Hours after praising socialist Senator Bernie Sanders prior to ABC’s Democratic presidential debate on Saturday night, ABC News political analyst Cokie Roberts completely reversed course on Sunday’s This Week and brushed off Sanders as unelectable and having shot at the nomination even if he wins both the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary in February 2016.
Liberals & Democrats
The current election campaign pits the forces of backlash (“the old and angry”) against the forces of frontlash (“the new and different”), and November’s vote will be “a referendum on the existence and civic participation of Americans who are not white men,” contended Traister in a Wednesday piece for New York magazine.
Traister posited that “Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton…represent an altered power structure and changed calculations about who in this country may lead,” but warned, “While the resistance may be symptomatic of death throes, a rage at the dying of the white male light, it nonetheless presents a very real threat…Imagine Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or Marco Rubio in office with a Republican Congress and Supreme Court seats to fill. Voting: restricted. Immigration: halted. Abortion: banned. Equal pay: unprotected. Same-sex marriage: overturned.”
On Saturday morning, MRC Research Director Rich Noyes joined co-host Tucker Carlson on the Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends to highlight a few winners from the 2015 edition of Notable Quotable’s Worst of the Worst, including overall winner MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry for her diatribe about the term “hard worker” having racist connotations.
In the final set of questions of Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate prior to the closing statements, ABC’s co-moderator Martha Raddatz served up a massive softball to frontrunner Hillary Clinton concerning how former President Bill Clinton would function as a member of the First Family if Hillary is elected president.
In one of the more awkward and bizarre happenings you’ll see in a debate, Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate on ABC restarted without frontrunner Hillary Clinton following a commercial break and continued for over a minute until she returned to the stage.
Showing that they’ve learned next to nothing from the George Stephanopoulos/Clinton Foundation scandal, ABC allowed its chief anchor in Stephanopoulos to anchor its pre-game coverage of Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate. Not surprisingly, the former Clinton White House official teamed with DNC Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile to gush over how Hillary Clinton has “found her footing during the fall” and has been “battle tested” following e-mail server and Clinton Foundation scandals that rocked her candidacy earlier in the year.

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).”
On Friday, the “big three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC covered the new scandal brewing inside the Democratic presidential campaign with the data breach involving the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton campaigns (plus the Sanders camp suing the Democratic National Committee), but it was the CBS Evening News that sought to downplay the story by not covering the “brewing” “family feud.”
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.

The people who run Cosmopolitan Magazine's Twitter account really stepped in it today — and they're so utterly clueless that they doubled and tripled down on their ignorance.
Cosmo's tweeters have thrown themselves behind legislation drafted by Missouri State Representative Stacey Newman. Newman, a Democrat, actually believes that it is more difficult to get an abortion in the Show Me State than it is to buy a gun; her legislation would supposedly remedy this horrible situation. Cosmo is on board with horribly unhinged proposed legislation. The good folks at Twitchy pointed that out this afternoon, but that didn't stop Cosmo from doubling and tripling down on their ignorance (original tweets here, here and here) in the past 10 hours:

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."

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."
