Following the Republican victory in passing sweeping tax cuts for all American taxpayers on Wednesday, the GOP and President Trump held a White House gathering where they touted their win before the press. During the various victory speeches from Republican members of Congress, nearly all of them praised the President for his leadership.

Here's Vice President Mike Pence: “I would say to the American people President Trump has been making history since the first day of this administration … President Donald Trump delivered a great victory for the American people.”

And  here's a portion of the remarks made by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.): “It's been a year of extraordinary accomplishment for the Trump administration.”

Finally, here's House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.): “Something this profound could not have been done without exquisite presidential leadership.”

The anti-Trump media was disgusted by their glowing words and moved swiftly to condemn it. Many in the liberal media claimed that their praises was akin to the battered people of North Korea being forced to praise their “Dear Leader,” or any other of the world’s despots.

But if throwing “lavish” praise on a president was heinous and akin to glorifying a dictator, then how does the media explain itself? Here are ten instances of the liberal media spewing gushy praise on President Obama before, during, and after his inauguration in 2009.

On January 5, 2009, CNN Correspondent Joe Johns and The Washington Post's Sally Quinn were elated over Obama sending his daughters to the upscale Sidwell Friends School.

As then-NewsBusters Analyst Matthew Balan wrote:

CNN correspondent Joe Johns’ report on Monday’s American Morning heaped praise upon Sidwell Friends School, the new school for the Obama daughters. Johns read from one of the school’s own mission statements about its “Quaker values” and later described how President-Elect Obama apparently “often seems in tune with Quaker principles -- seeking consensus with others; talking rather than fighting with opponents; and, at least in the case of Iraq, if not Afghanistan, opposing war even when the majority supports it.” The correspondent also featured three clips from The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn, who gushed over school: “Sidwell is a happy school....it can be a really magical place.”

On January 17, 2009, Newsweek's Howard Fineman appeared on MSNBC and glowed about how intimate and personal Obama was when he traveled on a train with the press to Washington, DC.

As the MRC's VP of Research and Publications Brent Baker wrote at the time:

Catching up with something from Saturday I just came across, Newsweek's Howard Fineman pointed out on MSNBC just before 6 PM EST, as the Obama-Biden train arrived at Washington, DC's Union Station, that he was reading “the pool reports that have been filed by reporters on the train and they refer to Barack Obama as PEBO, which is short for 'President-elect Barack Obama.'” Fineman felt that illustrated how “there's an intimacy and a familiarity on that train,” presumably between the journalists and Obama, one shared by Fineman who hailed Obama's “many gifts” and saw “a down-home folksiness that belies the tremendous hopes that not only the country, but the whole world, have for him.”

The day before Obama's Inauguration, MSNBC was speaking with those gathered on the National Mall when one of his supporters told them how "I think they bring diversity. I think they bring a spirit of excellence. I think they bring unity and they bring love. Santa Claus loves them."

"You'd think Santa Claus would be jealous of Obama for intruding on his specialty of giving away stuff. But maybe the woman was mixed up and meant to say that Obama is just as great as Santa Claus because she expects to get handouts from him too," Baker joked. 

The liberal personalities of MSNBC were like kids staying up to see Santa the eve of Obama's Inauguration. As he was hyping the network's coverage planned for the event, Chris Matthews opined how "this is one of the great opportunities in journalism to cover history in the face ... it's going to be the honor of our lifetimes" for the liberal media. 

Baker also noted Matthews' trumpeted glorification:

This is one of the great opportunities in journalism to cover history in the face. We're going to see history in the face and when you get up tomorrow morning I recommend you stay tuned all day because I don't think you're going to stop seeing history being made, from the very beginning in the morning. It's going to be our best coverage all day. We're going to end up -- Keith and I and Rachel and Gene Robinson -- it's going to be the honor of our lifetimes to be here on the Washington Mall.

The next four slides ware all from Obama's Inauguration Day, and we begin with ABC embarrassingly fawning over how the event subdued the weather and tamed the animals. 

"We know that wind can make a cold day feel colder, but can national pride make a freezing day feel warmer? It seems to be the case because regardless of the final crowd number estimates, never have so many people shivered so long with such joy. From above, even the seagulls must have been awed by the blanket of humanity..." gushed then-ABC correspondent Bill Weir. 

Baker also noted how: "Meanwhile, over on the NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams must have been as awed as those seagulls since he contended he could “feel” the masses watching from around the nation." 

In what was arguably the most hyperbolic analysis of the day, NBC's Tom Brokaw told viewers that Obama taking office reminded him of the Velvet Revolution and the Czechoslovakian communists' fall from power. 

The MRC's Deputy Research Director Geoffrey Dicken noted Brokaw's full statement at the time: 

TOM BROKAW: You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the Velvet Revolution. I was in Prague when that happened. And Vaclev Havel was a generational leader and was in the square in Prague and the streets were filled with joy. And we're not overthrowing a communist regime here, obviously, but an unpopular president is leaving and people have been waiting for this moment. And there's that same sense of joyfulness and possibility even though, as in Czechoslovakia, they had enormous problems and we do as well.

While the election of America's first African-American President was a special time for our country, the folks at MSNBC were quick to share their own personal feelings about the day's event. 

"I think the hardest thing is, is not getting emotional because it is such an emotional morning, you just want to, you want to laugh, you want to cry," declared Meredith Vieira.

Matt Lauer, who has since been fired by NBC for being an alleged sexual predator, told his colleagues:

I was gonna say it's at a moment like this, as we get set to hand it off to you folks, what great jobs we have. You have to stop and think about the privilege that we all have this morning and you'll have for the next several hours to bring this story, in some way, to the American people because this is a rare opportunity and to, and to have a seat, even though we're in the studio. There's Magic Johnson right there.

In recapping the Inauguration during NBC Nightly News, reporter Andrea Mitchell claimed we didn't have the intelligence or the foresight to really understand what Obama's Oath of Office meant for the country. 

"It may take days or years to really absorb the significance of what happened to America today, even for those of us who were lucky enough to have a very close up front view," Mitchell declared. "His very name opening doors, as did his speech, to the rest of the world." “The mass flickering of cell phone cameras on the mall seemed like stars shining back at him," she added.

Baker noted at the time:

She also touted “the final blessing from a civil rights icon, the Reverend Joseph Lowery, changing the tones of official Washington,” but his prayer hardly saw a unified nation. In the soundbite she aired, he lectured the American people: “We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.”

Just three days after Obama's Inauguration, ABC and CBS were tripping over themselves to sing the praises of the newly sworn-in President for bringing his 'sweeping change.' Clinton lackey George Stephanopoulos told Diane Sawyer: "Change, which was the headline of the Obama campaign. And this first week was disciplined and strategic like that campaign, all designed to show that the President is moving on all fronts to bring change."

And Sawyer claimed it was "change the tone and change it at warp speed."

Meanwhile, on CBS, Bob Schieffer seemed to worship Obama as he rambled on about the transparency he would bring and special interests he would push aside:

And with the severity of the problems he faced, no human, no matter how confident, it seems to me, could look out on that crowd and not wonder: “Can I live up to the expectations of all those people?” Yet, in the three days since then, he has laid out an ambitious program, promises of more transparency in government, new walls between the government and special interests by executive order. He will close Guantanamo prison and outlaw torture. He has told the world that we will practice what we preach.

They all just seem like terrible jokes now. 

Four weeks after the Inauguration during one of Obama's first press conferences, MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann were "impressed" with how "intellectual" he was and how adept he was at answering multiple part questions. 

As NewsBusters Brad Wilmouth documented at the time about how smitten Olbermann was:

This is an entirely different experience for anybody who really perhaps only knew in their young lives President Bush ... This news conference in which a President will answer a multi-part question with a series of four different answers, all of them absolutely common sense and also intellectual and will take seven minutes to answer them. Is he going to adjust to where people were with George Bush’s, kind of, more truncated performance, or is he anticipating the democracy to be participatory and people are going to go in there ... is he going to demand of, you know, citizens, to go along with him and listen for the whole seven minutes?"