Appearing as a guest on Sunday's PoliticsNation, Daily Beast columnist Jonathan Alter -- a far-left MSNBC political analyst and frequent critic of conservatives -- surprisingly predicted that the Hillary Clinton campaign could be more vulnerable on the issue of Juanita Broaddrick's rape charges against Bill Clinton.
Declaring that "reasonable people" are questioning Hillary's comments on the issue, Alter made a logical point that could have been made by the Clintons' strongest critics.
Sunday’s MediaBuzz on the Fox News Channel (FNC) had a slew of media storylines to discuss from the past week and in one segment, host Howard Kurtz teamed with GOP strategist Mercedes Schalpp and the Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff to lambaste MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews for his fawning interview with Hillary Clinton on Tuesday that featured droves of softballs.
CNN host Jake Tapper set himself apart from the rest of CNN and the wider liberal media by devoting two segments to Juanita Broaddrick and other accusers of Bill Clinton. In a panel segment with Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and former Clinton staffer Donna Brazile, Tapper even asked about how feminism struggles against the Broaddrick allegations of a rape in 1978.
Brazile took that question and twisted it into an Orwellian pretzel, as Clintonistas do. Raising Bill Clinton's past is the "real misogyny," she insisted.
In the present, liberals vehemently oppose what conservatives stand for (and vice versa, of course). But do liberals believe there was a time when conservatism was somewhat reasonable, or at least not appalling? Martin Longman offered an answer in a Friday post: It was “the reaction to FDR’s New Deal” that crystallized the suspicious, radical conservatism of today.
“Conservatism is supposed to revere institutions,” commented Longman. “But what institutions has Movement Conservatism respected?...Not Congress or the federal government. Not the Supreme Court. The Office of the Presidency is respected only when it is in the hands of a conservative…What characterizes the conservative attitude to our institutions isn’t respect but paranoia.”
During the panel discussion on the Sunday edition ABC’s This Week, panelist and PBS host Tavis Smiley declared that he was “tickled” by the birtherism surrounding Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz being perpetuated by “an unrepentant, irascible religious and racial arsonist” in Donald Trump who also “troubles” him in that the media hasn’t supposedly tried to project Trump on the entire GOP.
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Appearing as a guest on Sunday's Reliable Sources on CNN to discuss CNN's town hall on guns with President Barack Obama, Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple derided the National Rifle Association as "utterly cowardly" for refusing to take part.
Fellow guest and right-leaning CNN political commentator S.E. Cupp then argued that the NRA had "no incentive" to attend because the President treats them and American gun owners as "the problem" while the media have been "overtly hostile" to gun rights supporters. Cupp: "The media has been overtly hostile on this issue, and it's also been hostile and deeply disappointingly unknowledgeable. I have never seen an issue be covered by so many vocal people who know little about guns, so there's no incentive for gun owners to have this conversation."
Bill Clinton can be shameless in his political life because he has thousands of enablers, just like Hillary. They’re the Democratic Party and the liberal media. Take Al Hunt, for many years the Washington Bureau Chief of The Wall Street Journal and a certified member of the Pundit Elite. On Bloomberg View, he wrote a piece headlined, “Yes, Bill Clinton Still Has It.” Magic, that is.
Hunt began: “Does Bill Clinton still have his political magic? How much of it can he transfer to his wife? The answers: Yes and not much.”
It’s an old New York Times labeling trick: Find the bad guys, and stamp the “conservative” label on them -- even if they are Soviet Communists -- the enemy of U.S. conservatives during the Cold War. The Times insists on describing Muslim migrants, in the news for sex attacks in Germany, as hailing from “conservative” societies (then turning around and accusing Western conservatives of “Islamophobia”). Reporter Melissa Eddy wrote three articles from Germany, two on the sexual assaults by Muslim refugees in Cologne and other cities, one on the republication of Mein Kampf. In all three stories, Eddy strangely managed to put the bad actors on the “conservative” or “far right” side of the political spectrum.
As Rush Limbaugh would say, they're not refugees or illegal immigrants: they're undocumented Democrats . . . On this morning's New Day, CNN political analyst Josh Rogin [formerly of the Daily Beast], repeatedly claimed that President Obama's push to admit refugees from Syria and elsewhere is a "principled" position, not a "political" one.
Does Rogin or anyone else seriously believe that the admission of refugees is not of a piece with the opening of our borders to immigrants, illegal and otherwise, in an effort to flood the electoral rolls with Democrats-to-be? Does anyone imagine Obama and his fellow Dems would be pushing hard for the admission of millions of new immigrants if they knew, for example, that 70% of them would be voting Republican? Playa please.
My New Year's Eve interview with CNN came with a Clinton defender who insisted every Clinton sex charge was "phony" and "disgraceful" and dragged around by the radical right.
Phony charges? Really? Really? President Clinton himself stepped in front of the cameras to say that he had never had sex with “that woman, Ms. Lewinsky”…and later came to the nation and admitted he lied. The phony here was Mr. Clinton.
Americans “will offer congratulations for just about anything,” Jimmy Kimmel observed in setting up a clip from his Wednesday night ABC show in which people on the street outside his Los Angeles studio treated North Korea’s supposed successful test of a hydrogen bomb as an achievement worth congratulating.
Ooops. CNN’s Anderson Cooper seemingly let slip on Thursday night what anyone who has a watched a presidential press conference already knows, but journalists are usually loath to admit: The White House press corps favor President Obama’s policies and so don’t challenge him on them. Following CNN’s “town hall” on guns with Obama, Cooper explained his approach: “I wanted him to actually address people who disagree with him, not just people who agree with him that so often happens at, you know, a presidential news conference.”
For years Northern Ireland has been a safe space for the unborn. With tight regulations on abortion in place, Irish children enjoyed protection that unborn Americans could only dream about. Naturally, writer Carmen Fishwick of the Guardian seized the opportunity to exploit women to propagate abortion in the Emerald Isle. The paper's headline? "Illegal pills and trauma: how Northern Ireland's abortion ban affects women."
Fishwick lamented that Northern Ireland has a much lower unborn body count than its neighbors. “Just 23 legal NHS abortions took place in Northern Ireland last year, compared with more than 200,000 in the rest of the UK.”
On Friday, New York Times entertainment reporters Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes lamented “the dreaded Oscar-season truth squad. Once again, confrontations between an expanding field of reality-based movies and a growing pack of watchdogs, mostly of the armchair variety, have been turning the annual awards ritual into a brutal game of ‘gotcha.’”
On Friday's Anderson Cooper 360, CNN correspondent Drew Griffin filed a report painting conservative opponents of President Barack Obama's gun control initiatives as conspiracy theorists, following up on the previous report finding that a number of gun owners in Florida are suspicious that Obama wants to go further with gun control that he is letting on.
