As the Reverend Franklin Graham appeared on Tuesday's CNN Newsroom to promote a national call to prayer, host Carol Costello raised charges that "heated rhetoric about Muslims" is "causing mosques to come under attack," and, after asking her guest if he thought Islam was "compatible with American values," fretted over his answer when he responded, "I don't think so." The CNN host followed up: "See, some people say that rhetoric like that is hurting them."

After the Reverend Graham took issue with the treatment of women and others within the Muslim faith, Costello suggested that Catholicism might be just as culpable as she responded: "I could say that about my own faith within Catholicism, right? I could."

Several weeks ago, there was an Internet meme about whether it would have been ethical to kill the infant Adolf Hitler. Michael Tomasky poses a (somewhat) less-weighty back-in-time question: Could the Republican party’s current Donald Trump problem have been avoided?

Tomasky suggests that it could have been, but instead, during Bill Clinton’s first term in the White House, GOPers “played footsie with the then-burgeoning far-right militia movements in the run-up to the [Oklahoma City] bombing…Fringe elements never properly denounced then are now, under Trump, becoming an in-broad-daylight part of the Republican coalition.” In part because of that long-ago malignant neglect, Tomasky argues, “The Republican Party of Trump is becoming a white-identity party, like the far-right parties of Europe."

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Thursday that Joshua Williams "was sentenced ... to eight years in prison for starting a fire at a QuikTrip in Berkeley (a St. Louis suburb) after an officer-involved shooting there." The Dispatch apparently didn't think it important to tell readers that the crime spree which occurred after that shooting took place despite the fact that the suspect had pulled a gun on that officer.

I noted in a NewsBusters post a year ago that Williams' arrest on charges of "1st degree arson, 2nd degree burglary and misdemeanor theft," and his confession "to setting fires at the store in a videotaped interview" constituted a major establishment press embarrassment. You see, until then, outfits like the New York Times, MSNBC and others had, in the words of Ryan Lovelace at National Review, "depicted him as a hero of the summer protests" in Ferguson, Missouri.

Seemingly unable to tell the difference between a man who affirmatively asserted racist assumptions about the physical abilities of a whole race and a man doing his job by pressing lawyers about a contention in a brief, Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd smeared Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia: “I couldn’t help but think of Al Campanis on Nightline.” Ted Koppel, a panelist on Sunday’s show who interviewed Campanis on ABC’s Nightline back in April of 1987, agreed: “You know, it’s funny. I was thinking of Al Campanis too.”

As he opened Sunday's Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, host Zakaria brought up his background as a secular Muslim as he condemned Donald Trump's "bigotry and demagoguery" in the show's regular "Fareed's Take" segment. At one point, he seemed to compare himself to secular German Jews who criticized Adolf Hitler in the 1930s as he referred to the diaries of Victor Klemperer and showed archival footage of Hitler inspiring an audience to chant, "Heil!"