MSNBC

[UPDATED: Video added] MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Thursday assailed John McCain, slamming the "boiling hatred" aimed at Chuck Hagel, Barack Obama's Defense Secretary nominee. Matthews sneered, "Hatred, pure and simple, seeped from the mouths of John McCain and Lindsay Graham as they slashed away at war hero Hagel." (McCain is also a war hero. Graham is a veteran. Are those with military experience only allowed to speak out if they agree with Matthews?)

Most ridiculously, Matthews whined, "Why can't politics be a matter of belief and honest disagreement, not hatred?" This coming from the man who has, more than once, compared his opponents to Nazis? This from a man whose show airs on a network that compared Rick Santorum to Stalin? The cable anchor ranted, "Badgering the witness is too nice a description of what went on today. The hawks swirled like buzzards sweeping down, pecking and pulling at the skin of a former colleague." [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

On today's Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough said that a Senior Fellow at the Independent Women's Forum testifying in favor of assault rifles looked "like a jackass."

Gayle Trotter, who holds undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Virginia and is the co-founder of a D.C. law firm, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday.  She argued that having an assault rifle could help a woman defend herself and her children against intruders. Immediately after playing a clip of her testimony, Scarborough said: "if you go out and try to defend assault weapons, then you end up looking like a jackass." Mika Brezezinski agreed: "I'm sorry, but that's true."  View the video after the jump.

It's a perilous proposition to insist that a long-dead historical figure would share your politics. It's doubly so when your documentary evidence is thin and you are twisting the proper meaning of the words in that supposed evidence. Take the case of MSNBC.com's Nick Ramsey, who insists that Abraham Lincoln would strongly disagreed with Justice Antonin Scalia that the U.S. Constitution is a dead document rather than a living constitution that can evolve outside the constitutionally-provided mechanism for such evolution: the amendment processes described in Article VII.

"This is an issue that constitutional experts have debated for years and years, but at least one president is firmly on the record on the issue. And this President is one often cited by conservatives, but he is not in agreement with Justice Scalia," Ramsey insisted, going on to quote Abraham Lincoln out of context and seemingly with a misunderstanding of a key word in the passage he cited. Here's how Ramsey dealt with that (emphases his):

Hours before the Senate Judiciary Committee held Newtown-inspired gun control hearings, MSNBC's Morning Joe program brought on former Playboy chairwoman and CEO Christie Hefner to warn that warmer weather in Chicago has been a contributing factor in the number of gun deaths in the Windy City.  "[W]e are having this climate change effect that is driving" young men in Chicago to commit 500 homicides in 2012 she insisted.

For his part, quasi-conservative host Joe Scarborough made no attempt to press Hefner on this outrageous claim, although he did mildly mock it. In doing so, however, he dismissed conservative bloggers with a lame stereotype:

For the third time in the past year, NBC News has been caught selectively editing video for political gain, with the most recent instance coming on the Monday, January 28 Martin Bashir program.  Bashir ran heavily edited video showing Neil Helsin, whose 6-year-old son was killed in the Newtown shooting, appearing to be heckled by audience members during a legislative hearing on gun control. The chorus of criticism from media critics on the right and left forced MSNBC to backtrack, but not apologize.

On the Wednesday, January 30 Bashir program, liberal fill-in host Ari Melber of The Nation magazine offered this ridiculous explanation:

Martin and many others who saw Mr. Heslin's testimony have called that interruption heckling. Some disagree. He wanted you to hear it in full so you can draw your own conclusion.  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]

On Monday’s edition of “Martin Bashir,” MSNBC ran footage of the testimony of Neil Heslin, the father of a Sandy Hook victim, in which it appears he is heckled by gun rights activists. MSNBC’s accompanying graphics box read “Mocked and Loaded. Sandy Hook Victim’s Father Heckled by Gun Rights Advocates.” In reality, Heslin was not heckled. He posed a challenge to the audience, and the audience responded. The MSNBC version deliberately cut out Heslin’s challenge to make it appear as though he was interrupted by heckling gun advocates.

"This is not how a legitimate, professional news organization operates," NewsBusters publisher and Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell complained in a statement released today. "MSNBC’s relentless anti-gun advocacy is bad enough, but this is downright dishonest. Time and time again NBC News has demonstrated why the American people can’t trust a single thing they say."

Leave it to NBC News’ liberal sister network MSNBC to continue to criticize Al Gore for his decision to sell Current TV to Al Jazeera, the Arab news network owned by the government of  Qatar.  Appearing on Morning Joe Wednesday morning, Al Gore was sharply criticized from the left by co-host Mika Brzezinski for selling his company to a network funded by oil. 

Speaking to Gore, Mika opened up the interview by asking him, “Is it okay, then, for you personally to -- I'd say profit from oil?”  Nowhere in the interview did Brzezinski or the rest of the panel -- including mildly conservative Joe Scarborough -- challenge Gore for selling Current TV to a network the airs strong anti-American viewpoints.   [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]

The liberal media's lovefest for Hillary Clinton continues apace. Andrea Mitchell’s  interview with the outgoing secretary of state will air today, but don’t expect to see many tough questions. We already know what Mitchell thinks about Clinton, based on a comment she made on Tuesday’s Andrea Mitchell Reports. Talking with MSNBC political analyst Ed Rendell, Mitchell declared of Clinton, “She has done such a job by everyone’s account as secretary of state.”

Except, of course, for that little Benghazi thing, which Mitchell acknowledged is Hillary’s major regret. And it’s a pretty big blight for someone who has done “such a job.” Such a job covering up the facts, maybe? Such a job misleading the American public about the nature of the attack? [See video below. MP3 audio here.]  

Marco Rubio's tough talk to Rush Limbaugh yesterday about no immigration deal being done unless certain language on border security, etc. is included?  Ignore it.  Just Rubio taking care of his conservative base—and saving face.  In the end, Rubio will likely give Obama his vote on immigration reform.  It's all about finding an out for Republicans when it comes to winning back a decent share of the Latino vote. And conservatives will be willing to take the deal.

Such was the collective wisdom of Morning Joe today, as enunciated by Jon Meacham and seconded by Joe Scarborough.  View the video after the jump.

As the immigration reform debate heats up in Washington, liberals seem to think that they have a free rein to say whatever they want against people who are skeptical of the proposals on the table.  That’s exactly what happened on this afternoon’s broadcast of Now with Alex Wagner, with MSNBC contributor and former Democratic National Committee communications director Karen Finney charging that the “crazy crackers on the right” would doom the GOP in this immigration debate. 

Yes, Finney used a derogatory, racist term for white people in a segment in which Republicans were chided for allegedly dehumanizing Hispanics with terms like "illegal immigrant" and "anchor babies." Of course, Finney, a board member of abortion lobby group NARAL Pro-Choice America knows a thing or two about dehumanizing innocents.

Leave it to MSNBC’s openly gay host Thomas Roberts to not let facts get in the way of a good story in service of pushing a pro-same-sex agenda.  On the January 29 edition of MSNBC Live, Roberts brought on a gay couple from Kentucky to promote their efforts to obtain a  marriage license in the Bluegrass State.

Roberts, who has segments nearly every day promoting gay marriage, began this segment in his typical biased manner:

I hate to criticize a fellow pilot, but when one engages in such sky-high hypocrisy, well . . .

On Morning Joe today, former Obama car czar Steve Rattner, a very successful hedge fund manager, decried "climate-change denier[s]." This is the same Rattner who, at last report, owned a "15,000-square-foot mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, to which [he] flies regularly on a Dassault Falcon 2000 jet [see file photo] he pilots himself."  Rattner wrung his hands over the fact that we're "putting millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every day." But just earlier this week, the New York Times ran a story entitled "Your Biggest Carbon Sin May Be Air Travel."  View the video after the jump.

It's a classic MSM tactic: delegitimize opposition to a liberal proposal.  Suggest that there can be no principled objections, only base motives.  

Take the current proposals on "the pathway to citizenship"—AKA amnesty—being floated.  On today's Morning Joe, Politico co-founder and executive editor Jim VandeHei proclaimed that it was probably "the right thing to do," but fretted that it would be easy to "demagogue."  View the video after the jump.

On the January 28 edition of his afternoon MSNBC program, Martin Bashir brought on liberal Democratic strategist Julian Epstein to talk about the left-wing’s favorite topic of late gun control.  As the interview progressed, Epstein made a comparison of the firearms industry to Big Tobacco, attacking firearms manufacturers for their role in sponsoring youth sporting events and publications like Junior Shooters.

This whole narrative was spawned from a ludicrous Sunday New York Times piece that basically said instructing kids in safe gun-handling is hazardous to their health.  As my NewsBusters colleague and MRC Times Watch director Clay Waters wrote today:

How big of an Obama lapdog is Andrea Mitchell?  Even bigger than ardent Obama fan Chris Hughes. The Facebook co-founder, who bought the New Republic last year, recently scored an interview with President Obama that has been criticized for its generally soft questioning.  But during an appearance on Mitchell's MSNBC show today, even Hughes was more candid about the prez than Mitchell.

When it came to the President's statement during the interview that at Camp David "we do skeet shooting all the time," Mitchell claimed "he didn't say that he was skeet shooting, but he does say that it's one of the practices at Camp David by his guests." Responding, Hughes effectively contradicted her: "Frank Foer, the editor of New Republic, actually asked him point blank 'have you ever fired a gun?' And in response he said "yeah, we go skeet shooting all the time up at Camp David. He and his guests.  Which is news to us and news to a lot of people."  The transcript of the interview makes clear that, contrary to Mitchell's claim, Obama answered in the personal and affirmative.  View the video after the jump.

On the January 25 broadcast of MSNBC’s The Cycle, 9/11 Truther and liberal commentator Touré Neblett “thank[ed] God” that abortion was there to save him from unwanted fatherhood with a girlfriend who was "just not the one."  "[I]n some ways that choice saved my life," the MSNBC host insisted in his closing commentary, seemingly remorseless for how that choice cost an innocent human being his or her life.

Noting that last Tuesday marked 40 years since the Supreme Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade,  Touré argued that there’s “something undeniably misogynist about the impulse to deny a woman's dominion over her own body and limit her ability to shape her life – and impose another sense of morality on her.”  So, when did respecting and protecting innocent life become “misogynist”?

In what has become a daily theme, once again, MSNBC is pushing a one-sided discussion on gun control.  Speaking on Monday, January 28 with Dan Gross, the President of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), host Thomas Roberts continued to lobby for congressional action for strict gun control. Naturally, Roberts failed to bring on a pro-gun rights advocate nor to feature one in a subsequent segment.

Roberts began the segment by hyping a New York Times article describing:

Some gun groups were seeking to, quote, introduce children to high powered rifles and handguns while invoking the same rationale of those older, more traditional programs that firearms can teach life skills like responsibility, ethics, and citizenship.

It's hardly a secret.  After all, in a letter to a senior officer, no less than a young Bill Clinton openly admitted that many of his cohort  "loath[ed] the military." Still, it's stunning to hear a modern-day liberal make a similar admission.

On her MSNBC show today, Melissa Harris-Perry stated that the U.S. military is "despised as an engine of war by many progressives."  View the video after the jump.

Leave it to MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts to attempt to smear the pro-life movement on the day of the March for Life with a misleading story about a law introduced in New Mexico regarding abortion. Roberts erroneously reported on a New Mexico state legislator named Cathrynn Brown, who, “introduced a bill that would force rape victims to carry their babies to term and their babies would be used as evidence during a court trial… Under the bill, a rape victim who had an abortion would be thrown in jail for tampering with evidence.”

Roberts brought on Pat Davis, the Executive Director of Progress Now in New Mexico to bash the bill, which, by the way, Roberts completely mischaracterized. What the bill actually would do is make it a crime for a rapist to pressure his victim into undergoing an abortion.  [See video after jump.  MP3 audio here.]

In a segment this morning discussing the breaking news that a panel of judges on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia unanimously ruled that some of President Obama's recess appointments had been made in an unconstitutional manner, MSNBC's Thomas Roberts turned to network contributor and former Democratic Senate staffer Jimmy Williams for his reaction.

Williams conceded the the court had ruled correctly, but rather than chiding the president for violating his oath of office with unconstitutional appointments, he blamed Senate Republicans for driving Mr. Obama to do so. For his part, Roberts agreed, mumbling "mm hmm" in reply to the ex-lobbyist's partisan swipe [MP3 audio here; video follows page break]:

Joe Scarborough was a voice in the politically-correct wilderness this morning on the subject of women in combat.  On today's Morning Joe, as other panelists voiced unerring if occasionally cautious support for the Pentagon's decision to permit women in combat, Scarborough sounded a stern warning note.

"I'll be damned; if we find out that the Pentagon is lowering standards for politically-correct reasons, then you know what? Then the blood of dead Americans in future battles will be on their hands." View the video after the jump.

Today is the 40th annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., a day that is likely to pass with limited, if any, notice from a national news media which is hostile to the pro-life cause. While the abortion issue has divided Americans for the past four decades, journalists have consistently come down on the pro-abortion side of this debate.

It’s a bias some reporters freely admit. “I think that when abortion opponents complain about a bias in newsrooms against their cause, they’re absolutely right,” Boston Globe legal reporter Ethan Bronner told the Los Angeles Times back in 1990. “Opposing abortion, in the eyes of most journalists...is not a legitimate, civilized position in our society.”

If you’ve ever watched MSNBC’s Politics Nation w/ Al Sharpton, you know that it is a bizarre hour-long program disguised as serious political analysis.  Host Reverend Al Sharpton, who hammed it up last year with his ‘Revvie Awards’ aimed at trashing GOP politicians, has a new segment entitled "Science Lab" where he criticizes Republicans as supposedly anti-science.

Sharpton began the January 23 segment by lumping in skepticism about manmade global warming with the likes of disgraced Congressman Todd Akin as a way to demonize conservatives.  Sharpton hilariously opened his segment by saying:

Joe Scarborough has said that he doesn't know whether Morning Joe member Willie Geist is a Democrat or a Republican.  I'd say Willie leans left on social issues but is not reflexively liberal on other matters.  Today, with Scarborough absent from the Morning Joe set, Geist actually rode to the defense of Rand Paul.

The Republican Senator from Kentucky has been taking heat from Dems over telling Hillary Clinton at yesterday's Benghazi hearings that had he been president, he would have fired her for her handling of the matter.  Panelist Donny Deutsch made a predictable attack, calling Paul "pathetic, amateur hour" and an "idiot."  But Geist weighed in to say that Paul "had a right to challenge" Clinton, and that he's "not supposed to just sit there and celebrate her," and that he was "doing his job."  View the video after the jump.

Ah, that obsessive devotion to facts remains rigorous and unshakable.

Anchoring her network's coverage of President Obama's second inauguration, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow describes an aspect of the event that few people notice, aside from keen observers like her. (video clip after page break)

It was a metaphysical certitude that America's media were going to gush and fawn over Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's testimony before Congress Wednesday as they mercilessly attacked any Senator or Representative having the gall to ask her tough questions about what happend at our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last year.

Playing his part was MSNBC's Chris Matthews who on Hardball moments after the hearing ended said of Senator Ron Johnson's (R-Wisc.) exchange with Clinton, "That was kind of a pissant performance" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In a January 23 interview at MediaBistro, MSNBC NewsNation host Tamron Hall addressed the (accurate) perception that her program is not exactly objective journalism. Asked by MediaBistro about whether CNN's attempt to be "objective" was dragging it down in the ratings or if the left-leaning MSNBC was simply a better news network, Hall insisted that the primetime news coverage was definitely opinion based but that "That's not what we do on NewsNation.... [F]or me, our show is not an opinion show, but it's not a show that's afraid of opinions." [h/t TV Newser]

Hall is unafraid of divergent opinions? That's a good one. Someone should tell conservative columnist Tim Carney, whom Hall chewed out on air on her May 11, 2012 program, ultimately cutting off his microphone for daring to challenge the network's liberal bias. As my colleague Scott Whitlock reported at the time (emphasis his):

Leave it to Obama-boosting MSNBC to carry water for the Obama administration over the terrorist attack on our consulate in Benghazi.  Speaking with Congressman Chris Smith (R-N.J) on her MSNBC program Wednesday afternoon -- prior to Smith's committee's hearing with Clinton but following this morning's Senate hearing -- Ms. Mitchell spouted off numerous White House talking points to excuse Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s failure to secure our embassy in Benghazi. 

Mitchell’s regurgitation of Obama/Clinton talking points comes just hours after she claimed Clinton had a “stellar term” as Secretary of State.  The segment began with Congressman Smith outlining his expectations for Ms. Clinton’s testimony: