Iran

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews is none too pleased about President Obama’s decision to send arms to Syrian rebels.

On Tuesday’s Hardball, the host asked, “Why don't we just change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of Killing Islamic People on Global Television Department, because that's what we've been doing for a dozen years?” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CBS’s David Letterman made a disgraceful joke Monday evening comparing Iran’s crazed despot Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to former President George W. Bush.

During the opening monologue of the Late Show, the host said, “Ahmadinejad is retiring. He's going to spend all of his time on his ranch in Crawford, Texas” (video follows with transcribed lowlights and commentary):

CBS News correspondent Elizabeth Palmer on Saturday’s Evening News compared the Iranian presidential candidates to members of the Tea Party.

In her first official re-appearance on Fox News Monday, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin told Fox & Friends viewers that Palmer “put the BS in CBS" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

For many years, the networks have done a sloppy job of comparing "conservatives" around the globe. As the Berlin Wall fell, the "conservatives" became the communists who wanted to keep their grip on power and not give way to democracy. That's hardly comparable to American conservatives.

On Saturday night, CBS News was doing this sloppy dance on the elections in Iran. From London, reporter Elizabeth Palmer declared all the candidates to succeed Ahmadinejad were the Islamist equivalent of the American Tea Party movement:

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews thinks all America seems to do these days with regard to foreign policy is kill Islamic people.

So astonishingly said the Hardball host Tuesday (video follows with transcript and commentary, file photo):

The perilously liberal Rolling Stone contributing editor and Buzzfeed reporter Michael Hastings on Saturday accused MSNBC analyst Perry Bacon Jr. of echoing “talking points from the White House."

Such occurred on MSNBC’s Up during a discussion about President Obama’s recent national security speech (video follows with transcript and commentary):

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."

Bill Maher has said a lot of REALLY dumb things throughout his career, but this howler uttered with a straight face on HBO's Real Time Friday might possibly be his stupidest.

"Do you know who the role model for every president should be? Jimmy Carter" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

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):

Zurprise, zurprise: Zbig wouldn't go to war to stop Iran getting nukes.  On Morning Joe today, Jimmy Carter's former national security adviser had some advice for President Obama: tell Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that America will not go to war against Iran.

Attacking Iran's nuclear facilities would surely be an act of war. Yet doing so might well be the only way to prevent the ayatollahs from getting the A-bomb. Unfortunately, neither Joe Scarborough nor anyone else on the panel including daughter Mika asked Brzezinski flat out whether he would encourage America to stand by while Iran got nukes.  But it's hard to  intepret his words otherwise.  And of course, Zbig is the man who called for the U.S. to shoot down Israeli warplanes on the way to Iran. View the video after the jump.

Iran's ambassador to the United Nations had some harsh words for George Clooney and Ben Affleck this weekend.

In a taped interview that aired on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS Sunday, Mohammad Khazaee called "Argo" weak saying, "The producer of the film that is known as ambassador of peace, as I heard, should be ashamed...I would like to invite the producer and the director of the film to travel to Iran, and when they travel to Iran, the day after they will apologize from the big nation of Iran for producing such a weak film" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

The Morning Joe panel was tough today on the Obama White House for threatening Bob Woodward by telling him he would "regret" his reporting that it was the Obama administration that had devised the sequester,   In the course of the opening segment, various panel members described the Obama White House response as "mickey mouse," "pathetic" and "childish."

But at the same time, a theme emerged that there was nothing unusual about a White House trying to intimidate reporters.  Mark Halperin said "the Bush White House regularly would engage in the same kind of tactics." And Joe Scarborough and Andrea Mitchell shared stories of having been threatened by the Bush and Reagan White Houses, respectively.  Andrea named names.  Scarborough did not.  H/t readers Ray R. and cobokat. View the video after the jump.

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."

On PBS's Charlie Rose show on Monday, as the group discussed the night's presidential debate, New York magazine's John Heilemann described Mitt Romney's past statements on foreign policy as "relatively harsh and relatively bellicose," as he argued that Romney had faced political "dangers" in his foreign policy positions "because he's been surrounded by some number of neo-conservative foreign policy advisors."

Seventeen days before Election Day and 45 months after Barack Obama's inauguration following a presidential campaign during which he expressed his eagerness to meet enemy leaders "without preconditions" (Obama responded "yes" to a 2008 presidential debate question containing those words), the New York Times is reporting that the U.S. and Iran "have agreed in principle for the first time to one-on-one negotiations," despite the fact that the White House has "denied that a final agreement (to negotiate) had been reached," and despite a reactive AP report (saved here for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes) claiming that while "The White House says it is prepared to talk one-on-one ... there's no agreement now to meet."

Despite the supposed certainty of the Times's headline ("U.S. Officials Say Iran Has Agreed to Nuclear Talks"), the paper's Helene Cooper and Mark Landler report that "American officials said they were uncertain whether Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had signed off on the effort." If Khamenei isn't on board, it doesn't matter what anybody else, including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, says or does. Three years ago, two AP reporters covering the government's crackdown on dissidents noted Khamenei's "virtually limitless authority," i.e., he's the country's behind-the-scenes dictator. In a piece that's supposed to be about a supposedly important international development, Cooper and Landler predictably blow through quite a bit of ink and bandwidth trying to paint this development as a problem for Obama's GOP opponent Mitt Romney (bolds are mine):

NBC's Tom Brokaw blasted Joe Biden's debate antics on Friday's Morning Joe. "I mean he just can't contain himself," note Brokaw. "And he's become a caricature on the talk shows."

"I just don't think you should be laughing during a discussion about thermonuclear war with Iran," Brokaw called out Biden, who repeatedly shook his head at opponent Paul Ryan while smiling and laughing. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

CNN's Piers Morgan just couldn't let his Republican guest denounce President Obama's foreign policy. He spouted the White House spin on all the President's accomplishments while not holding him accountable for the Libya fiasco, on his Monday night show.

"I would say one of the things that Barack Obama has done incredibly successfully is restore a lot of America's very damaged reputation around the world since the eight years of George Bush and all the warfare that came with it," claimed Morgan. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

What is Piers Morgan thinking? On Monday, he said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "makes perfect rational sense" when talking about broadly about "Afghanistan and Iraq and America's response to 9/11." On Wednesday night, he cast Ahmadinejad's UN speech as "for him, relatively low key, dare I say almost reasonable."

New York Times columnist Nick Kristof was quick to provide some context. "It was reasonable by Ahmadinejad standards," he noted. "Not by sort of normal conventional standards." [Video below the break. Audio here.]

At the top of Tuesday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams framed President Obama's  address to the United Nations as him getting tough on Iranian nuclear ambitions: "Drawing the line. The President today with a strong new warning to Iran, plus what he had to say about the recent violence against Americans."

In the report that followed, chief White House correspondent Chuck Todd touted that Obama  "appeared to draw a real line in the sand on Iran's effort to build nuclear weapons." Todd then sneered that "the President's strong words weren't enough to satisfy Mitt Romney."

In a pre-recorded interview with former President Bill Clinton aired on Tuesday's Piers Morgan Tonight, CNN host Morgan fawned over the former Democratic President and complained about the "God damned Twenty-Second Amendment" as he suggested that Clinton should be President "for the next 30 years."

In an interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, CNN's Piers Morgan asked him about his love life and got into an exchange with him about women not being able to ski by themselves in Iran.

"How many times in your life, Mr. President, have you been properly in love?" Morgan asked at the end of the interview. "I'm in love with all of humanity," answered Ahmadinejad, to which Morgan responded "That might be the best answer I've ever heard to that question." [Video below the break. Audio here.]

One might have thought that Charlie Rose received an extra dose of caffeine before Friday's CBS This Morning, as the normally-subdued anchor hounded Romney campaign adviser Dan Senor on how the Republican presidential nominee would change policy toward Iran. Rose wouldn't let Senor complete an answer, interrupting six different times in 50 seconds.  [audio available here; video below the jump]

By contrast, 11 days earlier, the veteran TV host tossed softballs at Democratic Senator Dick Durbin on the issue of ObamaCare, and merely prompted Durbin on the issue of the Chicago teachers strike.