Bob Woodward

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward on Wednesday said “tax returns are a character issue.”

This occurred during a lengthy Morning Joe discussion about – what else? - Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s taxes (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Liberal author Bob Woodward confessed last week that Al Gore told him the American public knows just "one percent" of what went on during Bill Clinton's presidency. Speaking to the Organization for International Investment's dinner on Thursday, the longtime author admitted that this fact didn't sit well with him: "I kind of died inside and have to confess to having an unclean thought."

Woodward also bashed Gore. According to The Hill, he didn't enjoy sitting next to the former Vice President at a previous event: "Now, sitting next to Gore is taxing...In fact, it’s unpleasant."

Millions of Americans are out of work, some of them for several years.

Yet the Washington Post's Bob Woodward said on the Chris Matthews Show this weekend that Barack Obama's top priority is getting reelected (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Bob Woodward thinks the world doesn't hold the United States in very high regard anymore.

Appearing on the syndicated "Chris Matthews Show" this weekend, the Washington Post's most recognizable journalist said, "I’m not sure the United States has been looked at as the grown-up nation for a long time...You travel around the world a little bit, and, and there’s, there’s not even tough love for the United States" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

There certainly has been a lot of interesting comments made by the Obama-loving media this week following last Sunday's successful raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan.

One of the most surprising came from the Washington Post's Bob Woodward who told "Meet the Press" host David Gregory, "Being holed up in that compound was smug. It was raising a middle finger to the United States and saying, 'Hey, look, we're hiding right under your nose'" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Appearing on Wednesday's "Morning Joe," Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward dismissed the significance of the accession of Rep. John Boehner to the post of Speaker of the House of Representatives, saying that Presodent Obama's inauguration dwarfed Boehner's.

Politico's Mike Allen had reported that Capitol Hill had "the air of a Presidential Inauguration" Wednesday with a new Speaker of the House and 87 new Republican congressmen coming in. A few minutes later, Woodward tempered Allen's enthusiasm.

"I think Mike Allen's one of the best in the business, but to compare the Boehner coming to the Speakership with the Presidential Inaugural – four busloads, Mike? I mean, for Obama, for any president – c'mon, they had hundreds of busloads."

A former ambassador to Afghanistan said Sunday that revelations in Bob Woodward's book "Obama's Wars" were "far more damaging" to U.S.-Afghani relations than what recently was released by WikiLeaks.

Speaking to Christiane Amanpour on the Roundtable segment of ABC's "This Week," the following statement by Zalmay Khalilzad is sure to raise some eyebrows in our nation's capital (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Bob Woodward on Sunday tried to excuse Barack Obama's ineffectiveness by claiming his "day is crazy" with "so many meetings, so many outings, so many handshakes, and so many trips to Ohio and here."

Having previously scolded "Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer for asking a "bulls--t question," Ronald Reagan biographer Edmund Morris countered, "Yeah, but presidents have plenty of spare time" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

 On Sunday’s syndicated Chris Matthews Show, panel member Katty Kay of the BBC claimed that Vice President Dick Cheney had convinced 70 percent of Americans to believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, and that he "hoodwinked the American public." Kay’s accusation came as host Matthews had turned the discussion to the topic of how President Obama might have handled the response to the 9/11 attacks differently than President Bush.

Bob Woodward of the Washington Post asserted that "there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq until we invaded, and then they came." But, as previously documented by NewsBusters, before the 2003 invasion, varous news sources - some American, some from other countries - were already citing the governments of several countries as they reported that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, not only was already in Iraq plotting attacks against targets in Europe, but that he already had an association with Osama bin Laden and had spent time in Afghanistan.

Kay then chimed in, as she suggested that Cheney had convinced most Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks, although she seemed to mistakenly use the word "Iraq" instead of "9/11." Kay: "But the, sort of, political ‘extraordinaryness’ of the Bush administration was that Cheney managed to convince 70 percent of American people that Iraq was, that Saddam Hussein was directly behind Iraq and hoodwinked the American public."

Matthews responded: "In the polling, you’re right, it’s in the polling."

In a preview of President Obama's upcoming 60 Minutes interview on Friday's CBS Early Show, correspondent Steve Kroft is shown commiserating with the commander-in-chief over midterm election losses: "People have made the argument you lost control of the narrative, you've let other people define you, that you haven't sold your successes well enough."

Kroft was understanding as he lamented Obama's political problems: "People who were among your most ardent supporters...feel a little disappointed, that they think that you've lost your mojo, that you lost your ability, that touch you had during the campaign to inspire and lead." He noted how "everybody in Washington writes about this sort of aloofness that you have. And I'm sure that drives you crazy."  

How much in the tank for Democrats would you have to be as a mainstream media member to say on national television that Hillary Clinton is one of the best Secretaries of State this nation has ever had?

Or that Joe Biden is one of the best Vice Presidents?

Well that's what liberal radio host Bill Press told Ed Schultz Wednesday on MSNBC's "The Ed Show."

Not surprisingly, the host didn't bat an eye (video follows with transcript and commentary): 

In an interview with 'Obama's Wars' author Bob Woodward on Wednesday's CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith sought to defend the President's uncertainty on Afghanistan: "...when he takes over they're already in this war for seven years and what he was not going to do...was give the military a blank check in an open-ended deal, say, 'go do your best.'"

Moments before that comment, Smith spun severe division in the White House over the war this way: "...these folks are infused with ambition and intelligence and have lots of things at stake and there really is quite a lot of friction among them all, as they're theoretically trying to get to the same place." Woodward replied: "I mean, it's intense....so much is unsettled. The President's committed to 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan. But, in these secret meetings in the Situation Room in the White House, he repeatedly says, 'we need a plan to get out. There can be no wiggle room. I'm not going to do ten years.'"

The Washington Post reporter then observed: "[Obama] is out of Afghanistan psychologically and the question is, for a commander in chief, don't you have to be kind of the guy who's up there, 'Yes, we can. We're going to win.'?" At that point, Smith ran to Obama's defense with the "blank check" remark.

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 what Obama really believes about Afghanistan. Speaking of the surge, he quizzed, "And it appears in many, many scenes throughout this book that the President is approving of a compromise that he doesn't fully believe in."

Stephanopoulos quoted Woodward's colleague at the Washington Post, David Ignatius, as saying that the President should not "ask young men and women to die" for something he doesn't believe in. Woodward responded by defending, "He is an intellectual, as we know. He's the law professor...And so, intellectually, he realizes [that the situation is] real, real, hard. He knows as commander in chief, he has to do something."

Acting as if President Barack Obama is uniquely burdened by the responsibility of protecting the nation from a terrorist attack or overseeing a war, Diane Sawyer and Bob Woodward marveled at how he’s taken on the job despite the terrible world George W. Bush left for him, in awe of his recognition that terrorists setting off a nuclear device in U.S. city would be a “game changer” and how he dictated “a six-page document” outlining Afghan war strategy – a level of presidential engagement never before seen in “American history.”

Setting up an eight-minute segment on Monday’s World News pegged to Woodward's Obama's Wars book (an abridged version ran later on Nightline), Sawyer relayed how “Woodward said, quote, ‘the saber-rattling Bush administration had not prepared for some of the worst case scenarios, ones the new President was handed in the Oval Office.’”

As if the terrorist threat was unknown, Woodward empathized with Obama: “Imagine the high of being elected on that Tuesday and then they come in two days later and say, ‘by the way, here are the secrets. It's a drumbeat. They're coming. They're planning. They're plotting. They're communicating.’”

As the Media Research Center reported last month, there are some truly sick, hate-mongering liberal radio hosts in America today, and one of the most disgusting is Mike Malloy.

On Friday, this vile miscreant with a microphone said on the air that Liz Cheney should be planning her father's funeral rather than offering her opinions to the American people.

This comes three months after Malloy told his listeners that he hoped former Vice President Dick Cheney would die in the hospital. 

On this day, the subject was Liz's comment concerning a Barack Obama quote about America being able to absorb a terrorist attack referenced in Bob Woodward's new book (video follows with partial transcript and commentary, h/t Right Scoop):

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, Mark Halperin of Time and formerly with ABC News, hailed President Barack Obama: “He's done, I think, an extraordinary job running the government...under difficult circumstances. He managed the economic crisis and kept the world from going into a depression...” The co-author of the new book, ‘Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime,’ however, didn’t see everything as rosy: “The problem has been is he's not inspired the country to feel a sense of optimism and renewal and to be unified in a bipartisan way.”

During the same roundtable, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward rejected the notion Obama is any kind of a “European socialist,” taking on Charles Krauthammer’s characterization: 

There was a column The Washington Post Friday in which Charles Krauthammer tried to essentially say he is a European-style socialist because of health care and he's trying to do these other things. Now, I'm trying to do a book on President Obama, and calling him a European socialist is just not even in the ballpark...

Actually, Krauthammer never used the term “socialist” as he contended Obama wishes “to introduce a powerful social democratic stream into America's deeply and historically individualist polity” and the 2008 election “was not an endorsement of European-style social democracy. “

On Sunday’s Meet the Press roundtable, Mark Halperin of Time denounced Republicans for not repudiating Rush Limbaugh’s "outrageous" remarks on how President Obama would use Haiti to his political advantage. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post attacked "slasher" and "chainsaw" partisanship, and insisted the idea that Obama’s first year doesn’t bode well for his political future is...."crap." Halperin also insisted that Team Obama’s Haiti response was extraordinary, both in reality and in public relations:

HALPERIN: I think they're dealing with it extraordinarily well from a mechanical point of view, from a public relations point of view. But it's going to involve two things going forward, I think. One is continued execution for what Bob suggested, which is getting more stuff there. And I think it's also an opportunity for the president to try to keep the country together.

The two former presidents, Clinton and Bush, come together, but we see Rush Limbaugh say something outrageous and not a lot of repudiation from Republicans in Congress or others to say, "This is unacceptable. It's a time when the American people are showing our best to help, not a time for that kind of--to try to take partisan...(unintelligible)."

Former Democratic operative turned Good Morning America co-host George Stephanopoulos prompted guest Bob Woodward on Monday to repeat Democratic spin that Barack Obama is doing more to fight terrorism than George Bush did.

The famous D.C. journalist backed up claims first made by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Woodward asserted, "...It's very clear that the new administration is taking a very aggressive stance on these matters and are, perhaps, even more than the Bush administration, doing more about the al Qaeda sanctuaries in places like Yemen."

Stephanopoulos chimed in: "In fact, they had 53 drone strikes over the last year, more than the entire Bush administration." The GMA host and Woodward were discussing the attempted Christmas day airline bombing in Detroit. Responding to Dick Cheney’s assertion that the President want to "pretend we aren’t at war," Stephanopoulos queried Woodward: "The President has been pushing back very hard against that notion. Bottom line, who's got the better argument here?"

The roundtable members on Sunday's This Week derided or dismissed Sarah Palin, with David Brooks, the putative conservative columnist for the New York Times, declaring “she's a joke” and insisting “Republican primary voters just are not going to elect a talk show host” -- leaving it to PBS's Gwen Ifill, of all people, to come to her defense as a fellow woman.[MP3 audio available here]

Left-winger David Corn yearned for how she will damage Republicans while the Washington Post's Bob Woodward agreed with Brooks and George Will wondered: “Some conservatives think they have found in Sarah Palin a Republican William Jennings. Why they would want somebody who lost the presidency three times I do not know.”

The derogatory take from David Books on the November 15 This Week with George Stephanopoulos on ABC:

Yeah, she's a joke. I mean, I just can't take her seriously. We've got serious problems in the country. Barack Obama's trying to handle war. We just had a guy elected Virginia Governor who's probably the model for the future of the Republican Party, Bob McDonnell. Pretty serious guy, pragmatic, calm, kind of boring. The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the Republican nomination, believe me, it will never happen. Republican primary voters just are not going to elect a talk show host.

Susan Crawford's recent assertions of torture simply do not add up, and your main stream media isn't going to investigate anytime soon.  Had Crawford made an assertion that there was unequivocally no torture to speak of at Guantanamo, the media would be sifting meticulously through her statements with a fine-toothed comb, smearing her reputation at every turn.  Instead, her arguments seemingly confirm what the leftist media has long assumed - that our government has condoned torture tactics - and because of that, everything is taken at face value.

Crawford recently told Bob Woodward of the Washington Post that: 

"We tortured (Mohammed al-) Qahtani.  His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

The basic premise of this story however, had apparently been completely refuted in retrospect, back in February of 2008.  By whom?  Why, the Washington Post.

On February 12th, 2008, the Post printed an article titled:

U.S. to Try 6 on Capital Charges Over 9/11 Attacks

New Evidence Gained Without Coercive Tactics

You read that correctly, the staff writers went out of their way to inform the public that the evidence against the 9/11 conspirators was ‘gained without coercive tactics.'

Although most media members used the occasion of Mark Felt's death on December 18 to praise the former FBI official better known as "Deep Throat," George Friedman of the geopolitical intelligence organization Stratfor warned readers about journalists becoming "tools of various factions in political disputes" as well as "the relationship between security and intelligence organizations and governments in a Democratic society." 

As Friedman indicated, Felt is a pop hero to media members across the fruited plain.

The Associated Press called him an "inspiration to a generation of investigative journalists" the day after his death. The Washington Post wrote days later, "Without a single byline he inspired thousands and thousands of campus misfits to get journalism degrees."

Unlike an adoring press that's always interested in the next gotcha story regardless of the consequences, Friedman, ever the concerned citizen looking out for America's national security interests, didn't write about Felt's role in the Watergate scandal with such glowing praise (emphasis added throughout, h/t many NBers):

On Sunday’s CBS Face the Nation, host Bob Schieffer discussed the challenges President-elect Barack Obama will face with liberal authors: "Today we ask the authors of four of the year's most important books to assess the problems the new administration will face." Schieffer asked the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, author of ‘The War Within: A Secret White House History,’ about Obama picking Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, Woodward replied: "It's an amazing national security team that Obama appears to have selected. It's kind of like 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears.' You've got too cool, which might be -- or at least appropriately cool, General Jones as the national security adviser; Gates is kind of just right, in the middle; and Hillary Clinton, hot."

Schieffer later turned to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, author of ‘The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals,’ and asked: "...your fascinating book, 'The Dark Side,' tells how the current vice president, Richard Cheney, amassed power unknown to any vice president in our history. I'd like to ask you first, how did he do that? And do you see Joe Biden having the kind of power?" Mayer replied: "it takes a president like Bush to have a vice president like Cheney. Obama, so far, seems to be so much more involved in the details and in kind of wanting to command the policies all the way up and down, really -- so I don't see it repeating." Mayer then went on to compare the Bush and Obama administrations:

Another difference that's very important is that both the president coming in and the vice president are lawyers, and one of the things that happened in the last administration was neither of them were. They were not constitutional scholars and they enacted policies that -- including legalizing torture for all purposes -- that really were not constitutional. And I don't think we're going to see that again. This is a -- this is a group of people who -- and the secretary of state is also a lawyer now. These people respect the law, I think.

While interviewing Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward on Sunday’s 60 Minutes about his latest book on the Bush Administration’s handling of the Iraq war, The War Within, anchor Scott Pelley described how: "Another part of that story, according to Woodward, is the president's frustration with the attitude of the Iraqi people." Woodward explained: "He has a meeting at the Pentagon with a bunch of experts and he just said, 'I don't understand that the Iraqis are not appreciative of what we've done for them,' namely liberating them." Pelley then asked: "But tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis had been killed in the invasion and through the occupation. He didn't understand why they might be a little ungrateful about what had occurred to them?"

Woodward replied by skeptically explaining President Bush’s perspective: "His beacon is liberation. He thinks we've done this magnificent thing for them. I think he still holds to that position." Earlier in the interview, Pelley seemed to imply that Bush was almost bloodthirsty, wanting know how many enemy had been killed each day: "Mr. Bush told Woodward that he was frustrated with his commanders and asked for enemy body counts so he could keep score." Woodward described: "And this is Bush's concern that we're not going out and killing. In fact, [General George] Casey told one colleague privately that the president's view is almost reflective of ‘kill the bastards, kill the bastards, and that way we'll succeed.’"

No journalists in the last thirty years have built more of a legend than the old Washington Post pairing of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. As the Watergate wrecking crew that put Richard Nixon in the scrap yard, they are America’s most venerated “icons” of investigative reporting.

But since that event, the paths of Woodward and Bernstein have separated dramatically. Woodward is still considered the top-dog journalist in Washington, a titan no president can ignore if he cares about his historical legacy, or his short-term political standing.  By contrast, Bernstein has bounced around to cushy media jobs, at ABC, and at Time magazine, rarely distinguishing himself, with a mere fraction of Woodward’s celebrity aura.

If George W. Bush had gone to law school and later flunked the bar exam, you can imagine that fact would have become a virtual part of his name in the MSM, as in "George Bush, who failed the bar exam, today criticized a law that . . ."

But it came as news to me when Carl Bernstein mentioned on this morning's "Today" that Hillary flunked the Washington, DC bar exam back in the '70s. OK, I'm not the most knowledegable guy, and the fact of Hillary's failure is not news -- after years of hiding the embarrassment, she revealed it, en passant, in her ghostwritten 2003 "autobiography." Note: according to that book, during the same period Hillary took and passed the Arkansas bar exam.  The pass rate in Arkansas was considerably higher than in DC.

Over on The Corner, Byron York is puzzled over why Libby's lawyers wouldn't choke on the many conflicts of blabby juror Denis Collins, the former Washington Post staffer who worked for Bob Woodward, partied with Walter Pincus, shared a back yard with Tim Russert, not to mention the book-writing about the CIA:

From the day Denis Collins appeared in jury selection, reporters asked themselves one question: How did this guy get on the jury? From his account at the Huffington Post, he recounts telling the court about his many, almost unbelievable, conflicts:

A sickeningly common theme asserted by media members around the country is that Iraq is “Bush’s war,” and that Democrats who voted for the resolution in October 2002 have no responsibility because they were supposedly misled by a president from a different political party.

Well, a fascinating event transpired on Sunday’s “Chris Matthews Show” as one high-ranking media member – the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward – fervently refuted this disingenuous media myth. And, maybe more shocking, CBS’s Gloria Borger agreed with him.

The panel was discussing the recent nonbinding resolutions voted on in Congress, when Bob Woodward said something that few in the media would dare utter with cameras rolling:

The Boston Herald reports that hundreds of journalists hungry for advancement have sent in resumés to become Bob Woodward's assistant. Making up facts to fit a preestablished narrative a plus. Also, like Mark Felt, you have to do all the work but give all the credit to Woodward.

Last October, Dante Chinni wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that Bob Woodward has an uncanny knack for finding quotes to match any narrative, even if it contradicts one of his earlier narratives.

You may not be Carl Bernstein, but that doesn’t mean you can’t work with Bob Woodward.

The legendary journalist is currently looking for a new assistant and took the unusual step of advertising on Web sites like journalismjobs.com.