Foreign Policy

Anyone critical of President Obama being in India right now is an "idiot," MSNBC's Joe Scarborough bluntly served on his morning show, which prides itself on being a safe haven for different views. India is "exactly where [President Obama] should be" right now, he opined. With Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass on as a guest Monday morning, Scarborough clamored that…

They're back, they have their media water-carriers in place, and the Obama administration is smack dab in the middle of it. The United Nations is pushing for countries in the developed world to keep their "promise" to, in the worlds of Charles J. Hanley at the Associated Press,  "raise up to $100 billion a year in new money for poorer countries to cope with climate change and reduce their…

Worked into a tizzy over conservative radio talk show hosts and a Republican congresswoman complaining about the reported cost of President Obama's state visit to India, MSNBC's Chris Matthews today suggested racial animus -- against President Obama and the country of India -- played a role in the criticism. Yet at the same time Matthews put down Indian journalists by suggesting their reporting…

In an attempt to re-litigate the past, MSNBC contributor Cenk Uygur indicted former President George W. Bush for war crimes. Bellowing today from his regular perch on late afternoon Dylan Ratigan Show, Uygur mischaracterized the 43rd President's position on the waterboarding of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as "go ahead and torture him basically" before demanding that Bush be…

Not that it justifies the horrible consequences of leaking classifed information, thereby endangering our troops, our allies, our friends, and their families (of course it doesn't), but the WikiLeaked documents being carried at outlets like the New York Times are revealing some truths that are proving quite inconvenient for Iraq war opponents. Earlier today (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), I…

The WikiLeaksters seem to have inadvertently done history a bit of a favor in the their obsession, with the help of heavy-breathing media mouthpieces like the New York Times, to release classified military documents. It seems that some of those documents reveal the utter untruthfulness of a core claim of Iraq War opponents, namely that "We now know that there were no weapons of mass…

At the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog, J.P. Freire reminds us of a dark chapter in American history. Freire draws some strong parallels to today's debate over foreign influences in American elections. But the story itself is incredible. According to an internal KGB memo discovered by reporters in the 1990s, the late Senator Edward Kennedy colluded with the Soviet Union to…

Only the New York Times could burn through 2,500 words about Japan's economy and not use the word "stimulus." The Old Gray Lady's Martin Fackler did refer to Fed Chair Ben Bernanke's just-announced second attempt to "stimulate" economy, but dodged the central lesson: The government created the Japanese people's malaise, and our government, despite Japan's experience, seems determined to do the…

UPDATE: Did AP read this post and react? An updated AP story time-stamped at 6:35 p.m. reports the following: "He (Shahzad) said the Pakistan Taliban provided him with more than $15,000 and five days of explosives training late last year and early this year, months after he became a U.S. citizen." (Original post follows) The Associated Press's Tom Hays did not report who trained Faisal Shahzad in…

"The State Department has issued a "travel alert" for Europe—underscoring the effect Muslim-bashing politicians have had on the terror threat on the continent," reads the subheadline to an October 4 Newsweek story by Christopher Dickey and Sami Yousafzai.In "Turn On the Red Light," Dickey and Yousafzai went so far as to suggest that anti-Islamist politicians like the Netherlands' Geert Wilders…

According to Bob Woodward, Barack Obama is an "intellectual" who has agonized over Afghanistan. The Washington Post author appeared on Good Morning America on Tuesday and touted his new book, Obama's Wars, as a way of getting inside the President's "internal struggle" over military action in that country. During the segment, it was co-host George Stephanopoulos, who actually pressed Woodward on…

"To survive in a hostile world, guys need to embrace girly jobs and dirty diapers," argued the Newsweek writers Andrew Romano and Tony Dokoupil in the subheadline of their September 20 article "Men's Lib."The writers set out to explain "[w]hy it’s time to reimagine masculinity at work and at home."If American men want to be competitive in a global economy, they argued, they need to suck it up…

Alan Colmes on the ninth anniversary of 9/11 said America shouldn't commemorate these attacks every year, and was nicely smacked down by Judith Miller for his smarmy efforts.Discussing the anniversary coverage on "Fox News Watch," Colmes said, "Every 9/11 it's become like a national day of remembrance, which I understand from an emotional standpoint, but I wonder if it's such a good idea that…

What follows indicates that at least one limit has been found to the establishment press's willingness to serve as this government's official apologists. Not surprisingly, it relates to Iraq. The press obviously and bitterly opposed the war from the start, to the point of doctoring photographs, making stuff up, pretending that its sources knew what they were talking about when they didn't, and…