Former John McCain presidential campaign advisor Steve Schmidt pushed back against Chris Matthews on tonight's Hardball when the latter whipped out his tired Bush-caused-ISIS talking point.
Campaigns & Elections

Just after the undercard Republican presidential debate began on Tuesday night, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC offered previews of the impending “freewheeling and fiery slugfest” debate and contrasted that with plenty of laudatory rhetoric for “grown up” Hillary Clinton as she spoke in Minnesota about ISIS and “slamm[ed] Republicans for fearmongering.”

On Sunday's This Week, they concluded the show with a feminist tribute. ABC’s Cokie Roberts sat down with feminist legend Gloria Steinem for what should’ve been an interview on her first book in over 20 years, My Life on the Road. Instead, it was a celebration of her life. George Stephanopoulos gushed that Steinem “sat down with our own pathbreaker, Cokie Roberts, for a look back at 50 years of change in feminism and journalism.”
Roberts began by suggesting today’s young women don’t appreciate the Old Guard enough:” “Gloria Steinem, loved and hated by millions, grew up in a world modern Americans wouldn't recognize. Women were legally denied jobs and credit and shut out of prominent positions. But instead of accepting that world, she led a movement to change it.”

When it comes to global warming, Esquire’s Charles Pierce implies, it’s now conservative Republicans and a few hidebound Democrats versus pretty much everyone and everything else, including the world’s non-human animals and its plant life. Meanwhile, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait opined that the Paris climate deal was “probably the [Obama] administration’s most important accomplishment."

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough blasted Marco Rubio in a series of posts on Twitter on Tuesday. Scarborough linked to Rubio's latest TV ad and contended that "Marco goes full-on nativist. Says he feels out of place in his own country. It's such a crass play. It's offensive." The Republican senator led the ad by stating, "This election is about the essence of America -- about all of us who feel out of place in our own country." The anchor claimed that "the second most nativist statement according to pollsters is 'these days, I feel like a stranger in my own country.'"
After covering the upcoming Republican presidential debate on Tuesday, NBC Today co-host Matt Lauer promoted Hillary Clinton preparing to attack her GOP rivals: “Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton is planning a preemptive strike against the barrage of criticism that she's expecting from her Republican rivals on that stage tonight. So today she’ll make her case on how she’d take on the ISIS threat.”
On two occasions during CNN’s live coverage Monday night previewing the sixth Republican presidential debate, CNN political commentator Michael Smerconish attempted to paint the issue of climate change and the deal reached in Paris as posing a “down ballot concern” for the GOP and causing “brand damage” since the party has largely rejected the ideal and declined to embrace the issue as a whole.

UPDATE: Scarborough just discussed blooper on air, mentioning NB and this NewsBusters. Video clip below!
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Ted Cruz: MSNBC's modern-day version of Nikolai Yezhov! Yezhov was the head of Stalin's secret police who fell into disfavor and was executed during a purge. A photo of him standing next to Stalin was famously airbrushed to remove his image.
And so we come to today's Morning Joe, which displayed an image of tonight's Vegas debate stage. Photos of all the candidates appear at their assigned slots. With one exception. Ted Cruz is nowhere to be found! Simple mistake . . . or diabolical left-wing media plot to purge the #2 Republican contender? The truth is out there!
In what may be the worst series of attacks by the liberal media on Ted Cruz, Monday’s Nightly Show on Comedy Central featured host Larry Wilmore declaring that the “creepy” Cruz may be mentally disturbed with guest Aida Rodriguez firmly asserting that, if elected, Cruz’s agenda would be to “do everything the KKK does.”
With Monday marking the third anniversary of the horrifying murders of 20 children and their teachers in Newtown, Connecticut, the CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News used the somber occasion to lament the lack of gun control passed by the GOP Congress and compared the need for gun control to seat belts and passing a driving test to obtain a driver’s license.

MSNBC host Chris Matthews seems to have a problem with those who would call the torturers, rapists, and murderers who populate the ranks of ISIS as "animals."

On the first Sunday after the San Bernardino attacks, CNN Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter ignored that in favor of a one-hour program focused on Donald Trump. Then on December 13, Stelter talked to al-Jazeera host (and former CNN anchor) Ali Velshi, and again he skipped over the murders of San Bernardino. Syed Farook? Tashfeen Malik? Stelter's only villain worth discussing was Trump.
Stelter failed to ask the al-Jazeera staffer about the bizarre opinion by an al-Jazeera staffer that mass murderer Malik should not have pictured without her burqa. It was “disrespectful” to the mass shooter. Stelter only felt the pain of Muslim journalists, that they don’t have a “Muslim Jorge Ramos.” In other words, Muslims need an aggressive loudmouth leftist activist or better yet, a leftist activist group of reporters.
