Afghanistan

As NewsBusters reported earlier, unabashedly liberal commentator David Sirota published an article at Salon Tuesday with the disgusting title, "Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American."

As a result of all the negative attention he's gotten due to this piece, rather than doing the right thing by apologizing, Sirota on Wednesday actually doubled down with a new article titled "I Still Hope the Bomber Is a White American."

As the media predictably gush and fawn over the thought of Hillary Clinton as president, there's something extremely obvious they've been missing.

Rather surprisingly, Roger Simon, the perilously liberal chief political columnist at Politico, asked the $64 million question on CNN's Reliable Sources Sunday, "How good a job did she really do as Secretary of State?" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Warning: Please remove all flammables, fluids, and food from proximity to your computer as the following statement by Newsweek's Eleanor Clift on PBS's McLaughlin Group Friday could result in a potentially hazardous fit of laughter.

"The concern within the [Obama] administration [regarding cyber warfare] is intense, and it reminds me of the way the Clinton administration was focused on al Qaeda in the ’90s" (video follows with lengthy commentary to really expose the absurdity of this statement):

Not surprisingly, most of the folks on MSNBC have being having a field day Thursday ridiculing Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) for his historic filibuster the day before.

Doing his part on the Martin Bashir show was MSNBC political analyst David Corn who said that Attorney General Eric Holder’s letter to Paul “had a very silent FU in it” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Syndicated columnist George Will on ABC's This Week Sunday made a marvelous observation about the upcoming Academy Awards.

In his view, “Zero Dark Thirty” should win as best picture as a “rebuke to Senators Levin, Feinstein, and McCain who have enough to do without being movie critics and falsely accusing that movie of taking a stand on torture it does not take” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

On the eve of Sunday's Academy Awards presentation, former George W. Bush CIA Director Michael Hayden has made a strong statement about the hunt for Osama bin Laden film "Zero Dark Thirty."

In an interview to be aired on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS Sunday, Hayden said, "If you look at the movie, it was artistically true, not factually true. Artistically, it portrayed the CIA interrogation program, but factually it was overwrought and inaccurate" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

It’s been four years since President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney left the White House, but MSNBC’s Chris Matthews can’t miss an opportunity to trash the former vice president every chance he has. After playing a recent soundbite of Matthews's favorite bete noir, Matthews asked Howard Fineman, the editorial director of the Huffington Post, “Where do you learn to be that evil?”

Speaking to his all-liberal panel, which included Joan Walsh of Salon.com, Matthews went on a bender against Cheney from everything from the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame -- he blamed the wrong person for it, by the way -- to the decision to go to war with Iraq.  Matthews began his spittle-laced rant:

In today's "Can Someone Help Me Get My Foot Out of My Mouth" segment, the astonishingly pompous and self-righteous MSNBC regular Julian Epstein made an absolutely delicious faux pas Monday while excoriating the character and accomplishments of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

In an appearance on the Martin Bashir Show, Epstein derisively described Cheney as "a guy who failed to get Osama bin Laden in Bora Bora" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Throughout her tenure at Newsweek, Eleanor Clift has been one of the national media's most consistently dovish, anti-war figures.

On Friday, while appearing on PBS's McLaughlin Group, Clift twice said drones "are a blessing" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

A pig just flew by my window.

On PBS's Inside Washington, the perilously liberal syndicated columnist Mark Shields noted the "inconsistency" and "hypocrisy" of the Left being "muted in their criticism" of President Obama's drone attacks (video follows with transcript and commentary):

With this afternoon's Senate confirmation hearings for CIA director nominee John Brennan in view, the February 7 broadcast of Now with Alex Wagner devoted significant attention to the Obama administration's use of armed drones and the recently-leaked DOJ White Paper defending the legitimacy of drone strikes that explicitly targeted American civilians overseas. 

For her part, host Alex Wagner failed to mention Anwar al-Awlaki’s activities as a terrorist operative affiliated with al-Qaeda.  The Now host merely tagged al-Awlaki as an American-born cleric, even though he served as a talent recruiter within the organization and inspired Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hassan.  Al-Awlaki also had contact with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the terrorist who attempted to blow up a passenger airliner on Christmas Day of 2009.  None of that was mentioned on the show. 

The media complicity in President Obama's drone strategy gets more and more astonishing with each passing day.

On Wednesday, Britain's Guardian published a piece with the incredible sub-headline "New York Times and Washington Post knew about secret drone base in Saudi Arabia but agreed not to disclose it to the public."

In the wake of the leaked Department of Justice memo detailing the legality of targeted killings by drones on American citizens, the PBS NewsHour found it fitting to have the ACLU defend its position in why these strikes are troubling, and why American-born al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki should’ve been kept alive to plan acts of terror against the United States.

Of course, this is maddening to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.  Liberal publications, like The Nation, detail the dark future of drone warfare, and some anti-drone journalists, like Conor Fierdorsdorff of The Atlantic, have compared Obama to Bush.  However, even with the media either criticizing, or ignoring, this development, last night’s broadcast of the PBS NewsHour didn’t take into account the hypocrisy of liberals who were on the warpath a few years prior after release of Bush memos related to enhanced interrogation techniques.

It's been nothing less than astonishing watching the media cover for Monday's leaked Department of Justice memo making the legal case for drone attacks against Americans.

Exposing the hypocrisy of this Wednesday was one of Fox News's liberal contributors Kirsten Powers who said of her colleagues on the left, "They're clearly hypocrites. They clearly don't really care about human rights. They only care if it helps them politically" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

To give you an idea of how much you have to be in the tank for President Obama in order to be the typical host on an MSNBC program, on Tuesday, Krystal Ball and Toure Neblett - two far, far-left commentators! - actually came out in support of the just-released Justice Department memo that made the legal case for drone strikes against Americans.

Be sure to strap yourselves in tightly before you enter the bumpy ride in this bizarre parallel universe (video follows with transcript and commentary):

During a panel discussion on Wednesday's NBC Today, attorney Star Jones and the network's chief medical editor Nancy Snyderman hyperventilated over Britain's Prince Harry revealing in interviews that he killed Taliban fighters during combat in Afghanistan. Jones fretted: "Why do you need to antagonize the Taliban?" [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

I don't know about you, but when I want to know how William F. Buckley, Jr. would have felt about an issue, I always consult Arianna Huffington and Joe Scarborough.  But seriously, who would you trust more to reflect how Buckley would have felt on an important issue of the day: the editors of the National Review--the magazine that WFB founded--or the combined wisdom of Huffington and Scarborough?  In an editorial published before Hagel's nomination became official, the Editors at National Review wrote: "Chuck Hagel is a very poor choice for the next secretary of defense," concluding that he was "definitively not the man who should be the next secretary of defense."

But on today's Morning Joe, when Huffington asked "don't you think William F. Buckley would be endorsing Chuck Hagel now?", Scarborough responded with an emphatic "yes!"  View the video after the jump.

In an interview with retired General Stanley McChrystal on Monday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer grilled the former Afghanistan commander on his resignation following criticism of President Obama in a 2010 Rolling Stone article: "There were several demeaning quotes attributed to your staff members, even to you, about the President and about key members of his staff....Was he [Obama] furious about what had come out in that Rolling Stone magazine? Did he express displeasure with you?"

While McChrystal was supposedly on to promote his memoir, My Share of the Task, Lauer spent nearly the entire exchange harping on the two-year-old personal drama between the General and Obama: "Did you distrust the people at the White House? Did you distrust key members of the Obama administration when it came to their policy in dealing with Afghanistan?...Did you distrust the President and key members of the administration in terms of their handling of the war in Afghanistan?"

On New Year’s Eve, schlockumentary filmmaker Michael Moore made a resolution to stop saying he supports the troops.

On Thursday, Moore put an exclamation point on this anti-American insanity publishing a piece at the Huffington Post entitled “Those Who Say 'I Support the Troops' Really Don't.”

In her "Sunday Roundup" post at the site which bears her last name, Arianna Huffington supported that notion that "This week, America finally began questioning the judgment of its generals," but lamented that the scrutiny is over "sexual conduct rather than military conduct."

Fine, that's her opinion. But what's really odd is that she apparently thought that referencing a headline found at the Onion would be seen by readers as meaningful support for her argument (HT to a NewsBusters tipster):

How I look forward to Rachel Maddow's chummy chats with Bay Area soulmate Nancy Pelosi -- especially when it turns awkward.

On her MSNBC show last night, Maddow showed clips of her "exclusive" interview with Pelosi earlier in the day. It was during their discussion of the Petraeus scandal that matters took a turn toward hilarity, an outcome always on the horizon whenever Pelosi is involved. (video clip after page break)

Well, there's one little bit of good news in Martin Crutsinger's final report on yesterday's release of the federal government's October Monthly Treasury Statement (I did a review of his initial take yesterday [at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog]). The good news is that Crutsinger, unlike in most months during the past several years I have reviewed such reports, actually identified the single-month amount of money the federal government spent in October, namely $304 billion. We'll see if he continues the practice of reporting single-month spending amounts in future months.

The rest of Crutsinger's coverage is typically pathetic and predictable. He failed to correctly define what the deficit really is for his readers, understated the impact on fiscal 2013 of any tax or spending decisions the President and Congress might agree on, ignored the likelihood that receipts in teh coming year are likely coming back to levels last seen in fiscal 2007 (meaning that virtually the entire problem facing the country has to do with spending, not collections), and engaged in the seemingly required exercise of blaming George W. Bush for running deficits (not disclosed as far smaller) and conducting wars Congress agreed to fight before Obama came into office. As I said, typically pathetic and predictable.

During a eight minute interview, Tuesday's CBS This Morning helped left-wing radical Oliver Stone promote his latest project - a revisionist documentary and book on World War II and the beginning of the Cold War that credits the Soviet Union for winning World War II and indicting the United States for its supposed "history of aggression."

Anchor Charlie Rose omitted a key part of the New York Times critique of Stone's project when he noted that the liberal newspaper "called your series 'a ten-part indictment of the United States that doesn't pretend to be even-handed'." Reviewer Alessandra Stanley had also charged that the documentary "sounds almost like a parody, a sendup of that filmmaker's love of bombast and right-wing conspiracy." The leftist director flatly denied he wasn't being even-handed. [audio clips available here; video below the jump]

A war broke out on the set of HBO’s Real Time Friday when MSNBC’s sole conservative commentator S.E. Cupp had the nerve to say that Barack Obama’s foreign policy was no different than former President George W. Bush’s.

In the midst of the shouting, actor Samuel L. Jackson said to Cupp, “You don’t want to f—k with Dick Cheney" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Reporting for Thursday's NBC Rock Center, chief foreign affairs correspondent Richard Engel ranted over the lack of infrastructure spending to protect against Hurricane Sandy and tried to blame it on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: "...the thing we've spent the most money on, a trillion-plus dollars, the most American lives on, and that has been bringing democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, with very questionable results." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Rather than be in Lybia covering the growing scandal over the Obama administration's botched response to the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Engel sat in the NBC News New York studio and proclaimed: "People I've spoken to, experts in this field, say we would be a lot safer, not just richer, if we had spent a lot of that money on improving infrastructure."

Although it should have used harsher language in its headline, FactCheck.org, the Annenberg Foundation-funded outfit, has apparently set its leftist bias aside long enough to take shots at an ad narrated by President Barack Obama which claims 5.2 million jobs created and gives all but the most alert viewers the impression that the number represents those created during his entire administration. Perhaps predictably, the item, which was at the top at Yahoo News just a few hours ago, is not on the home page of Yahoo's U.S. home page and is on the verge of falling off at its main page.

Excerpts from Brooks Jackson's writeup follow the jump, including FactCheck's review of claims made at the "learn more" web link mentioned in the ad (bolds are mine):

You don't know whether to laugh or cry upon reading the Sunday night shots campaign Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen at Politico took at Mitt Romney and his campaign.

Maybe these guys really believe that the Romney campaign is the one which still desperately needs a "last chance to move the needle in any significant way in the swing states that will decide the election," and that "Obama is slightly better positioned in the states that will dictate the outcome." If they do, my take is that the Romney campaign is playing possum, and the Politico pair, infused with Beltway naiveté and skewed polling data, are gullibly buying it. Several paragraphs from their effort follow the jump (bolds are mine throughout this post):