Campaigns & Elections

There was Hillary Clinton, telling Al Sharpton of all people that she found Kevin McCarthy's comments about the Benghazi hearings "deeply distressing."   That was too much for the Morning Joe panel, which just had to laugh.  As John Heilemann put it, far from being distressed, Hillary surely sees McCarthy's comments—implying a political motive behind the hearings—as a Christmas and birthday gift…

Apparently, the establishment press is waiting for its marching orders on how to handle what an Investor's Business Daily editorial has already called a "scandal." This one's a joint effort involving Hillary Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, a recently deceased former CIA operative named Tyler Drumheller who worked with Blumenthal — and CBS News. As Mark Hemingway at the Weekly Standard reported…

On Wednesday night, the CBS Evening News punted on the latest batch of Hillary Clinton’s State Department e-mails released hours earlier while their competitors at ABC and NBC did cover them, but only through the veil of defending Clinton against Speaker of the House candidate Kevin McCarthy’s comments on the Benghazi Committee that NBC’s Andrea Mitchell touted as “an unlikely political lifeline…

How damaging to Republicans are Speaker-presumptive Kevin McCarthy's comments in which he tied the drop in Hillary's poll numbers to the Benghazi hearings? Very damaging, according to the With All Due Respect duo on today's show. John Heilemann called them a "disaster" for congressional Republicans and GOP presidential candidates alike.  Mark Halperin called them a "huge, huge problem" for the…

Good Morning America’s Tom Llamas, a vocal critic of Donald Trump, on Wednesday touted Bill Clinton’s defense of his wife against the candidate. Llamas narrated, “He's back. Former President Bill Clinton making the rounds and the case why his wife should be president, defending Hillary from one of her harshest critics.” 

On Tuesday night, Daily Show host Trevor Noah surprisingly took time out of his second broadcast to mock Hillary Clinton’s recent softball interview with liberal actress Lena Dunham. The Comedy Central comedian introduced the segment by joking that “Hillary knows how to win the nation. First you have to win the butt-smotherers. And here's the thing, Lena Dunham loves Hillary, too.”

On Wednesday, the State Department will release 6,000 more pages of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails but NBC’s Today was the only network morning show to cover this news whereas ABC’s Good Morning America and CBS This Morning ignored the story altogether. In a full report, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell stressed that the e-mail release was a result of a “court order” which will continue the “drip, drip, drip…

Tuesday’s edition of the CBS Evening News used a liberal tax group, passed off as “non-partisan,” to bash, from the left, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s tax plan. Trumpeting the “non-partisan Tax Policy Center,” chief White House correspondent Major Garrett used multiple soundbites from senior fellow Howard Gleckman to hype that “an independent analysis says Trump's plan would…

Hours after Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards testified Tuesday before the House Oversight Committee concerning the videos that have embroiled the abortion provider in scandal over the selling of aborted baby parts, the “big three” networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC rushed to the defense of the “unfazed” and “spirited” Richards as she “endured a five-hour interrogation” by the GOP.

CJ Pearson, the 13-year-old conservative social-media star, could use a few good role models, suggested TNR’s Brian Beutler in a Monday article. After noting that Pearson has been “revealed as the perpetrator of a number of hoaxes,” Beutler mused that such behavior isn’t surprising given the ideological company the youngster keeps. “He's coming of age in a movement that often treats reality as…

You know the saying: once is a fluke, twice is a trend. Yesterday, Stephen Colbert and First Lady Michelle Obama shared a laugh over Bill Clinton's "passion." On today's With All Due Respect, responding to Mark Halperin's report that Bill Clinton "keeps saying he doesn't know what Snapchat is," John Heilemann quipped "let's hope not, for his sake." For those who might not be familiar, Snapchat…

In the rarely fruitless world of MSNBC’s Hardball, host Chris Matthews groaned at the top of Monday’s show about the ongoing Benghazi and e-mail scandals enveloping Hillary Clinton that have become “termite bites” for the Democratic presidential candidate as Vice President Joe Biden could still join the 2016 race.

The Washington Post's Fact Checker blog, after years of usually sincerely prepared though not always accurate posts, appears to have descended to the level of hackery typically found at Politifact. One recent example demonstrating that the effort has turned into a weapon dishonestly employed against Republicans and conservatives comes from Michelle Ye Hee Lee, who on Friday called 2016…

On Tuesday, ABC’s The View hosted Republican presidential candidate Senator Lindsey Graham and co-host Paula Faris desperately attempted to get him to smear his fellow Republicans in Congress. After Graham outlined why he refused to drop out of the presidential race despite his low poll numbers, Faris asked “don’t you feel that Republicans are sabotaging their own party right now?”