Ryan Lizza
Unhinged people can be counted on to deliver colorfully deranged quotes and on Tuesday night's CNN Tonight the reliably batty Philip Mudd, in his role as their counterterrorism analyst, did not disappoint. In reaction to the good news for President Donald Trump that Special Counsel Robert Mueller named him not a target but merely a subject for investigation, Mudd declared that subject status would make him wet his pants.
On Wednesday night, CNN continued its unholy and fact-devoid crusade to tar and feather every one of President Trump’s new high-profile government hires as nothing more than a clueless Trump stooge off the street or a Fox News personality. This time, their unfortunate target was Navy Rear Admiral Dr. Ronny Jackson hours after the President nominated him to be the new Secretary of the Department for Veteran’s Affairs.
CNN Tonight host Don Lemon trapped himself in a lie this week, falsely claiming that the Fox News Channel (or “Trump TV” in his mind) had never covered the White House resignation of Hope Hicks. He offered “apologies for that” on Thursday but it was anything but that as he channeled Dan Rather and Michael Wolff in arguing that the spirit of his lie was true.
Over the past week, strict gun laws in Connecticut have been repeatedly touted on CNN as an example to be enacted nationally, with New Day host Alisyn Camerota pushing the laws the most frequently. The simplistic narrative has been promoted that there has been a "direct correlation" between the passage of new gun control in 2013 and lower numbers of homicides and violent incidents seen in the state the years since. But no mention has been made of the fact that two of the three most populous cities in Connecticut experienced a doubling of homicides in 2017 meaning that, after the numbers for the entire state are tallied, there will likely be a substantial increase in the state's total number of homicides from the previous year's levels.
While there have been only a smattering of climate change references since Hurricane Harvey took over news cycles, CNN and MSNBC featured more shameful exploitations of the hurricane on Monday to promote climate change as thousands were in need of help from rising flood waters.
On Friday afternoon, a slew of CNN personalities could barely contain their approval with the German journalists who questioned President Trump, swooning how they exclusively stuck to the wiretapping claims and should be given “kudos” for their questions from the left.
Late Tuesday evening, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow sent out an enticing tweet declaring that she would expose newly authenticated copies of President Donald Trump’s 2005 tax returns. As her show aired and the White House put out their official statement, it became clear that the hype was much to do about nothing. The revelation that Trump made roughly $150 million and paid $38 million in taxes fell so flat that the panel of Anderson Cooper 360 laughed about how good it made Trump look, with one saying it wasn’t “explosive” at all.
In their two-hour-long documentary, The Legacy of Barack Obama, Wednesday, CNN allowed former Obama adviser Fareed Zakaria to set his sights on Congressional Republicans as he claimed their opposition was fueled by a deep-seated racism. “That fierce, unrelenting opposition, would haunt the next eight years and what began as whispers is now discussed openly,” he pontificated as ominous music played, “Did race play a role in the brick wall of Republican resistance to Barack Obama?”
For weeks, the liberal media have been dismissing in all mediums nearly any questions being raised about Hillary Clinton’s health as conspiracy theories. Even after she admitted to not remembering a whole host of important details in her July 2 FBI interview about her e-mail scandal, the media stayed on message in denouncing concerns as illegitimate.
Appearing as a guest on Sunday's CNN Newsroom with Poppy Harlow, CNN political commentator and New York Times columnist Charles Blow became the latest example of liberals accusing Republicans of racism when they talk about helping black Americans solve problems that they are disproportionately affected by, as he asserted that recent efforts by the Donald Trump campaign at "outreach" to blacks are just an excuse for the GOP candidate to speak negatively about blacks in front of white audiences.
After declaring that "This is just a backhanded way of criticizing black people in front of white people," leading host Harlow to bring up a clip of CNN political commentator Ryan Lizza suggesting that the Trump campaign was just trying to convince college-educated white Republicans that he is not racist, Blow reiterated his charge as he responded: "There may be something to that. I think it's worse than that, though. I do think that it is a backhanded way of criticizing black people in front of white people."
Tuesday's New Day on CNN completely glossed over the fact that 150 out of 7,000 pages from the latest release of Hillary Clinton's e-mail from her tenure as secretary of state contained classified information. Instead, John Berman wildly claimed that "as far as I can tell, nothing in here that reeks of illegality in what we're seeing here." Alisyn Camerota wondered, "If there's no smoking gun, when does the e-mail issue go away?" Nia-Malika Henderson even asserted that "in some ways, these e-mails, kind of, help, because there's no 'there' there."
It can only be described as both ludicrous and insensitive. Just days after a Muslim terrorist shot up two military recruitment centers, killing five servicemen in Chattanooga, TN, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson told the media and high-ranking government officials to not mention the word “Islam” when talking about ISIS or terrorism.
Johnson made these comments at a national security conference July 23. Ryan Lizza, Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, moderated the event centering on the U.S.’s strategy for Al-Qaeda and ISIS.