Maybe you're a liberal, reluctant to accept Charles Krauthammer's conclusion that President Obama's speech on terror tonight was a "complete failure." Fine. But there's no getting around Richard Engel, whom no one would accuse of conservatism. Speaking with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, the bleak assessment of NBC's chief foreign correspondent was that President Obama laid out "the same strategy that hasn't been working for last several years."

After a point-by-point takedown of Obama's weak tea, Engel concluded "the course of treatment that he laid out for this sick patient with cancer with no immediate cure does not seem like an incredibly strong prescription." Ouch.

I turned on MSNBC this morning in the admittedly masochistic hope of seeing Melissa Harris-Perry, only to find Harry Smith--of all people--hosting continuing coverage of the Paris attacks and related issues.

After running clips of Ted Cruz, Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee questioning the admittance into the US of Syrian refugees, Smith immediately displayed on screen and read the passage of Matthew 25 that begins "For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat . . . I was a stranger and you invited me in," etc.  Smith then turned to the Rev. Jacqui Lewis, pastor of the hyper-liberal Middle Collegiate Church in NYC's East Village, and asked this hyper-leading question: "is this as important a piece of the New Testament as exists?" Surprise! Lewis agreed that it "absolutely" is.

Mike Huckabee might be down in the polls, but he's still up to throwing a good political punch. 

On this evening's MTP Daily, Chuck Todd suggested, by way of advocating the admission of Syrian refugees, that the US is better than Europe at "assimilation." Retorted Huckabee, speaking of one of the Boston bombers, "he really assimilated, until he blew up the Boston Marathon with a pressure cooker." Boom!

On Wednesday night’s Last Word, MSNBC’s Alex Wagner introduced the broadcast by complaining that despite President Obama “riding the political wave of political success” “the Democratic Party just got a brutal reality check” in the 2015 elections. The MSNBC host and liberal Washington Post columnist EJ Dionne repeatedly tried to downplay the bad night for Democrats and chalked it up to low voter turnout among key Democratic demographic groups rather than a rejection of the party's liberal policies. 

I took it for granted that a leftist like Bernie Sanders would be opposed to the death penalty. Still, I was truly shocked to see Sanders—not in some throwaway comment on the campaign trail but in prepared remarks on the Senate floor—flatly call the death penalty "murder." On his MSNBC show this morning, Al Sharpton played the clip to illustrate how Sanders is working to differentiate his policy positions from those of Hillary Clinton, who says she supports the death penalty in "rare" cases.

Question: how can we begin to explain the moral compass of liberals like Sanders who call imposing the death penalty on adults duly convicted of heinous crimes "murder," but refer to the killing of innocent, unborn babies as "choice" or other grotesque euphemisms like "women's health?"