This will be a stream-of-consciousness rant, because I’m just coming off watching two hours of nothing but corporately owned distorted “news” commentating. As regular readers know, I write about the obvious bias on the Sunday talkers nearly every week (scroll).

Today I ended up watching ABC and CNN, because MSNBC is airing the Olympic Games and we have two weeks without Chris Hayes and Melissa Harris Perry.

ABC’s “This Week” was hosted by Matthew Dowd. Who’s Matthew Dowd? Why, he’s an American political consultant who was the chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney ’04 presidential campaign. 

Dowd began his political career as a Democrat, working for, among others, Texas Lt. Governor Bob Bullock. In 1999, he switched parties to become a Republican.^[1]

During the 2002 election, Dowd was a senior adviser to the Republican National Committee.

During the 2004 Presidential election, Dowd was chief strategist for George W. Bush‘s re-election campaign.^[1]

His HuffPo bio reads, in part:

During the past twenty-five years, Matthew Dowd has helped shape strategies and campaigns for CEOs, corporations, foundations, governments, candidates, and presidents. He is a founding partner of ViaNovo, an international brand positioning firm.

Matthew’s recent political work includes serving as the Chief Strategist on two winning reelection efforts – for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006 and for President George W. Bush in 2004.

Today Dowd’s Round Table consisted of Ruth Marcus, David Chalian (Yahoo! News Washington bureau chief), George Will, Brietbart.com contributing editor Dana Loesch, and Donna Brazile. How fair and balanced can you get?

Needless to say it was an Obama-bashing fest with an occasional moment of Brazile, who, when she wanted to challenge the “You didn’t build that” GOP attack on the president for being out of context, she was promised she’d get her chance “later.” Instead, every conservative on the panel had their say, and when Brazile finally got her chance much later, she was cut off after a one-sentence response because it was time to move on, you see, to Chick-Fil-A.

Watching one run-on stream of misinformation and GOP talking points after another had me screaming at the Tee Vee machine.

And then it was time for CNN to raise my blood pressure even higher. Candy Crowley, immediately after Mitt Romney’s Big Israel Speech, called it “impressive”. She didn’t skip a beat.

Then she proceeded to interview whoever the milquetoast Dems were she was interviewing, pressing them on how awful the economy has been under President Obama (never bothering to mention the 4 million jobs created in the past three and a half years after Bush put the U.S. economy into the toidy; or the crisis in Europe; or the GOP obstruction that prevented any of the president’s or Democratic Congress members’ jobs plans from being so much as considered).  

As for Romney’s speech, she forgot to inform her audience that Benjamin Netanyahu is the “head of the hawkish Likud party,… leads a governing coalition dominated by right-wing and religious parties.” Instead she repeated at least three times that he had criticized President Obama. Yes, she failed to mention that “Bibi” is a conservative hawk, just like Willard M. Romney whose foreign policy advisers are mostly Bush-Cheney regime war hawks. She didn’t provide context, let alone facts. But she did squeeze in several (paraphrased) versions of, “But Netanyahu said Obama hasn’t helped the Iran situation ONE IOTA.” “Hey, how about that ONE IOTA comment?” “Did I mention Bibi’s ONE IOTA remark?”

Instead, she continued to interrupt Blah Dem, emphasizing Bibi’s differences with the president, and finally led into her next segment with words like (again, paraphrased), “Coming up, the economy sucks which sucks for Obama. Stay tuned.”

I didn’t. Instead, I turned off my TV.