President Obama spoke off the record to news columnists, in a defensive response to Republican criticism that he has seemed passive and uninterested in the face of Islamic terror attacks against the United States. In a news story about the meeting New York Times reporters Peter Baker and Gardiner Harris revealed this damning admission from the president: "In his meeting with the columnists, Mr. Obama indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments." So why was that sentence was deleted from the version that appeared in Friday’s print edition?
David Ignatius
By Brad Wilmouth | December 17, 2015 | 9:56 PM EST
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."
By Michael McKinney | November 18, 2015 | 11:27 AM EST
Morning Joe on Wednesday discussed the recent remarks by President Obama on Republicans who are “afraid of orphans and widows.” When the discussion turned to David Ignatius for commentary, he gave a defense of Obama. Scarborough would press Ignatius with on using "the widows and orphans" to antagonize Republican governors. While Ignatius conceded there is always room to correct the words used, he thought the President was on point.
By Jeffrey Meyer | November 8, 2015 | 1:30 PM EST
Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius blasted the GOP presidential candidates for daring to complain about the biased questions asked during last month’s CNBC debate. Moderator John Dickerson teed up Ignatius by playing a clip of President Obama mocking the Republicans' debate complaints which prompted the Post columnist to declare the American public want someone who does more than "whines about media coverage."
By Mark Finkelstein | October 13, 2015 | 8:21 AM EDT
Michelle might want to gently tap the president on the shoulder and remind him "umm, Barack, you're not in the faculty lounge any more. You're actually, uh, President and Commander-in-Chief. So you don't get to criticize your own failed policies as if you're not responsible for them. They're, umm, your policies, you know?"
Commenting on President Obama's 60 Minutes interview in which he said he was "skeptical from the get-go" about his administration's failed policy of training Syrian rebels, WaPo's David Ignatius on today's Morning Joe called the president's reaction "weird," adding "he spoke almost like a man vindicated when a policy of his own administration had collapsed in failure. And he was, he took the line almost of, see, I told you so."
By Tom Blumer | September 5, 2015 | 10:43 AM EDT
In the past week, several pundits and alleged "experts" have been on a mission to tell us rubes that Hillary Clinton's email and private-server controversy doesn't rise to the level of being a scandal. They have absurdly argued that even if she "technically" violated State Department protocols and even broke some pesky laws in handling her communications while she was Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton's actions weren't serious enough to warrant prosecution.
In making that argument in an August 27 column ("The Hillary Clinton e-mail ‘scandal’ that isn’t"), Washington Post columnist David Ignatius heavily relied on one Jeffrey Smith without revealing Smith's political connections to Bill and Mrs. Clinton and his professional advocacy on behalf of Democrats. After getting caught, while never recognizing his critics' existence, Ignatius incompletely disclosed Smith's obvious lack of objectivity in a manner which would have been barely tolerable during newspapers' dead-trees era, and which is completely unacceptable in the digital age.
By Tom Blumer | August 30, 2015 | 9:49 PM EDT
One of the odder pieces appearing during the past week in connection with the Hillary Clinton email and private server scandal was David Ignatius's attempt to deny that it's a scandal at all in Thursday's Washington Post.
Ignatius devoted four of his first five paragraphs to relaying the allegedly expert assessments of Jeffrey Smith, who Ignatius described as "a former CIA general counsel who’s now a partner at Arnold & Porter, where he often represents defendants suspected of misusing classified information." Sounds like an arms-length guy, doesn't he? He's not. He has been a security adviser to Hillary Clinton's previous presidential campaign, defended John Kerry against criticism of the Massachusetts senator's national security negligence in 2004, and served on Bill Clinton's presidential transition team in late 1992 and early 1993.
By Mark Finkelstein | July 15, 2015 | 9:16 AM EDT
Zbigniew Brzezinki is the man who infamously advised President Obama to shoot down Israeli warplanes should they attempt to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. So when David Ignatius asked him on today's Morning Joe what he thought of Bibi Netanyahu's condemnation of the Iran deal, Zbigniew knew he was being teed up to unload on the Israeli PM.
By Zbigniew's vituperative standards, his response was in fact relatively measured. Still, the utter disdain with which he regards Netanyahu was evident, calling him "not a very serious person" who can entertain Congress but is not good for Israel.
Heilemann: Hillary is 'Running Against the Press,' Which She Rightfully Believes to 'Hostile' to Her
By Bryan Ballas | April 25, 2015 | 7:36 AM EDT Apparently the media’s overt sympathy for Democratic candidates is so taken for granted that anything less than glowing adoration and cooperation is viewed as hostile. That’s at least one explanation for John Heilemann’s odd evaluation of Hillary Clinton’s campaign launch.
According to Heilemann of Bloomberg Politics, Hillary is fighting a two front war. "She’s running against herself And she’s running against the press...the Clintons’ relationship with the press has never been great. She’s believes the press corps is incredibly hostile to her. She has some reason to believe that the press corps is unduly or disproportionately hostile to her...she is been subject to not that flattering of press coverage....[S]he got something in that week that I don't think I've seen her ever have before....[S]he had mockery."
By Bryan Ballas | April 17, 2015 | 8:04 AM EDT
Instead of leaping in celebration at the Hillary rollout on Morning Joe, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski lamented the fact she was forced to settle for a pale imitation of the left’s true savior, Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Brzezinski, a devout Warren fan-girl with the shirt to prove it, took issue with Hillary Clinton’s philosophical plagiarism of her hero’s ideas, "I just feel like she's, it's a great message, but she's got to stop...sounding like she talked to Elizabeth Warren on the phone and then repeated everything Elizabeth Warren said."
By Mark Finkelstein | March 17, 2015 | 8:15 AM EDT
Imagine you're David Brock, James Carville or Lanny Davis. Stop: no! Can't do that to our Newsbusters readers. Let's just picture someone in the Hillary camp—even Herself. He/she's settled in front of the tube this morning, Grande, two-pump Vanilla, Non-Fat, Extra Hot Latte in hand, and tuned to fave show: Morning Joe.
Suddenly, from an array of people, you hear these phrases: "in jail for five to ten years"; "Clinton fatigue especially among Democratic primary voters"; "perjury charges"; "I'm still not certain she's going to be a candidate"; and more and more people in the inside [saying] they don't think -- they're not so sure she's going to run." What the? You double check just to make sure you haven't—God forbid—dialed Fox News. But no, it's MSNBC!
By Tom Blumer | January 22, 2015 | 5:28 PM EST
Earlier today (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I posted on the establishment press's apparent determination to punish anyone who dares to mention the existence — in their view, the "myth" — of "no-go zones" in France and other European countries.
The tactic seems to be working. The Washington Post's Erik Wemple, who criticized CNN for allowing guests to use the term and failing to challenge them after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, is now praising the network, particularly Anderson Cooper, for backing away, even though one of those guests was a "former CIA official" who, it would seem, would have been asserting his position about their existence based on job experience and other acquired knowledge. Before the term completely disappears down the memory hole, readers should be reminded that it was being used even before the 2005 riots in Europe.