Unemployment is zooming towards ten percent. The national debt is reaching levels never thought imaginable. And Barack Obama acts more like a celebrity than President. So what's bothering progressive nitwit Marc Cooper? Newt Gingrich!

Cooper's piece in the Los Angeles Times, "Newt Gingrich, zombie politician," is a typical bitter and stale attack on the former House Speaker: He resigned as Speaker "under a cloud of dishonor, disgrace and corruption"; he's remarried and divorced; he received a book advance while still in office. Blah, blah, blah. (His angry piece is hardly different than one that his curmudgeon friend Robert Scheer wrote ten years ago.)

Yet what's even worse is that Cooper can't avoid misleading his readers and failing to present his facts honestly. For example, Cooper writes,

But now, like the living dead, [Gingrich is] back. And his deeply polarizing and frankly fringe rhetoric is unchanged. Sonia Sotomayor is a "racist." Non-Christians are "pagans."

If Cooper wanted to be fair - which apparently he doesn't - he would have included a small note that Gingrich apologized for the "racist" tag on Sotomayor.

And as far claiming that Gingrich said that "non-Christians are 'pagans,'" Gingrich said no such thing. See the video.

The sad thing is that Cooper is supposedly "director of Annenberg Digital News at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism." Apparently his job entails nothing about teaching fairness, honesty and integrity in journalism. What a shame.