Democrat strategist James Carville Thursday had strong words for Fareed Zakaria who in an interview recently published at CNN.com defended President Obama's handling of the Gulf Coast oil spill.

"When I read that I wanted to hit him with a football bat," Carville told CNN's John King on the program bearing his name.

For those not getting the joke, Carville was mocking Zakaria's reference to "offensive linebacker" during the interview; only the defense has such a position in football.

Carville continued, "This guy, there's some kind of a breakdown here, because this is a very smart man, and I don't think that he understands exactly what is going on down here."

The outspoken Democrat later quipped, "[I]f that thing was in Long Island Sound, I guarantee you Fareed Zakaria and all his friends would be going nuts out there" (video follows with transcript and commentary, h/t HotAirPundit): 

CNN host and Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria concluded his program Sunday with some blatant commercial plugs -- first, for his show's nifty GPS mugs, now on sale at the CNN online store, and second, for his Newsweek colleague Jonathan Alter's book. He warned the book is "unabashedly pro-Obama," and Zakaria ought to know, since he gauzily endorsed Obama on CNN late in the 2008 race.  

Now as I do every week, I want to recommend a book. This week it's Jonathan Alter's "The Promise." a narrative of President Obama's first year in office. Now I should warn you, it's unabashedly pro-Obama, so it might not be everybody's cup of tea -- get it? Tea Party?

But if you feel like you want to be right there in the West Wing, thanks to interviews with top officials in the White House, this book will take you there. He's talked to the president himself, and there's a fascinating story in it about Obama's searing anger at the Pentagon for boxing him in on Afghanistan. I won't spoil it for you. Just pick up the book.

You'd think the money man behind an array of left wing organizations wouldn't need CNN to get out his message about the death and "bankruptcy" of free-market capitalism, but there was left-wing billionaire and financier George Soros on "GPS" Feb.18

Interviewed by Fareed Zakaria, Soros said he disagreed with President Obama's decision to bail out the banks. Soros would have nationalized them. Soros also advocated for capping CEO pay, and imposing additional taxes on financial transactions and for banks based on size. 

Zakaria offered praise for Obama, saying "You can look at any (issue) all by itself, but I think he's done pretty well and in some ways hasn't gotten the credit for it because the crisis was averted. So now the Republicans can say ‘there was no problem, we didn't need to spend all this money."

CNN's Fareed Zakaria on Sunday demonstrated just how ignorant most media members are of how the federal budget works.

During the most recent installment of "Fareed Zakaria GPS," the host actually said, "[T]he Bush tax cuts are the single largest part of the black hole that is the federal budget deficit."

Before we examine the staggering stupidity on display here, let's first look at exactly what Zakaria said (video embedded below the fold with transcript):

(Oops! "Ugly reality" already seems to have contradicted the naive premise of this Newsweek editor. See update below.)

I'm not sure what's scarier: the fact that Newsweek International editor Fareed Zakaria wants us to believe that Iran seeks nuclear power only for peaceful purposes or that President Obama might be seriously buying into this guy's delusions by reading his book, The Post-American World. Zakaria wants us to put away our fears of a nuclear Iran by making the case in his Newsweek article that that nation has no interest in weaponizing nukes:

Everything you know about Iran is wrong, or at least more complicated than you think. Take the bomb. The regime wants to be a nuclear power but could well be happy with a peaceful civilian program (which could make the challenge it poses more complex). What's the evidence? Well, over the last five years, senior Iranian officials at every level have repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to build nuclear weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has quoted the regime's founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who asserted that such weapons were "un-Islamic." The country's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral. In a subsequent sermon, he declared that "developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam." Last year Khamenei reiterated all these points after meeting with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. Now, of course, they could all be lying. But it seems odd for a regime that derives its legitimacy from its fidelity to Islam to declare constantly that these weapons are un-Islamic if it intends to develop them. It would be far shrewder to stop reminding people of Khomeini's statements and stop issuing new fatwas against nukes.