At the Associated Press Sunday evening, White House Correspondent Julie Pace's coverage of President Obama's Oval Office address was predictably weak.
One could cite at least a half-dozen problems with Pace's story, but two of them were particularly disingenuous.
MSNBC Live with Tamron Hall had Chuck Todd on for two segments related to the terrorist attack in San Bernardino on Wednesday. When confronted with the idea that this could be terrorism, as many labeled the Colorado Springs shooting, Todd hesitantly said, “I don't know if we want to go down that road, Tamron, just yet. I think, I think let's let all this play out. But I have, I have very, I have some fears of where this conversation goes, if this turns into being an American Muslim, an American citizen, and the investigation comes out that this is a radicalized situation and all this stuff, I think the consequences on our politics could be very ugly and very negative.”
ESPN’s nosedive quest to find the absolute bottom of the cultural and moral pit appears to continue unabated. On the network’s Heisman House Voting Site, which is sponsored by Nissan, ESPN removed the name of Navy quarterback Keenan Reynolds, which had appeared next to the name of other leading Heisman candidates.
Tuesday Night on The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly and Bernie Goldberg discussed the ‘morality play’ created by NBC's Harry Smith on the Syrian refugee crisis, complete with Bible verses, as was previously documented on NewsBusters. Smith had tried to compare the Japanese internment with the refugee crisis. Bernie set fire to the idea when he said, “He [President Roosevelt] only interned Japanese Americans, and let's emphasize they were Americans, because they weren't white."
There are plenty of problems with the government's "no-fly list," and especially the plans by some congressmen and senators to abuse it. That said, it appears, almost three years later, to have gotten one name right.
In late 2012 and early 2013, leftists like Chris Hayes at MSNBC, Glenn Greenwald and Kevin Drum at Mother Jones were upset that Saadiq Long, a U.S. Air Force veteran who was living in Qatar, had been put on the no-fly list. After making a stink, Long's name was apparently removed so he could fly into Oklahoma to see his ailing mother, only to see his no-fly listing reinstated so he couldn't leave. He returned to Qatar, but only after taking a bus down to Mexico City and flying from there. End of story? Hardly, as PJ Media's Patrick Poole reports:
On Monday night on The O’Reilly Factor, Charles Krauthammer discussed with Bill O’Reilly the growing rhetoric of the White House and its attempt to downplay or diminish the threat that radical Islam is on the world. Shortly after a clip of President Obama criticizing the media for conflating ISIS’s power, Krauthammer opened up on the President.
Liberals sometimes say that law enforcement’s approach to the Mafia offers a model for how to deal with jihadists, even though the latter tend not to limit their demands to protection money. This past Sunday, Egberto Willies claimed that if terrorist attacks were “treated as they should be, like organized crime, it would neuter ISIS. After all…the group is no more powerful than a large band of thugs with weapons.”
But crimefighting methods weren’t the main concern of Willies’s piece. Rather, it was his belief that “neocons” wish to exploit fear of terrorism in order to start a war which would “transfer wealth from the masses to the few owners of the defense industrial complex.” Willies also ranted that conservatives don’t take a back seat to Islamist fanatics when it comes to lethality: “America's right-wing mass killers and gang bangers have killed more people in the West than ISIS has.”
New York Daily News covers on November 18 ("NRA'S SICK JIHAD" — noted at the time by NB's Kristine Marsh) and today ("NOWHERE TO HIDE, JIHADI WAYNE") have accused the NRA of placing the right to purchase guns ahead of public safety from terrorist attacks.
The paper's bogus claim is based on the NRA's opposition to legislation prohibiting anyone on the government's "terror watch list" from purchasing a gun. While the idea might appear to have sensible on the surface, it doesn't survive scrutiny, as the folks at the group's legislative arm painstakingly explained over four years ago:
On Monday's Morning Joe, the crew discussed New York Police Commissioner William Bratton's appearance on Sunday's Meet the Press. Joe Scarborough played a clip of Bratton begging Congress to pass a law preventing people on the government's terrorism watch list from buying guns. Scarborough echoed the plea as well.
I suppose there was nothing overtly biased or overly offensive that went down on Sunday night’s episode of Madam Secretary. Unless, you actually have a normal and good understanding for what real tough-talk and inspirational military speech-making is.
In the wake of the Paris terrorist murder sprees, a media narrative that the U.S. is somehow less vulnerable to terrorist attacks than countries in Europe has arisen.
The reasons given for this contention would be uproariously funny if the stakes weren't so serious: "Geography and strict travel restrictions." Additionally, according to the report where the meme appears to have originated, there is "one measure" which makes the U.S. "arguably" more vulnerable: guns.
President Obama deserves high marks for his ISIS policy only if you’re grading on a curve and the other students are Republicans who “can't be bothered to take any of this seriously,” suggested Kevin Drum in a Thursday post.
Drum charged that GOPers “blather about Obama being weak, but when you ask them for their plans you just get nonsense…Obama's ISIS strategy has [not] been golden. But Republicans make him look like Alexander the Great. They treat the whole subject like a plaything, a useful cudgel during a presidential campaign. Refugees! Kurds! Radical Islam! We need to be tougher!...That isn't leadership. It barely even counts as coherent thought. It's just playground jeering.”