Foreign Affairs is "a multiplatform media organization with a print magazine, a website, a mobile site, various apps and social media feeds, an event business, and more." It is published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an influential organization which has caught flak for decades, predominantly from the right, for undermining and misrepresenting U.S. interests.

One doesn't have to be a conspiracy theorist to recognize that CFR has significant influence on Washington politicians and the press. Thus, it's fair to say that contentions in a column in its flagship magazine by Bridget Moreng and Nathaniel Barr that recognizing the ISIS victory at Ramadi last month as significant is "dangerous," and that any kind of statement indicating that ISIS is on the rise feeds "directly into the group's narrative," are very disturbing (HT Patrick Poole at PJ Media):

Monday was a big day for journalists to suggest similarities between mass murderers and Republicans. Newsweek writer Nina Burleigh claimed that certain of Timothy McVeigh’s “militia ideals have gone mainstream” in the GOP, but Esquire's Pierce really put the ideological pedal to the metal when he likened Dick Cheney to one of the all-time worst genocidal maniacs, opining that Cheney’s relatively high current political profile is akin to “giving Pol Pot a late-night TV gig.” (As a lead-in, Pierce also called Cheney “the most inexcusable American who ever lived.”)

Pierce’s item piggybacked on a Washington Monthly post by Ed Kilgore, whose tone toward Cheney was not much less harsh than Pierce’s. After quoting Reince Priebus’s remark that Cheney is “a top fundraising draw, in high demand,” Kilgore sniped, “I suppose this is an example of what the church calls the ‘glamor of evil’ in the Easter baptismal renewal vows."

Associated Press reporter Sarah El Deeb and Abu Bilal al-Homsi, the person she now describes as a "Syrian fighter," have had a long acquaintance.

Sarah's and Abu's long-term relationship culminated in a Tuesday afternoon story which AP condensed into 140 characters on Twitter as follows: "Marriage, honeymoons and welfare: @AP exclusive shows Islamic State membership has its privileges." A great deal of justified outrage has followed the release of El Deeb's dispatch for "romancing the Stone Age" by glorifying the advantages accruing to an Islamic State jihadist. More attention needs to be paid to her history with al-Homsi, and her "reporting" in general.

I think it's a safe assumption that I need to inform the vast majority of readers here that former Democratic Massachusetts Congressman Patrick Murphy has a new weekend show on MSNBC.

On that show on Sunday, Murphy interviewed House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. In the "Who was more out of touch?" contest between the two, it was a draw. Murphy asserted that the war against ISIS had "mixed results" during the past week, virtually equating the fall of Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria, the latter of which he did not mention, with the special forces operation which killed ISIS's "money man" in Syria. Pelosi, aka San Fran Nan, somehow took comfort in how "we" are making "advances" against ISIS — in social media.

Future commencement speech invitations for Beltway media eminence grise Bob Woodward effectively evaporated, at least in the Northeast, after his appearance yesterday on Fox News Sunday.

Woodward, who'll be known in perpetuity as the stable half of the reporting duo who brought down Richard Nixon for a scandal that now appears paltry compared to the vast money-laundering scheme dignified under lofty title of Clinton Global Initiative, admirably did his part to puncture a sacred liberal myth -- that Bush lied and people died. As Woodward sees it, only the latter half of that equation is correct.