In the late hours of Wednesday night after the Republican debate, MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews was in his element as he whined about the 2016 GOP candidates being “very ideological tonight” and targeted the Cuban-American heritage of Senators Marco Rubio (Fl.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.) for thinking that “they still are fighting a Cold War” and “treat[ing] Obama like he’s Castro.”
Prior to Donald Trump’s rally Monday night in Dallas, Texas, Chris Matthews and the panelists on MSNBC’s Hardball mocked Republican women and voters from “southwestern Virginia” of Scots-Irish heritage who’ve “got an attitude” and previously supported Democrats like Jim Webb. Matthews wrote them off as white people “like Pat Buchanan...the people that went to the mountains when they immigrated to the United States, they went right to the rural areas and they've got an attitude.”
Fox News Channel (FNC) host Bill O’Reilly slammed the liberal media at the top of Wednesday’s O’Reilly Factor for not having exposed the “the disastrous foreign policy of the Obama administration” in a pattern of behavior that he proclaimed as “simply stunning.” O’Reilly kicked off his four-minute-plus opening commentary by highlighting results of a recent national poll on the Iran deal that found only 21 percent of Americans in support of it, which he then concluded that shows “the folks have turned against President Obama's deal with the mullahs.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton is, as usual, working as a black activist while hosting the MSNBC PoliticsNation weekday afternoon program. This time, he's calling on African-American churches to organize in support of the nuclear agreement with Iran.
However, Victor Davis Hanson -- an American military historian, columnist and scholar – responded to Sharpton's charge that “our community is always disproportionately part of the armed services” by stating that the liberal TV anchor “as usual, is not telling the whole truth here.”
The Obama administration has managed cybersecurity so poorly, Secretary of State John Kerry has admitted to CBS that it is “very likely” the Russians and Chinese are reading his emails.
Kerry’s admission came after multiple hacks of U.S. government data including the largest data breach in American history, when hackers allegedly working for the Chinese government stole the detailed records of nearly 22 million people including former and current federal employees and nearly everyone who had ever applied for a security clearance. That hack happened in 2014, but was widely reported in July 2015 after months of agency investigation.
On Wednesday night, the major broadcast networks came out in full force to praise a “defiant” President Barack Obama for having made a “sweeping speech with fiery words” on the Iran nuclear deal that included the President following some in the media by comparing Iranian hardliners to Republicans against the deal (even though some Democrats are opposed to it as well). Hanging on to Obama’s every word, NBC's Chris Jansing hailed him for being “on the attack” and “answering critics of the Iran nuclear deal with an impassioned, nearly hour-long defense.”
The “big three” networks of ABC, CBS and NBC gleefully promoted on Monday evening President Obama’s “scolding” of 2016 Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee over his criticism of the Iran deal and his “scathing words” for the GOP field as candidates “are trying to out-trump [Donald] Trump.” Not surprisingly, the networks also sided with then-candidate Obama on May 15, 2008 when the same three networks chided then-President George W. Bush and fellow Republicans for a “two-pronged Republican attack” on Obama.
At two separate points on Friday's The Rundown on MSNBC, Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd, NBC's Chris Jansing and fill-in host Thomas Roberts bemoaned the lack of gun control during the Obama administration and especially after Newtown. Todd called on “responsible leaders” to put “everything on the table” to consider whether or not incidents such as the one in Lafayette Thursday night are part of “an epidemic” because “[i]t feels like one.”
It took only 12 minutes into their live coverage on Thursday night of the deadly movie theater shooting in Lafayette, Louisiana before CNN Tonight invoked gun control and President Obama with panelists lamenting the lack of “sufficient common sense” on guns, the need for a “more realistic in a interpretation of the Second Amendment” and that the issue will go down in history as President Obama’s “biggest defeat.”
On Wednesday night, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell began his show by cheering President Obama’s news conference performance and declared he “demonstrated more confidence at the podium than any president in the history of televised presidential press conferences, more even than Kennedy.”
The major broadcast networks continued their defense on Wednesday night of the Iranian nuclear arms agreement and specifically President Obama’s press conference from hours before, ruling that the President was “on offense” in providing “a spirited defense” of the “history-making deal.” While all three network anchors interviewed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, it was CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley who hounded Netanyahu on the deal and encouraged him "to talk things over" with Iranian President Rouhani in Tel Aviv.
Soon after President Barack Obama announced on Tuesday morning that the government of Iran signed a nuclear arms treaty with the United States and a coalition of allies, Richard Engel -- NBC's chief foreign correspondent – stated on MSNBC's Morning Joe program that the deal was “a gamble” for the U.S. that “very possibly” could lead to a new arms buildup in the Middle East.
Later that day, Engel told Chris Matthews, the host of the weeknight Hardball program, that people were filling the streets of Tehran -- the capital of Iran -- because “they see this as a real moment to celebrate, a moment of renewal, of hope when they could maybe improve their lives, their freedoms, their financial freedoms, their ability to live a decent life.”