Appearing as a guest on Thursday's New Day on CNN, former Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown lavished praise on GOP presidential candidate Lindsey Graham, as she pined for him to make it onto the main debate stage, and three times gushed that the South Carolina Republican "rocked." She also rejoiced over Senator Graham characterizing Donald Trump as "a poster boy for ISIS," as she asserted that he is "helping to radicalize the non-radical Muslims."
Donald Trump
By Mark Finkelstein | December 17, 2015 | 8:47 AM EST
A modern-day variation on "better red than dead" . . . Joe Scarborough says that Haley Barbour and many Republican leaders would "much rather" have Hillary be president than to let Trump win and represent the GOP.
On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough said that if it looks like Trump will win the nomination, something Scarborough sees as very plausible, he envisions Mitt Romney or Michael Bloomberg jumping into the race as a third-party candidate. Not really with the goal of winning, but rather to "take a bullet," splitting the vote and denying Trump the White House.
By Brad Wilmouth | December 17, 2015 | 1:43 AM EST
Appearing as a guest in the final segment of Wednesday's MTP Daily on MSNBC, Ron Fournier of the National Journal slammed the previous night's GOP presidential debate as "disgusting" as he claimed to see "dog whistling" and "fearmongering" from the candidates.
By Brad Wilmouth | December 16, 2015 | 7:42 PM EST
Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's MSNBC Live, Linda Sarsour of the Arab-American Association of New York received no pushback from host Jose Diaz-Balart over her inflammatory assertion that some of the Republican presidential candidates "think they can mass murder civilians across the world" to defeat the ISIS threat.
She also absurdly claimed that the U.S. killed 650,000 civilians in Iraq, even though most estimates place the total number of Iraqis killed by the U.S. military much lower.
By Matthew Balan | December 16, 2015 | 1:26 PM EST
CNN's Chris Cuomo made a gaffe regarding the religious faith of ISIS and other similar groups on Wednesday's New Day. When Senator Lindsey Graham accused Donald Trump of "playing into ISIL's hands," Cuomo replied, "Sixty percent of your party agrees with him. They think all jihadis are Muslim." Since jihad is a concept from the Islamic faith, a jihadi, by definition, would indeed be a Muslim waging a religious-based war for Islam.
By Mark Finkelstein | December 16, 2015 | 8:42 AM EST
When tagging items at NewsBusters, one of our Media Bias sub-categories is "Sudden Respect." The notion is that to win the affection of the MSM, all a Republican or conservative needs to do is turn against members or positions of his party. A great illustration of the phenomenon comes from today's Morning Joe. During last night's undercard debate, Lindsey Graham repeatedly ripped fellow Republicans for their rhetoric on Muslims, at one point even apologizing to Muslims for Donald Trump's comments.
And that of course caused what Rush might call a GrahamGasm by the Morning Joe crew. Mike Barnicle called Graham "fantastic," Nicolle Wallace said "I adore Lindsey Graham." Most amazing was Mika Brzezinski, who beyond praising him as "incredible" actually declared, sounding like she was choking up, "I feel a connection with Lindsey Graham," causing Joe Scarborough to claim [we presume facetiously] that Mika said "where has he been all my life?" Not to be outdone, Joe called on President Obama to award Graham the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Barnicle summed up the panel's sentiment by saying "thank God for Lindsey Graham."
By Curtis Houck | December 16, 2015 | 12:08 AM EST
Offering his initial thoughts on Tuesday’s GOP presidential debate on the 11:00 p.m. Eastern edition of CNN’s AC360, CNN political commentator and Hillary Clinton super PAC head Paul Begala complained that Republicans possess “dominant emotion” of “fear” that they’ve somehow used to instill fear in Americans following recent terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino.
By Brad Wilmouth | December 15, 2015 | 2:12 PM EST
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."
By Clay Waters | December 15, 2015 | 1:09 PM EST
The latest from New York Times reporter Kirk Semple on the front page of Tuesday’s Times, “Muslim Youth in U.S. Feel Strain of Suspicion,” demonstrates that the paper’s strongest impulse after Islamic terror attacks is not to investigate what went wrong but to fret over perceived, anecdotal “Islamophobia” among their fellow citizens. It’s much like his previous, anecdote-heavy, statistic-free “CAIR” package (as in Council on American-Islamic Relations) that Semple delivered in late November, an article completely dominated by CAIR sources in which Semple quite comfortably accused his fellow Americans of Islamophobia on the basis of anecdotes.
By Brad Wilmouth | December 14, 2015 | 11:35 PM EST
On Monday's Erin Burnett OutFront, CNN National Correspondent Jason Carroll delivered a heavily one-sided report highlighting charges by the Council on American-Islamic Relations that GOP presidential candidates -- specifically naming Ben Carson, Chris Christie and Donald Trump -- have been partly to blame for inspiring a recent spate of attacks against Muslims in the U.S.
By Tim Graham | December 14, 2015 | 9:23 PM EST
On the first Sunday after the San Bernardino attacks, CNN Reliable Sources host Brian Stelter ignored that in favor of a one-hour program focused on Donald Trump. Then on December 13, Stelter talked to al-Jazeera host (and former CNN anchor) Ali Velshi, and again he skipped over the murders of San Bernardino. Syed Farook? Tashfeen Malik? Stelter's only villain worth discussing was Trump.
Stelter failed to ask the al-Jazeera staffer about the bizarre opinion by an al-Jazeera staffer that mass murderer Malik should not have pictured without her burqa. It was “disrespectful” to the mass shooter. Stelter only felt the pain of Muslim journalists, that they don’t have a “Muslim Jorge Ramos.” In other words, Muslims need an aggressive loudmouth leftist activist or better yet, a leftist activist group of reporters.
Daily Beast Pundit: GOP Could Become a ‘Neo-Fascist, White-Identity Party’ If Leadership Doesn’t Speak Out
By Tom Johnson | December 14, 2015 | 5:25 PM EST 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."