Howie the Unreliable Putz

Speaking of dishonest, overheated rhetoric, Howie the Putz channels el-Brent Bozell and Nooners in an embarassing performance claiming the SCLM has been biased against Benny the Rat.

The Putz announces his bogus premise as follows:

Pummeling the pope. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger gets a hero's welcome in Rome and rough treatment in the press. Are the media giving him a tough time because of his conservative views, or properly scrutinizing the world's newest religious leader? A 1,000-year tradition meets the 21st century media.

Apparently pointing out that the pope has conservative religious views constitutes pummeling.

Fortunately, E.J. Dionne tells Kurtz that he's full of crap:

I am so tired of -- any coverage of somebody who is conservative that is not adulatory, a whole bunch of guys get on television and attack the press for not being adulatory. It's the same story that they are regurgitating about the coverage of Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict as they would about George Bush.

If you look at the leads of all the stories in the major newspapers, I talked to reporters in Rome who said that their newspapers actually pushed down some of the critical commentary, precisely because they didn't want to come out of the box in the first five paragraphs of their stories saying these critical things. Yet this choice was controversial, that's a fact.

You've been pummelled, Howie.