Giving viewers his initial thoughts concerning Tuesday’s 2016 GOP presidential debate on the 11:00 p.m. Eastern edition of AC360, CNN political commentator and former Obama administration adviser Van Jones opined that Marco Rubio seemed “rattled” for “the first time” and “lost his cool” as he faced “competition” from fellow Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.
Conservatives & Republicans
By Curtis Houck | December 15, 2015 | 8:04 PM EST
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.”
Bloggers: Global-Warming Deniers Are Traitors to the Planet, Paris Deal ‘One of the Great Triumphs in History’
By Tom Johnson | December 15, 2015 | 4:55 PM EST 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."
By Matthew Balan | December 15, 2015 | 4:05 PM EST
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.'"
By Brad Wilmouth | December 15, 2015 | 2:12 PM EST
As the Reverend Franklin Graham appeared on Tuesday's CNN Newsroom to promote a national call to prayer, host Carol Costello raised charges that "heated rhetoric about Muslims" is "causing mosques to come under attack," and, after asking her guest if he thought Islam was "compatible with American values," fretted over his answer when he responded, "I don't think so." The CNN host followed up: "See, some people say that rhetoric like that is hurting them."
After the Reverend Graham took issue with the treatment of women and others within the Muslim faith, Costello suggested that Catholicism might be just as culpable as she responded: "I could say that about my own faith within Catholicism, right? I could."
By Kyle Drennen | December 15, 2015 | 11:50 AM EST
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.”
By Curtis Houck | December 15, 2015 | 8:47 AM EST
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.
By Mark Finkelstein | December 15, 2015 | 7:18 AM EST
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!
By Curtis Houck | December 15, 2015 | 2:50 AM EST
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.”
By Brad Wilmouth | December 14, 2015 | 11:35 PM EST
On Monday's Erin Burnett OutFront, CNN National Correspondent Jason Carroll delivered a heavily one-sided report highlighting charges by the Council on American-Islamic Relations that GOP presidential candidates -- specifically naming Ben Carson, Chris Christie and Donald Trump -- have been partly to blame for inspiring a recent spate of attacks against Muslims in the U.S.
By Curtis Houck | December 14, 2015 | 7:47 PM EST
On her eponymous CNN show on Thursday night, Christiane Amanpour verbally harassed former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair over his involvement in the Iraq War and specifically whether he and former U.S. President George W. Bush “feel pain” and “a sense of responsibility” for the war having supposedly caused recent Islamic terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.
Daily Beast Pundit: GOP Could Become a ‘Neo-Fascist, White-Identity Party’ If Leadership Doesn’t Speak Out
By Tom Johnson | December 14, 2015 | 5:25 PM EST Several weeks ago, there was an Internet meme about whether it would have been ethical to kill the infant Adolf Hitler. Michael Tomasky poses a (somewhat) less-weighty back-in-time question: Could the Republican party’s current Donald Trump problem have been avoided?
Tomasky suggests that it could have been, but instead, during Bill Clinton’s first term in the White House, GOPers “played footsie with the then-burgeoning far-right militia movements in the run-up to the [Oklahoma City] bombing…Fringe elements never properly denounced then are now, under Trump, becoming an in-broad-daylight part of the Republican coalition.” In part because of that long-ago malignant neglect, Tomasky argues, “The Republican Party of Trump is becoming a white-identity party, like the far-right parties of Europe."