Jihadist thugs are now attacking us in the name of Islam. No doubt there are a lot of Islamic believers who don’t support this. But like the Germans in World War II, they are not speaking up… for good reason of course, as there was a good reason back in the days of the Third Reich. But because they aren’t speaking up to oppose what is being done in their name, the world has a Muslim problem. Everybody knows this. Not many public figures dare to say it out loud. Some public figures don’t want to know it, much less say it out loud.

Bill O’Reilly, who has taken great pains in recent years to position himself as a centrist, has now had the courage to say out loud what everybody knows. The predictable cries of outrage have ensued. Juan Williams, a true blue liberal who has no doubt outraged his bosses at NPR for years by appearing on Fox, even if it was to espouse their cause, is now paying the price for O’Reilly. They couldn’t fire him; he doesn’t work for them. Juan does, so out he went.

I used to watch Bernie Goldberg in his early days on Fox trying to retain what he could of his liberal beliefs. As he came to see the savagery of the left he slowly came around to being more conservative. It will be interesting to see the same thing happen to Williams. Both of them were decent liberals who found that the ground moved out from under them.

NPR has made a serious miscalculation. It should have buttoned its lip and shut up. But leftists are not just hateful, they are stupid.

The latest shot fired by Goldberg is that by taking on Fox News, Stewart is “throwing spitballs at a battleship.”  This is one issue where we at Big Hollywood disagree with what the venerable Mr. Goldberg said.  Although “The Daily Show” has significantly less influence than Fox News, Jon Stewart is an incredibly potent weapon in the Left’s war against the Right and it’s our editorial position not to underestimate him (among other things, there is a case to be made he is a primary reason the Democrats recaptured Congress in 2006).  We suspect Fox News and Goldberg agree with us to at least some extent since they are the ones who have been devoting time to try to take Stewart down a peg.

So, check them all out and let us know who’s winning so far. Here they are in chronological order with the most recent at the end:

Well, he lied. But at least it was in a good cause. I just read his latest slice-and-dice of the liberal media, “A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media,” and I was reminded what a travesty the MSM made of the 1st amendment in its desire to ensure Obama’s victory.

There was a time, after all, when Americans actually had a rather high opinion of those who brought us the news in a fair and reasonably objective manner, and when editors and publishers didn’t allow their opinions to bleed all over the rest of the newspaper. But those days are long gone. Today, nobody trusts print or TV journalists. Liberals may have been delighted to find the MSM working overtime to get their guy elected last year, but in the final analysis nobody respects a whore. Americans, whatever their politics, have no more reason to believe what they’re told by the members of the fourth estate than the Russians had when their news source was Pravda, Stalin’s propaganda machine.

As Goldberg makes clear, the shame of the MSM during the presidential election wasn’t simply that they couldn’t mention Barack Obama’s name without swooning, although it did get awfully embarrassing. Giggly teenage girls at a Jonas Brothers concert behaved with more restraint than Chris Matthews.

Worse yet was the way the media kept anything negative about their Lochinvar under wraps. So it was that although Rolling Stone, as early as February, 2007, in a profile of Sen. Obama, wrote about his friend and religious mentor, the loony racist, Jeremiah Wright, the MSM totally ignored the connection until bloggers and Sean Hannity forced the issue. Even then, the media merely took its lead from Obama. When the candidate claimed that in 20 years, he’d never heard his minister say anything hateful about America or white people, they went along with it. When Obama dismissed Wright’s rants as sound bites taken out of context, that was good enough for the MSM. When Obama said that he would never turn his back on Wright, they praised him for his loyalty. Then, when Wright kept repeating those “sound bites” and Obama hurled his worthless carcass under the bus, the MSM praised him for his resolve.

When some people questioned how Obama could have sat in that cesspool of a church for a thousand Sundays, Obama said that anyone who would ask such a rude question was obviously a racist, knowing full well that the MSM, aka the amen corner, could be counted on not only to parrot his words, but to clap hands and shout “Hallelujah!”

If some of us began to confuse news stories about Obama with his campaign press releases, it’s because they were interchangeable, although the press releases tended to be more restrained and, usually, better written.

When Geraldine Ferraro dared to point out that if he were white, the inexperienced Obama would not be running for president, there was such a firestorm of media outrage that Hillary Clinton had to toss her under the bus. Clearly, though, when 90% of blacks were voting for Obama when he was running against someone as liberal as Sen. Clinton, it should have been pretty obvious to one and all that the allegedly post-racial candidate was about as post-racial as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson or Jeremiah Wright. Considering how cynical the members of the press like to consider themselves, it’s rather amusing how naive and, well, slobbering the members of the press can be when they really put their minds to it.

The members of the MSM, as Goldberg makes perfectly clear in 173 very readable pages, went completely in the tank to ensure that Obama would be the 44th president of the United States. But they paid a terrible price. They showed themselves to be nothing more than partisan hacks. And in the end, Obama owed his victory more to the financial meltdown than to their ethical meltdown.

Is it any wonder that newspapers are barely hanging on, that network news shows are seeing their audiences evaporate like the morning dew, and that MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann could double their ratings if only they could finally convince their fathers to tune in?

The MSM reminds me of Marlon Brando’s character in “On the Waterfront.” By taking a dive, they’ve forfeited their chance to be contenders…for our respect. Instead, like Terry Malloy, they’re just bums.