Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

On Sunday's Meet the Press on NBC, as guest Rick Santorum criticized President Obama because he refused to support a democracy movement in Iran that might have weakened the anti-America radical Muslim government of Tehran, but, by contrast, supported a democracy movement in Egypt directed against a pro-America government - which resulted in an election that recently handed more power in Cairo to radical Muslims - host David Gregory accused the GOP presidential candidate of being "patently contradictory." (Video below)

As he moved into the foreign policy portion of the interview, Gregory brought up a recent speech in which Santorum accused President Obama of engaging in "appeasement" against America's enemies,  and then the NBC host defended Obama's foreign policy:

As NewsBusters has been reporting for days, the Obama-loving media have been doing a collective victory lap concerning the President's appeasement retort "Go ask Osama bin Laden."

When CNN's Candy Crowley tried this during her interview with Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Sunday's State of the Union, she got a much-needed education that would help all her foreign policy-challenged colleagues in the press (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):

After his much-publicized interview with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week, CNN's Fareed Zakaria thinks America has to change its attitude towards one of its biggest enemies.

On Fareed Zakaria GPS Sunday, the host began the show declaring "Obama's Iran policy looks a lot like George W. Bush's - pressure and more pressure," and that "Obama should return to his original approach and test the Iranians to see if there is any room for dialogue and agreement" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

As the media did a victory lap over Friday's announcement by President Obama that all American troops would be removed from Iraq by the end of the year, Fareed Zakaria took a surprisingly contrary position.

Speaking from Tehran with a variety of CNN hosts throughout the day, Zakaria said this development was a disappointment for the United States and a victory for Iran (video follows with transcript and commentary):

In stark contrast to NBC, Good Morning America co-host George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday hit Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with tough questions, pressing the Iranian President on whether he was in control of his government and on his rough handling of protesters.

Regarding 2009 crackdowns on personal freedoms, the ABC anchor pointedly asked, "You referred to the protesters as dust and dirt. Do you regret using that term?" On September 12, when Today co-host Ann Curry spent the day with Ahmadinejad, she wondered, "What is your primary motivation, as president? Why do you work so hard?" She also pointed out his "grueling schedule."

Monday's NBC Today featured co-host Ann Curry live in Tehran doing a fawning "day in the life" profile of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. At one point, Curry noted the dictator's "grueling schedule" and wondered: "What is your primary motivation, as president? Why do you work so hard?" [Audio available here]

From beginning to end, Curry's report sounded more like propaganda on Iranian state television rather than a legitimate news story. She sympathetically declared: "A hard-driving schedule is the norm his aides say, claiming he sleeps just three hours a night and that his days often stretch to 2:00 a.m. They say even Iran's supreme leader has advised him to sleep more."

It appears that at NPR, even a fat lip for the President is to be heralded as a crowning achievement furthering his prestige and street cred when dealing with despots like Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

According to Scott Simon, a president with a "gnarly, vivid scar" might even be able to intimidate China's rulers into halting their currency manipulation (audio follows with partial transcript and commentary):

Good Morning America's Jim Sciutto on Friday suggested Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an example of a human rights "advocate" opposed to the execution of a woman in Virginia. The odd aside came from just one day after the Iranian leader blamed the United States for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Sciutto related the details of Teresa Lewis, who was executed on Thursday for plotting to kill her husband and stepson.

The ABC reporter then asserted, "But advocates, from crime novelist John Grisham, to Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, even to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, questioned whether she deserved the death penalty." [MP3 audio here.]

On the eve of the one year anniversary of the most recent Iranian presidential election, the Web site for The New Republic gave space to Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) to lament the Obama administration's feckless response to the corrupt Iranian regime's crackdown on protesters and its continued quest for nuclear weapons and terrorist sponsorship under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In response two days later, Time's Joe Klein resorted to his typical petulant bluster to berate the generally liberal magazine and divert attention from the real issue of Obama's leadership:

The New Republic perplexes me. It has some of the best and smartest writing around. And then it allows John McCain, whose lack of knowledge about Iran is encyclopedic, to hold forth in its pages.

Klein's June 13 Swampland blog post at Time.com focused on one brief excerpt of McCain's item, launching into how he felt McCain was not nuanced enough and hence lacks credibility to address the issue:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad  and Industries Minister Ali Akbar.  February 7, 2010.  Photo Reuters/Raheb Homavandi

With each passing day, more and more media members are taking shots at the Obama administration's strategy of attacking Fox News.

On Sunday, one of the best observations yet came from Marisa Guthrie of Broadcasting & Cable magazine: "[Obama] can talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but he can't talk to Chris Wallace."

Such was stated on CNN's "Reliable Sources" after host Howard Kurtz played a video of Rahm Emanuel saying just a few minutes earlier that Fox isn't a news organization because it has a perspective (video embedded below the fold with partial transcript):

On Wednesday’s NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams made an observation about the United Nations General Assembly meeting one normally does not expect to hear from the mainstream media, as he remarked that the gathering at one point looked like the "bar scene in Star Wars." After a report by Andrea Mitchell which focused on the "bizarre speech" by Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi, and which also mentioned the presence of "international pariahs" like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez, Williams commented on the "circus atmosphere" as he introduced NBC News political director Chuck Todd. Williams:

We’ve seen this kind of a circus atmosphere here inside the U.N. ... And, Chuck, for a while, it did look like the bar scene in Star Wars, except that the stakes are so high.

Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh has famously made such a comparison on his show over the years. Below is a complete transcript of the relevant portion of the Wednesday, September 23, NBC Nightly News:

[Update, 7:30 pm Eastern: Audio and video clips added.]

On CBS’s Late Late Show Tuesday night, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour again claimed that she was a nonpolitical entity: “I know it’s very fashionable and trendy to wear your politics on your sleeve right now, but I just don’t.” When host Craig Ferguson favorably compared her to the late Walter Cronkite, Amanpour gushed, “He was so special. I think we really will miss him” [audio clips from the interview are available here].

Towards the end of the interview, at about 22 minutes into the 1 am Eastern hour, Ferguson asked her if she about her political stance, specifically in the context of her native Iran: “What about you and politics though? Do you find yourself in accord with Ahmadinejad?” The CNN chief international correspondent tossed a question back at him: “What do you think?” When the CBS host joked that he didn’t view her as “a big Ahmadinejad-i,” Amanpour replied with her claim of objectivity: “You know...I know it’s very fashionable and trendy to wear your politics on your sleeve right now, but I just don’t.” Ferguson complimented her, but she continued that “I feel- to be very honest with you, that- that if I went and- and treated every story through my own political lens, then how is anybody to know what’s- what’s true? Or at least as close to the objective truth.”

A search of Nexis shows that, from June 13-20, the Washington Post printed about 39 articles and columns pertaining to the fraudulent June 12 Iranian election, including nine page A1 stories. Some of the front page stories dealt with the Obama administration's response to the developments, such as Glenn Kessler's June 18 piece, "U.S. Struggling to Right Response to Iran."

Fast forward nearly a month later to July 15. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton essentially tells the Council on Foreign Relations that the right response is to nag Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about the Obama administration's determination to sit down with him.

Yes,the Iranian protests may have temporarily "shifted" the push for direct talks with Iran, but President Obama's offer still stands. After all, Clinton noted, the Obama foreign policy shop is committed to "a more flexible and pragmatic posture" with Iran.

Keeping in mind that the Iranian election is still hotly disputed inside that country -- opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi won't concede to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- reporting the story on the front page of the next day's paper could reasonably be expected. Failing that, a story in "The World" section (pp. A8-A13) would also be appropriate.

Yet the Washington Post today did neither, failing to carry the story. Here's how CNN.com reported Clinton's remarks in a story filed the afternoon of July 15 (emphasis mine):

If beating dead horses were an Olympic event, Joe Klein would have more medals gracing his neck than Michael Phelps.

On his magazine's Swampland blog, the Time columnist returned to his latest overwrought left-wing pandering point: labeling hardliner President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the Iranian version of George W. Bush:

The protesters admire our freedom, but they are appalled--and insulted--by our neocolonialist condescension over the past 50 years. The reformers, and even some conservatives, consider Ahmadinejad the George W. Bush of Iran--a crude, unsophisticated demagogue, who puts a strong Potemkin face to the world without very much knowledge of what the rest of the world is about. This was an anology [sic] that came up in interview after interview, with reformers and conservatives alike.

Klein doesn't explicitly reference the "axis of evil" remarks  in then-President Bush's 2002 State of the Union address as an offense, although he quite probably has it in mind. Yet a review of the relevant passage from that speech shows Bush was dead-on and arguably eerily prophetic about the iron-fisted repression that the world is witness to presently on the streets of Tehran (portion in bold is my emphasis):

It struck me, in reading this AP dispatch from Tehran by Nasser Karimi and William J. Kole, that the political and media establishment has, in the two decades since the death of the very visible Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, allowed Ali Hoseyni Khamenei, his successor as the Supreme Leader of Iran, to fade comfortably into the background, while still pulling all the meaningful levers of power in that country.

Only now, with Tehran in turmoil, and of all things during an attempted media blackout, do we directly learn from Karimi and Kole that election winners are in most meaningful ways mere puppets who serve at Khamenei's pleasure, and that the elections themselves are mere spectacles designed to convince the populace, and perhaps more importantly the West, that Iran, though Islamic fundamentalist to the core, is still somehow a sort-of democratic country.

It is, of course, anything but that. I daresay that most in the West, up to and including many politicians and establishment media elites, and even presidential candidates, haven't even the faintest appreciation of this fact.

In their report, Karimi and Kole communicated the essence of Iran's reality in one concise phrase, referring to "the virtually limitless authority of the country's most powerful figure." Now they tell us.

Unnoticed in the recent upheaval surrounding the fallout from the Iranian elections earlier this month has been how it could affect the price of oil, and therefore the price of gas. And according to Fox Business Network "Happy Hour" co-host Eric Bolling, the longer this goes, the more likely you'll see it at the gas pump.

Bolling appeared on the Fox News Channel's "Your World with Neil Cavuto" on June 19 and explained how events in Iran, the world's fourth largest oil-producing nation, would have a lagging impact on the price at the pump.

"Now think of this - it takes about 45 days to take a barrel of oil, run it through a refinery and hit the pump, the price at the pump," Bolling said. "So knowing this, for the next two or three weeks, at least, at minimum, pump prices will continue to rise. It may go down a penny or two here, but in general they'll continue to rise."

On Thursday evening, the CBS Evening News and the NBC Nightly News presented opposite takes on whether Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi is really a moderate, or whether he is actually about as extreme and dangerous as current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. CBS’s Mark Phillips argued that Mousavi is merely more moderate in "tone" than Ahmadinejad while taking similar policy positions, while NBC’s Richard Engel played up Mousavi as a real alternative to Ahmadinejad. CBS News substitute anchor Maggie Rodriguez introduced Phillips’s report: "Mir Hossein Mousavi insists he won the presidential election there, only to have it stolen from him. He's been cast as an outsider, anxious for reform. But as Mark Phillips reports, that's not exactly the case."

After beginning his report contending that "Mir Hossein Mousavi is neither a champion of democracy as we know it, nor an advocate of great change within Iran's mullah-dominated government," Phillips further argued that Mousavi would bring little substantive policy difference to the presidency:

In the midst of his June 16 Swampland blog screed leveled against the "unhinged" Sen. John McCain for his criticism of President Obama's low-key response to the Iranian election, Time magazine's Joe Klein [shown in file photo at right] also worked in a comparison of hardliner Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's support base with former U.S. President George W. Bush's core supporters:

It is not even clear that Ahmadinejad--who has significant backing from the sort of people who support Republicans here (the elderly, the religious extremists) plus a real following among working-class Iranians--would have lost this election, if the votes had been counted fairly. (I tend to believe that they weren't counted at all, but that's just my opinion.)

Twelve days earlier, Klein more subtly made the Ahmadinejad/Bush connection in a comparison that favorably compared Iranian presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi to Bush's 2004 rival Sen. John Kerry (emphasis mine):

"Ahmadinejad won. Get Over It."

That was both the headline and the theme of an astounding story written for Politico by the former foreign policy husband and wife team of Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett.  Their shtick while at the Bush White House was that we needed to "engage" Iran and left their jobs  "with a growing sense of alarm" that we were headed towards war with that Islamic regime which, of course, never happened. And now they are continuing to run cover for the mullahs with their Politico story about how the Iranian presidential election was fair and square:

Without any evidence, many U.S. politicians and “Iran experts” have dismissed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection Friday, with 62.6 percent of the vote, as fraud.

They ignore the fact that Ahmadinejad’s 62.6 percent of the vote in this year’s election is essentially the same as the 61.69 percent he received in the final count of the 2005 presidential election, when he trounced former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The shock of the “Iran experts” over Friday’s results is entirely self-generated, based on their preferred assumptions and wishful thinking.

Usually when there's turmoil in the Middle East, you'll see a spike in the price of oil, but not this time.

On June 15, the first day of trading since the public backlash in Iran began from what many are calling a fraudulent election, the price of oil has actually declined - after a rally over the past few weeks. But as CNBC's Jim Cramer pointed out on his June 15 "Stop Trading" segment on "Street Signs," oil is falling because this was expected.

"North Korea, Syria - I mean these are places when they always have elections, there's always a couple of people who don't vote for the right guy," Cramer said. "But I think the price of oil is going to tell you exactly how everything is going to play out in Iran, which is it's much ado about nothing."

For the last several months, New York Times reporter turned international columnist Roger Cohen has filed naïve apologist columns about Iran, often attacking Israel in the process. Previously mocked for this embarrassing display of Obama-mania in March 2008, Cohen attracted negative attention on the foreign affairs front earlier this year by telling readers how good things really were for Jews in Iran.

After that line of argument failed to convince, he then accused Israel of lying about the Iranian threat while constantly insisting that Iran was actually a functioning and reformist democracy. Cohen minimized the danger posed by Iran's demonized leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, excusing his anti-Israel rantings. And of course, Cohen strongly favored Obama's brand of diplomacy with Iran as opposed to Bush's hostility.

Cohen's Thursday column from Tehran, "Iran Awakens Yet Again," which ran in the Times international edition the day before the vote, featured some poorly timed fawning over Iran's "unpredictable" democracy.

In today's "Will Bush Derangement Syndrome Ever End" segment, CBSNews.com published an article from The New Republic comparing Iran's crazed leader who believes the holocaust never happened and Israel should be wiped off the face of the planet to -- wait for it! -- America's 43rd president.

Isn't that special?

In a piece hysterically titled "Meet Iran's George W. Bush," author Laura Secor said Iran's upcoming elections (this is from last Monday) were similar to ours in 2004 for reasons that every American save the REAL Bush haters -- and you know who YOU are!!! -- should find thoroughly offensive (h/t Gateway Pundit via NBer Blazer):

While President Obama was extoling the virtues of wind power in an Earth Day speech, his Justice Department lawyers were attempting to scuttle a lawsuit filed in federal court against Iran by former U.S. embassy hostages. The lawsuit alleges that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was one of the hostage-takers who interrogated the captives.

Two days after the story broke on the Associated Press wire, it appears the mainstream media have virtually buried the story, with no televised coverage save for a brief mention on CNN and one story in the Boston Globe.

A search for "'lawsuit' and 'Iran'" in Nexis from April 22 to 24 found no mentions of the story on MSNBC nor ABC, CBS and NBC broadcast network news programs. Likewise the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, USA Today, and Washington Post were devoid of stories. A search of "major newspapers" in Nexis did yield one hit, a 380-word AP wire story by Nedra Pickler printed on page A6 of the April 23 Boston Globe.

In that April 23 story, Pickler noted that (emphasis mine):

"British delegates joined a dramatic diplomatic walkout today when President Ahmadinejad of Iran told a major UN conference against racism that the state of Israel had been founded 'on the pretext of Jewish suffering' during the Second World War."

So reported Britain's Financial Times moments ago leading one to wonder how American media will cover this event.

The Times continued (video of incident embedded right):

An Iranian website is claiming that Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently had a shoe thrown at him while en route to give a speech ahead of the upcoming elections.

Given the tremendous attention given to President Bush having a shoe thrown at him by an Iraqi journalist last December, one has to wonder if American media will report this incident or ignore it.

Consider what was published by Israel's Haaretz Saturday:

Tuesday’s NBC Nightly News presented a more whitewashed view of prospects for better relations with Iran compared to ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson as NBC’s Brian Williams portrayed Iranians as receptive to Barack Obama’s recent call for talks between the two nations as long as there was "mutual respect." Williams: "President Obama called on Iran to send a signal that it was ready to talk, and it turns out the Iranians were apparently listening. Today President Ahmadinejad, at a rally marking the 30th anniversary of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, said he would welcome talks with the U.S. as long as they were based on what he called ‘mutual respect.’"

By contrast, on the same night’s World News, correspondent Jim Sciutto relayed the presence of anti-America sentiment in Iran – recounting chants of "Down, down with America," that were shouted during the day’s Islamic Revolution commemoration – and the Iranian public’s support for the country’s nuclear program. And while the ABC correspondent did allude to Ahmadinejad being a less likely prospect for successful negotiation than the more moderate former President Khatami who is running for office again, even Sciutto did not remind viewers of Ahmadinejad’s past anti-Israel rhetoric and the country’s support for terrorism not only against Israel but against American troops in Iraq.

President Barack Obama's olive branch to Iran was seriously snubbed in the past couple of days as key figures within the Islamic nation made it clear that they have no interest in talking with America unless we change our policies.

Even worse, an Iranian government spokesman said Obama's statement on Al Arabiya Wednesday concerning a willingness to talk to Iran "means Western ideology has become passive, that capitalist thought and the system of domination have failed."

Might this alter the press's repeated view the previous eight years that tensions in the Middle East were largely caused by President Bush's refusal to talk to Iran without preconditions concerning that nation's nuclear buildup, and that all would be well in the world if we would just agree to meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on any terms?

Such analysis seems critical given Saturday's report from Xinhua:

Whoopi Goldberg’s solution to winning the War on Terror: talk to "Shum Jum Yum Yum," whoever that is. On the October 24 edition of "The View," the aforementioned co-host defended Barack Obama’s call for unconditional talks with rogue nations like Iran. Whoopi concluded that dictators such as "Ahmadinejacket" and "Shum Jum Yum Yum" (presumably she meant Kim Jong Il?) have become "less rational" because the Bush administration has allegedly not talked to these regimes.

Besides airing her opinion without getting key names correct, Whoopi should know that talking unconditionally to Adolf Hitler did not make him any less radical. This should come as no surprise to a woman, who, on more than one occasion, demonstrated her ignorance of basic history.

Mehdi Kalhor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's media consultant and Iran's Vice President of media affairs announced on Saturday that Iran is setting two preconditions before it will engage in any talks with the United States. (h/t Wizbang).

The announcement was made in an interview with the Islamic Republic News Agency and has been reported independently by both the Fars News Agency and Al Jezeera. Strangely though there does not appear to be any mention in the US media according to a Google search. (all emphasis mine throughout)

Vice President for Media Affairs Mehdi Kalhor said on Saturday that Iran has set two preconditions for holding talks with the United States of America.

In an exclusive interview with the Islamic Republic News Agency, he said as long as U.S. forces have not left the Middle East region and continues its support for the Zionist regime, talks between Iran and U.S. is off the agenda.