillary Rodham Clinton's best friend, which his publisher says will reveal a number of "discrepancies" in the New York presidential hopeful's official story.</p> <p>"Bernstein reaches conclusions that stand in opposition to what Sen. Clinton has said in the past and has written in the past," said Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf, which will publish Bernstein's book June 19.</p>