Mitt Romney

Scarborough: Haley Barbour Would 'Much Rather' Have Hillary Than Trump as President
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.

NBC’s Guthrie to Romney: ‘Pretty Tough’ to Say Obama Just ‘Dabbling at War With ISIS’
By Kyle Drennen | November 16, 2015 | 11:06 AM EST

In an interview with former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney on Monday’s NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie was incredulous of his criticism of President Obama’s strategy against ISIS: “You wrote in The Washington Post that the President should wage war to defeat ISIS, quote, ‘not merely to harass it.’ That is pretty tough language. Let me be direct with you, are you saying the President is dabbling at war with ISIS?”

Wilmore Slams Obama's 'Near-Sighted Snobbery' for Mocking Romney on Russia Threat
By Brad Wilmouth | October 2, 2015 | 1:21 AM EDT

On Thursday's The Nightly Show on Comedy Central, host Larry Wilmore skewered President Barack Obama in the aftermath of Russia undermining the President's Syria policy by bombing the Syrian rebels Obama has been supporting.

The Comedy Central host reminded viewers that Obama had mocked Mitt Romney in 2012 when the GOP presidential candidate warned that Russia would be one of America's greatest foreign policy problems, as Wilmore referred to Obama's cocky dismissal of Romney as "near-sighted snobbery," and played a clip of the exchange with Romney.

Politifact: Harry Reid's '30 Percent of Women Served' Planned Parenthood Claim Is a 'Pants on Fire' Lie
By Tom Blumer | August 5, 2015 | 10:21 PM EDT

Call the "Ripley's Believe It or Not" people.

Politifact, the alleged fact-checking site which has for years almost invariably insisted on calling obvious truths stated by Republicans and conservatives "Half True" at best and often worse, while taking flat-out lies by leftists and pretending they contain some element of truth, has issued a "Pants on Fire" rating on Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's outrageously false claim last week that Planned Parenthood is "the only health care that a significant number of women get," specifically contending that this is the case for 30 percent of women.

Maddow Producer: ‘Baffling’ That GOP Doesn’t Understand It’s Dumb to Play Up Hillary’s Wealth
By Tom Johnson | July 16, 2015 | 6:00 PM EDT

The New York Times reported last weekend that one line of attack American Crossroads and other Republican-leaning groups are likely to use against Hillary Clinton is that she’s far too wealthy to relate to average Americans. Regarding such criticism, Steve Benen says, in effect: Bring it on.

Benen, a producer for MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary writer for the TRMS blog, argued in a Monday post that the rich-and-out-of-touch charge won’t stick to Hillary the way it did to Mitt Romney because “Romney was extremely wealthy while pushing a policy agenda that would benefit people like him,” whereas Hillary’s economic program would help those nowhere near as well-off as she is.

NYT's Backfiring Rubio Blunder Just the Latest of Times' Fizzled Anti-GOP Hit Jobs
By Clay Waters | June 6, 2015 | 10:01 PM EDT

The New York Times, after taking online hits over its not-a-parody nytimes.com news flash Friday morning about 17 traffic tickets earned by Marco Rubio and his wife Jeanette over an 18-year period, doubled down by reprinting the blog post in Saturday's print edition under the headline: "Plenty of Notice for Rubios on the Road." Seemingly every election cycle, the Times embarrasses itself with a partisan pro-Dem hit job that backfires in its face.

Mika Muzzles Talk of Bernie Sanders Writing That Women Fantasize About Rape
By Mark Finkelstein | May 29, 2015 | 9:53 AM EDT

Willie Geist wondered out loud what would happen to a Republican candidate who had written that women fantasize about being raped--and Joe Scarborough questioned whether he would he still be in the race.

But when it's a candidate for the Dem presidential nomination who had written those words, well, that's a different story. On today's Morning Joe, when Scarborough raised the matter of Bernie Sanders having written that women fantasize about being raped, Mika Brzezinski repeatedly tried to shut him down and turn the page.

WashPost Plays Dumb, Finds 'It's Surprisingly Hard to Say' If Letterman's Liberal
By Tim Graham | May 23, 2015 | 10:46 PM EDT

Washington Post political correspondent Chris Cillizza spent way too much time claiming the personal political views of David Letterman were some kind of mystery. The headline was "Is David Letterman liberal? It's surprisingly hard to say." No. It's not. Cillizza does this despite mentioning the Geoffrey Dickens Top Ten list of liberal outbursts posted at NewsBusters. Cillizza does this despite noting he donated more than $12,000 to electing Democrat Al Franken to the U.S. Senate.

NYT's Peters Plays Money Card Against 'Callous' GOP Hopefuls on Front Page
By Clay Waters | May 5, 2015 | 12:50 PM EDT

Jeremy Peters, the New York Times' designated critic of Republican presidential hopefuls, played the money card on Monday's front page, over a headline that reached back to the 2012 campaign: "G.O.P. Hopefuls Now Try to Woo the 47 Percent." In Peters' previous front-page stories on the GOP field, he has variously accused them of being ignorantly anti-science (in a misleading report on the vaccination controversy) and anti-immigrant.

CNN: GOP ‘Need to be Careful’ on Clinton Foundation Scandal Since They ‘Overplayed Their Hand’
By Curtis Houck | April 24, 2015 | 12:27 PM EDT

On two occasions during CNN’s New Day on Friday, CNN personalities raised the often-used liberal argument that Republicans have “overplayed their hand” on a scandal with the latest being their handling of the allegations surrounding the Clinton Foundation. The first person to raise the point was CNN political commentator and NY1 host Errol Louis. Jeff Zeleny parroted a Clinton campaign talking point about there being no quid-pro-quo with the donations coming in while the uranium deal was taking place: “The big picture here is there's no huge smoking gun so far in this book as we know now.”

Reid: No Regrets Lying About Mitt's Taxes Because 'Romney Didn't Win, Did He?'
By Tom Blumer | March 31, 2015 | 1:57 PM EDT

So Harry Reid knew he was lying about Mitt Romney not paying taxes for ten years when he made the claim in 2012 from the lawsuit-free zone known as the floor of the U.S. Senate, but didn't care.

That's what one must conclude from Reid's response to CNN's Dana Bash about that statement. Asked on the network's New Day program if he regrets what he said, Reid responded: "Romney didn't win, did he?" Rather than question Reid's outrageously cynical "end justifies the means" mentality, Bash's edited interview moved on to another topic.

NBC's Guthrie to Romney: Would You Have Made Bergdahl Swap if You Were President?
By Kyle Drennen | March 26, 2015 | 2:44 PM EDT

In an exclusive interview with Mitt Romney on Thursday's NBC Today, co-host Savannah Guthrie wondered if the 2012 presidential contender would have traded five Taliban terrorists for Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl if commander-in-chief: "It was controversial. The President presumably knew the circumstance of Bowe Bergdahl's leaving his post. He said, though, leave no soldier on the battlefield. If that had been you in the Oval Office, would you have made that same call?"