Despite the fact that numerous Republican presidential candidates have condemned Donald Trump’s call to ban all Muslims from entering the country, an MSNBC political analyst tried to connect it to all members of the GOP. Actor and liberal radio host Sam Seder appeared on Monday’s All In: “What Donald Trump was saying is obviously repugnant and antithetical to American values.” He added, “The groundwork for that has been laid by years of Republican rhetoric, including even the premise that people have to be worried about being blown up.”
Islam
By Mark Finkelstein | December 8, 2015 | 8:08 AM EST
One of James Taranto's tongue-in-cheek tropes at his Best of the Web Today column is "We Blame George Bush." As Wikipedia describes it, the trope "is a play on the perceived tendency for many of his detractors to lay the blame for pretty much anything" on Bush. In a recent example, "We Blame George W. Bush" was placed over a headline reading “Slipping Into a Food Coma? Blame Your Gut Microbes.”
And lo and behold, from today's Morning Joe comes a real-life example of the phenomenon. Mika Brzezinski blamed Donald Trump's proposal to ban all Muslims from the US, on in part—you guessed it—George W. Bush. In fairness, Mika did also blame the Obama admin. She argued that foreign policy blunders not just by the Obama administration but "by the George W. Bush administration" created feelings that Trump is tapping into. For Mika to reach back to blame Bush for Trump's proposal, when even liberals praise him for going out of his way, for example, six days after 9-11, to declare "Islam is peace," etc. is something between outrageous and hilarious.
By Curtis Houck | December 8, 2015 | 2:41 AM EST
In the latest analogy put forth by a member of the liberal media to praise President Obama, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria opined on Monday’s CNN Tonight that the President used his speech to the nation on Sunday to come across as the “cool” “fireman” who will “douse” the “flames” started by Donald Trump. Additionally, Zakaria hailed the speech as “vintage Obama” as he conducted “an adult conversation” with the American people about ISIS and forced them to accept his ISIS strategy since “not a lot of people have come up with an alternative.”
By Curtis Houck | December 8, 2015 | 12:49 AM EST
Ripping members of the liberal media who’ve criticized press outlets for publishing photos of San Bernardino terrorist Tashfeen Malik wearing a hijab, Fox News host Megyn Kelly teamed with guest Howard Kurtz on Monday night to excoriate the “ludicrous” line of thinking by Melissa Harris-Perry and an Al Jazeera producer (among others) that even led Kelly to exclaim that “[n]o one gives a crap about that.”
By Curtis Houck | December 7, 2015 | 10:06 PM EST
On Monday, the CBS Evening News ran a full story about fears of continued Islamophobia in America following the terror attack in San Bernardino and turned to none other than the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for help, but neglected to mention CAIR’s extremist tendencies and how an official recently blamed the United States and the West for the spread of terrorism.
Daily Kos Writer: Cruz Suited to Lead ‘Christian Caliphate’ Which Would Regard Second Amendment As ‘Holy’
By Tom Johnson | December 7, 2015 | 9:34 PM EST In 2010, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas published his book American Taliban, which detailed his belief that “fundamentalist Muslims [are] basically hard-right Christians…American [religious conservatives] may be more constrained by American society and laws than their Middle Eastern counterparts, but…their goals are the same.” This past weekend, one current and one former Daily Kos writer carried on the tradition of lumping the two groups.
Daily Kos’s Susan Grigsby opined, “It is very difficult to find much space between the coming Christian caliphate, which reveres the Second Amendment as a holy text, and the one set up by [ISIS] in Syria and Iraq.” Washington Monthly blogger David Atkins, a frequent Daily Kos contributor until about a year ago, argued that “to most rational people there is very little dividing line between the agendas of conservative Muslim extremists and conservative Christian ones. Both groups are strongly in favor of weaponizing the public, both are devoted to the imposition of theocracy, and both are opposed to expanded rights for women and those of alternate sexual orientations."
By Mark Finkelstein | December 7, 2015 | 6:57 PM EST
For a moment there, it looked like John Heilemann might go Absolut Olbermann and call Donald Trump a "fascist" for his proposal which would for the time being bar the entry of all Muslims into the United States.
But Heilemann backed off that f-word. While noting "some will say fascist" about Trump or his policy, Heilemann declared "I'm not saying that." Instead, he settled for asserting that there are "many voters in the country who are in fact reactionary" and that there is no way to describe Trump's policy "other than reactionary."
By Randy Hall | December 7, 2015 | 6:01 PM EST
Ever since the deadly shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., last Wednesday, several members of the media have tried to spread the blame from the “radicalized” Muslim couple who shot and killed more than a dozen people to other individuals who are “just as bigoted” as the murderers.
One of those people in the media is columnist Linda Stasi of the New York Daily News, who wrote in a Dec. 6 article asserting that the interaction between “two hate-filled, bigoted municipal employees” led to the deaths of “13 innocent people” who were killed in an act of “unspeakable carnage.”
By Clay Waters | December 7, 2015 | 11:55 AM EST
Reporters Patrick Healy and Maggie Haberman made Sunday's New York Times front page with a deep and deeply fear-mongering analysis of “demagogue” Donald Trump’s stump speeches: "95,000 Words, Many of Them Ominous, From Trump’s Tongue." But things that two Times reporters find “ominous” may not scare a more moderate reader, such as pointing out that ISIS chops off the heads of their victims.
By Alexa Moutevelis Coombs | December 7, 2015 | 5:26 AM EST
BOOM! Hollywood just dropped some truth about Hamas’ tactic of trying to get as many Palestinian civilians killed as they can for propaganda purposes in its war against Israel! On the 10th episode of ABC’s Quantico, Nimah Anwar, a Lebanese Muslim, attempts to impugn the integrity of Simon Asher, an American Jew, by revealing the truth about his relationship with Israel - and fails miserably.
CNN Split; Political Analysts Praise Obama Speech as Foreign Panelists Pan His ‘Self-Congratulation’
By Curtis Houck | December 7, 2015 | 2:38 AM EST Following President Obama’s Sunday night address, the always large post-event panel on CNN had plenty to say, but it was quite the disconnect as many of their political commentators hailed the “straightforward” speech by the President while two of their foreign policy analysts panned the President’s “self-congratulation” and having “his head...in the clouds if he thinks this current strategy is going to succeed.”
By Brad Wilmouth | December 7, 2015 | 1:31 AM EST
Appearing as a guest on Saturday's CNN Newsroom with Poppy Harlow, CNN's Fareed Zakaria complained that Americans are willing to "invade two countries, spend hundreds of billions of dollars" to fight terrorism from "some threatening 'other'" who "looks, feels, sounds different," but "we won't ask for gun registration, we won't ask for background checks, we won't ask for simple, common sense stuff" in response to thousands of gun deaths.