On her 12 p.m. ET hour MSNBC show on Thursday, host and NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell was unusually critical of the Obama administration's handling of terrorists seizing control of large portions of Iraq: "Where is our intelligence? We were there for ten years. We oughta know something about Iraq. This isn't North Korea." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

That comment followed Virginia Democratic Senator Tim Kaine's attempt to defend the White House for being caught flat-footed by the foreign crisis: "Well, this is a late-breaking development. Look, nobody in the administration contemplated that the Iraqi armed forces would just melt away and capitulate as fast as they have." Mitchell shot back: "Shouldn't they have?"

Virginia's junior U.S. senator, Timothy Kaine (D) became the first member of the world's greatest deliberative body to deliver a speech in Spanish. The former governor did so during debate on immigration reform on the Senate floor on Tuesday.

Covering the development, Washington Post staffer Ed O'Keefe gave readers an 18-paragraph story devoted to the history-making oration in his June 12 page A2 story headlined, "Kaine's Spanish speech on Senate floor is a first." Yet nowhere in the entire article did O'Keefe find any critics to complain that, maybe, just maybe, Kaine's ploy was a cynical effort at pandering to Hispanic Americans. Neither was there any concern about the logistics of debate in a chamber that is accustomed to speech and debate being conducted for the record in English.

Charlie Rose led Monday's CBS This Morning by hyping the allegedly catastrophic effect of the sequester during a promo for a report from correspondent Major Garrett: "Kids without vaccines; schools without teachers; and massive airport delays – we'll show you the worst-case scenario for government spending cuts."

Garrett himself could have been mistaken for an Obama administration flack as he devoted much of the segment to publicizing the White House's bombast about the impending $85 billion in spending cuts. He uncritically forwarded the administration's hype about the general and local effect of the cuts, which are set to take effect on March 1:

The editors of the Washington Post have, yet again, shown their extreme dislike for George Allen. Less than three weeks before Virginia's crucial Senate election, the liberal paper offered front page profiles of Republican Allen and Democrat Tim Kaine. On Friday, the Post's headline sympathetically declared: "A Man of Faith and Practical Politics: While Running for Senate in Virginia, Kaine Finds Time to Wrestle With His Conscience." (The paper endorsed Kaine on Monday.)

The headline for Thursday's profile announced, "A Humbler, More Cautious Allen." Not surprisingly, the Post dredged up Allen's 2006 "macaca" remark. Marc Fisher reminded that six years ago, Allen "found himself portrayed in news reports and voters’ minds as a colossally insensitive brute, a senator who publicly slurred an Indian American man who was working for his opponent at a campaign event, calling him 'macaca.'" The above description came from the third paragraph and made it onto page A1.

Washington Post reporter Ben Pershing dropped a very bizarre sentence into his Virginia election roundup on the front page of Wednesday's Metro section. Sen. George Allen won the right to attempt and regain his seat against former Gov. Tim Kaine, and Kaine "quickly made clear how he would run against Allen in their head-to-head matchup." I simply could not believe the audacity of what followed.

“Voters already had the chance to experience George Allen’s vision during his last term in the Senate, which turned record surpluses into massive deficits, added trillions to our debt, and put opportunity for a select few ahead of opportunity for all our businesses and families,” Kaine said in a statement Tuesday night. “George Allen’s approach helped create our economic mess; Virginians can’t afford six more years.”