NPR’s Steve Inskeep continued his media tour on Monday promoting his fawning sit-down interview with President by appearing with CNN Tonight host Don Lemon and, when asked about the President attacking the media for supposedly overhyping threats posed by ISIS, Inskeep stood up for the President by suggesting that it was “not a very outlandish idea that he's putting out there.”
Iraq
By Brad Wilmouth | December 22, 2015 | 3:56 PM EST
As MSNBC's Chris Matthews appeared on Tuesday's Andrea Mitchell Reports to promote his special on Donald Trump's life, substitute MSNBC host Luke Russert wondered why the "divisions that had ravaged the country" did not go away after President Barack Obama's election because "everybody thought that we were now coming into a post-racial society, that 'hope and change' was going to carry the day."
A bit later, he brought up segregationist Alabama Democratic governor and former presidential candidate George Wallace as he wondered whether Trump was more like Wallace or Ross Perot.
By Tom Johnson | December 21, 2015 | 8:48 PM EST
Though Steve Benen, who's also the primary blogger for the MSNBC program's website, is a true-blue liberal, he thinks highly of the foreign-policy chops of some recent Republicans. In a Thursday post, Benen wrote that GOPers such as Richard Lugar and Brent Scowcroft were “learned” and “approached international affairs with [a] degree of maturity.”
That was then; this is now. Benen touched on, among other things, Ted Cruz’s pledge to “carpet bomb” ISIS and Marco Rubio’s remark that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was “not a mistake” to build a case that today’s Republican party “approaches foreign policy…with all the maturity of a Saturday-morning cartoon…The national GOP candidates are speaking to (and for) a party that has no patience for substantive details, historical lessons, nuance, or diplomacy.”
By Matthew Balan | December 21, 2015 | 5:08 PM EST
CNN's New Day on Monday actually spotlighted Hillary Clinton's false claim on Saturday that ISIS is "showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists." Chris Cuomo asserted that "it's very hard to translate it any other way...we can't find the videos." When liberal pundit Errol Louis speculated that Clinton's campaign would "migrate towards some kind of clarification," Cuomo replied, "How could you clarify it? How is it anything but wrong?"
By Curtis Houck | December 20, 2015 | 3:49 PM EST
Commenting on how The New York Times removed a phrase from a Friday article explaining how President Obama told a group of columnists that he hadn’t consumed enough cable news to fully understand the anxieties of Americans over terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Fox News Sunday panelist Brit Hume lambasted the President for his “snark” and frame of mind that makes him “impatient with the American people.”
By Brad Wilmouth | December 19, 2015 | 4:26 PM EST
Appearing as a guest on Friday's Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN, during a discussion of President Barack Obama's news conference, CNN's Fareed Zakaria downplayed the threat to the U.S. posed by ISIS as he forwarded the President's view that ISIS "does not pose an existential threat," noting that President Obama "often points out that gun violence takes many, many more people" in the U.S. than radical Islamic terrorism.
By Tom Johnson | December 19, 2015 | 11:49 AM EST
Debbie Wasserman Schultz may not want you to know about it, but there’s a Democratic presidential debate on Saturday evening, and Beutler believes that the candidates therein “would be doing the country a service by placing the right wing appeal to paranoia in its proper context—and then rejecting it forcefully.”
In a Friday piece, Beutler described this week’s Republican presidential debate as “an elaborate group sermon on the importance of being afraid”; opined that the GOP candidates “have made almost no attempt to argue” that their proposals “will reduce the terrorism risk, which is so small to begin with”; and asserted that Republicans’ “position on Jihadi terrorism (that no risk is too small to ignore) is practically the opposite of their position on mass shootings in general (that no risk is worth mitigating at all).”
Networks Censor NYT Deleting Obama Quote Saying He Didn’t ‘Appreciate the Anxiety’ Post-Terror Attacks
By Curtis Houck | December 18, 2015 | 9:29 PM EST The major broadcast networks on Friday morning and evening showed no interest in reporting to viewers that The New York Times had scrubbed from an article on its website that contained a quote from President Obama telling columnists that he did not watch enough news coverage of the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks to truly grasp the anxiety of the American people.
By Brad Wilmouth | December 17, 2015 | 9:56 PM EST
Nearing the end of her MSNBC program Andrea Mitchell Reports on Thursday, NBC Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell claimed that "there is a lot of discrimination" against Muslims as she was introducing President Barack Obama's 1:00 p.m. speech.
After suggesting that some of the "rhetoric" at Tuesday's GOP presidential debate was "really a recruitment tool for ISIS," she recounted that Bernie Sanders visited a mosque yesterday and then asserted that "there is a lot of discrimination here," adding that it is "fueling the ISIS rhetoric."
By Matthew Balan | December 17, 2015 | 4:32 PM EST
On Wednesday's CNN Tonight, left-wing analyst Rula Jebreal and Columbia University's Ahmed Shihab-Eldin unleashed against the Republican presidential candidates, in the wake of Tuesday's CNN debates. Jebreal asserted that Ted Cruz was "nostalgic for Arab dictators," and concluded that "this is racist. This is pure bigotry." She later likened the GOP contenders to the Nazis: "What you are hearing from these people is a criminalization of an entire group of people — something that, actually, we heard...in Europe before World War II."
By Brad Wilmouth | December 17, 2015 | 8:54 AM EST
Appearing as a guest on Thursday's New Day on CNN, former Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown lavished praise on GOP presidential candidate Lindsey Graham, as she pined for him to make it onto the main debate stage, and three times gushed that the South Carolina Republican "rocked." She also rejoiced over Senator Graham characterizing Donald Trump as "a poster boy for ISIS," as she asserted that he is "helping to radicalize the non-radical Muslims."
By Brad Wilmouth | December 16, 2015 | 7:42 PM EST
Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's MSNBC Live, Linda Sarsour of the Arab-American Association of New York received no pushback from host Jose Diaz-Balart over her inflammatory assertion that some of the Republican presidential candidates "think they can mass murder civilians across the world" to defeat the ISIS threat.
She also absurdly claimed that the U.S. killed 650,000 civilians in Iraq, even though most estimates place the total number of Iraqis killed by the U.S. military much lower.