A lot has been written about Scott McClellan’s — the Bush loyalist and former White House spokesperson — tell all book. Of course, conservative apologists and Bush supporters are already gunning for their former colleague. Bush apologists don’t particular like this claim by the former White House spokesperson:

“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.

“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

Writing in The Corner, a blog from the conservative National Review magazine, Seth Leibsohn takes issue with McClellan’s claim:

The evidence I’ve seen does in fact show that the administration had different justifications for the liberation of Iraq — but we saw them plainly and in the open before as well as after the invasion. The president, the secretary of state, the VP, and many others gave lots of reasons for the invasion of Iraq. There were international legal cases, there were public policy cases, there were national security cases all to be made. And they were. The idea that the press didn’t do its job and was too soft on the president — as McClellan writes — is, frankly, laughable. Raise your hand if you have any evidence that the press was too soft on the administration.

Conservatives have long labored to caricature the press as liberal — which has served conservatives well, as they use this now conventional wisdom as bludgeon against submissive journalists if they don’t parrot conservative memes and talking points. Therefore, conservatives are not about to concede that, if anything, during the run up to the war, the media did as they were expected: they unquestionably parroted the Bush administration’s talking points, and claims about the threat that Iraq posed to our national security.

David Kurtz, over at TPM media, will be taking Seth’s challenge. However, I here offer Judith Miller and the New York Times subsequen apology as exhibits A and B, in response to Seth.

A Divided House Denounces Plan for More Troops

That’s the NY Times headline covering the recent Democratic Party resolution rebuking Bush’s Iraq war escalation. Here’s the bias, as others have commented:

That would be the New York Times editorializing in its news story about yesterday’s House vote on the Iraq escalation. It gets even more ridiculous in the lede:

A sharply divided House of Representatives passed a resolution on Friday formally repudiating President Bush’s decision to send more than 20,000 new combat troops to Iraq.

Never mind that there were 17 Republicans voting against their own President and with the Democrats. On any other vote that would have been called "bipartisan."

Look at this Yahoo headline of a Reuters story:

Bomb kills 15, Bush critic Pelosi visits Baghdad

"Bush critic"?  That’s the best descriptive Yahoo can think of to give Pelosi?

Not "Speaker of the House" Pelosi? Not "Third in Line for the Presidency" Pelosi?

Not even "California Congresswoman" Pelosi?

But, yes, all you lurking Freepers, keep crying that the media is liberal.

Tell you what, when Yahoo News refers to Bush as "Constitution Ignorer" George W. Bush or "Human Rights Violator" George W. Bush, you might just have a point.