Foreign Policy

In an interview with actor John Krasinski about his role in the new movie 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi on ABC’s Good Morning America on Tuesday, co-host Lara Spencer fretted over the political impact of the film set to be released on January 15: “Do you feel like this movie will re-open the wound, the debate of what happened in Benghazi?”

The Wall Street Journal ran a blockbuster story Tuesday afternoon ("U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress") about how the Obama administration's National Security Agency's "targeting of Israeli leaders swept up the content of private conversations with U.S. lawmakers." In other words, the NSA spied on Congress. As talk-show host and commentator Erick Erickson drily observed: "Congress began…

President Obama considers the Republican party an international outlier, and so does MSNBC's Steve Benen. (That’s “outlier,” not “outlaw,” though, who knows, for them that may be a distinction without a difference.) After quoting Obama’s recent comment that the GOP is “the only major party that I can think of in the advanced world that effectively denies climate change,” Benen, who’s also the…

In the annual competition between leftist media outlets for the screwiest (or most Scrooge-like) criticism of Christmas traditions, a Huffingon Post item published Thursday morning by Michael McLaughlin (HT Breitbart) was a formidable entry. After the HuffPo reporter's headline noted that "U.S. Christmas Lights Burn More Energy Than Some Nations In A Year," he suggested that "maybe we should…

The detachment from reality of those who actually believe that the recent international climate agreement in Paris is anything but a dangerous and potentially expensive charade has become especially irritating. The goals identified in Paris are obviously unachievable, and have no direct tie-in to reducing "global warming." Convincing evidence of the link between carbon dioxide generation and…

NPR’s Steve Inskeep continued his media tour on Monday promoting his fawning sit-down interview with President by appearing with CNN Tonight host Don Lemon and, when asked about the President attacking the media for supposedly overhyping threats posed by ISIS, Inskeep stood up for the President by suggesting that it was “not a very outlandish idea that he's putting out there.”

Though Steve Benen, who's also the primary blogger for the MSNBC program's website, is a true-blue liberal, he thinks highly of the foreign-policy chops of some recent Republicans. In a Thursday post, Benen wrote that GOPers such as Richard Lugar and Brent Scowcroft were “learned” and “approached international affairs with [a] degree of maturity.” That was then; this is now. Benen touched on,…

CNN's New Day on Monday actually spotlighted Hillary Clinton's false claim on Saturday that ISIS is "showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists." Chris Cuomo asserted that "it's very hard to translate it any other way...we can't find the videos." When liberal pundit Errol Louis speculated that Clinton's campaign would "migrate towards…

Both of the media-centered programs on CNN and FNC covered on Sunday the move by the New York Times from Friday to delete a line from an article about President Obama not fully realizing “the anxiety” of Americans following terror attacks due to his lack of exposure to cable news. Other than NPR TV critic Eric Geggans rushing to Obama’s defense on CNN’s Reliable Sources, the other panelists both…

Appearing as a guest on CNN's Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield to report on South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham's departure from the GOP presidential race, CNN's Kate Bolduan oddly claimed that the low-polling candidate's debate performances were "really widely, you know, seen as winners," inspiring agreement from host Banfield.

Commenting on how The New York Times removed a phrase from a Friday article explaining how President Obama told a group of columnists that he hadn’t consumed enough cable news to fully understand the anxieties of Americans over terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Fox News Sunday panelist Brit Hume lambasted the President for his “snark” and frame of mind that makes him “impatient with the…

Debbie Wasserman Schultz may not want you to know about it, but there’s a Democratic presidential debate on Saturday evening, and Beutler believes that the candidates therein “would be doing the country a service by placing the right wing appeal to paranoia in its proper context—and then rejecting it forcefully.” In a Friday piece, Beutler described this week’s Republican presidential debate as…

The major broadcast networks on Friday morning and evening showed no interest in reporting to viewers that The New York Times had scrubbed from an article on its website that contained a quote from President Obama telling columnists that he did not watch enough news coverage of the Paris and San Bernardino terror attacks to truly grasp the anxiety of the American people. 

On Wednesday's CNN Tonight, left-wing analyst Rula Jebreal and Columbia University's Ahmed Shihab-Eldin unleashed against the Republican presidential candidates, in the wake of Tuesday's CNN debates. Jebreal asserted that Ted Cruz was "nostalgic for Arab dictators," and concluded that "this is racist. This is pure bigotry." She later likened the GOP contenders to the Nazis: "What you are hearing…