Last night on Fox News (12/22/10), Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly attempted to defend GOP opposition to the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act of 2010, which would provide health care for 9/11 Ground Zero workers.

In his final broadcast of the year (12/16/10), Comedy Central's Jon Stewart devoted the entire show to lambasting the Republican opposition. Stewart's attention to the issue seems to have pushed other media outlets to pay attention to this issue. (With any luck, we'll remember this the next time there's a "debate" about people watching a comedy show instead of "real" news.)

Rove and O'Reilly's defense of GOP intransigence is hardly worth recounting. What was notable was their suggestion that Jon Stewart suspiciously developed an interest in this story just last week:

ROVE: But look, where was Mr. Stewart earlier this year--

O'REILLY: He didn't know about it.

ROVE: --when they weren't doing voodoo diddly squat to move this through? Where was the president of the United States?

O'REILLY: Look, look, look--you know the answers to these questions. You know the answer to these questions. They're demagoguing the issue now.

ROVE: Absolutely.

O'REILLY: Because they've squeezed it into a corner where they want to pass it tomorrow.

This is, unsurprisingly, false. Stewart did a report on the health bill in August (8/4/10), when he blasted Congressional Republicans and Democrats for the failure to pass the bill--leading him to declare about the political process,  "I give up."  You can watch it here. And send it to Bill O'Reilly while you're at it (oreilly@foxnews.com).

Former Bush adviser Karl Rove is making the rounds to promote his new book Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. He landed on NBC's Meet the Press yesterday (3/14/10), interviewed by Tom Brokaw.  Brokaw asked him about his book's discussion of the Iraq War:

BROKAW:  And in it, you acknowledge when weapons of mass destruction were not found, everyone was startled and not very happy about that.  If that had been the case before war began, you couldn't have gotten congressional authorization.

ROVE:  Nor in all likelihood U.N. approval, as we had as well.

BROKAW:  Would you have launched the war if you had known there were weapons of mass destruction?

ROVE:  Well, as I say in the book, we would not have had either the authorization from Congress nor the U.N., and we probably would have found other ways to constrain his behavior.

There was no U.N. approval for the Iraq War.

The White House always argued that U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 gave them legal cover for the war, but it did not--it warned of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to disarm.

As the U.N. weapons inspectors were reporting back from Iraq, the White House was seeking a second Security Council vote that would have officially sanctioned military action. That effort was unsuccessful, and the U.S./U.K. attack began without that Security Council approval.

This is not ancient history, nor is particularly obscure; coverage of Iraq and the U.N. weapons inspections in early 2003 was fairly intense, and Brokaw's NBC newscast aired several reports on the U.S. efforts to win U.N. support for a war resolution. (Brokaw himself on March 10, 2003, for example: "Tonight, the French vowed to veto any U.S. war resolution at the U.N., while Secretary of State Powell continued to look for votes and a plan that would allow the United States to go to war with some kind of U.N. approval.")

Rove undoubtedly knows this history, too. What he's counting on is that journalists like Brokaw will either not remember these facts, or will be too polite to bring them up.

We've talked about these "Topic A" debates in the Washington Post before, and today's installment is a doozy. The topic on the table is Obama's media strategy. And, as before, the important people are on the political right,

Here are the right-wingers: Karl Rove, Dan Schnur (communications director of John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign), Ed Rogers  (White House staffer to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush), Dana Perino (White House press secretary for George W. Bush),  Linda Chavez (chair  of the Center for Equal Opportunity, former member of the Reagan administration).

They're matched by two Democrats: pollster Douglas Schoen and Clinton adviser Lanny Davis (who's most recently been noteworthy for defending pro-coup forces in Honduras). Apparently the best media strategy comes from the right or the mushy middle.

OpEd News has published an open letter from attorney Dana Jill Simpson (8/20/09) to "Mr. Murdoch and all the editors at the Wall Street Journal," in which she expresses her wish to "thank you from the very bottom of my heart for running Karl Rove's delusional article, 'Closing In on Rove,' on August 20, 2009":

The reason I want to thank you is that Mr. Rove has clearly lied about me in this article. You have captured and printed it without even checking to see if it is so or not. The lie he has told is and I quote, "Judiciary Democrats didn't get testimony from either Mr. Siegelman or Dana Jill Simpson, the eccentric Alabama lawyer, who drew attention by publicly supporting the allegations." In case you are unaware, I testified on September 14, 2007, before the House Judiciary Committee lawyers that were selected to question me. I most definitely gave sworn testimony to the House Judiciary Democrats. In fact, I gave over 143 pages of testimony before the Judiciary Democratic and Republican lawyers. It is unfortunate that your paper does not give a rip about the truth or you would have checked out the bold-faced lie that Karl Rove put in his article before you printed it.

The OpEd News mini-bio of Simpson notes that she "has appeared on 60 Minutes and Dan Abrams MSNBC," and that "stories were written in Time magazine, Harper's magazine, and the New York Times about her being a witness in the Don Siegelman case on corruption at the Justice Department."

Still, in closing, Simpson tells the Journal she's actually "happy today to call Mr. Rove a liar and you have provided the cold hard proof. You, Mr. Murdoch, gave me that opportunity. I am thankful that you run a paper that apparently does not check for the truth."

In the lead-up to the November 4 election, Fox News host Sean Hannity warned (10/26/08) that an Obama victory would represent "a complete liberal takeover." He opined that a Democratic electoral victory would herald "an unchecked, ultraliberal government, passing the most liberal agenda under the most liberal president in U.S. history."

Citing the National Journal's flawed survey that called Obama the "most liberal senator," Hannity called the Democratic nominee "more extreme than Barbara Boxer or Russ Feingold, and even the admitted socialist Bernie Sanders."

So what's a conservative news channel to do when the American people turn out in droves and give this "extreme" agent of a "liberal takeover" 364 electoral college votes?

Remind viewers that his platform was actually, er, "center-right"! That's what Hannity and Fox analyst Karl Rove claimed on Hannity & Colmes (11/5/08):

ROVE: Let's make it clear. He [Obama] ran a center- right campaign. He said....

HANNITY: I agree with you.

ROVE: Center, absolutely. It was.

This is the tease for tonight's O'Reilly Factor:

• New Gallup poll shows McCain gaining ground. Karl Rove, Dick Morris and Dennis Miller weigh in.