Afghanistan

Yesterday the Gallup organization released a poll showing that Americans trust Republicans over Democrats on most major issues heading into the general election season. Today the same polling outfit released a poll that found a large number of Americans blame George W. Bush for the faltering economy. Guess which one Gallup partner USA Today hyped?Here's how USA Today staffer Susan Page began her…

NBC's Richard Engel has done some good reporting from Iraq.  But scratch the reporter's surface, and you find a political partisan eager to echo the anti-Bush party line.   Witness his exchange with Ari Fleischer on Morning Joe today.  Engel twisted the former Bush press secretary's words, accusing him of alleging an Osama Bin Laden connection with Iraq.  Fleischer had palpably said no such…

Defenders of controversial imam Feisal Abdul Rauf have been touting his past efforts in offering counterterrorism advice to the FBI as a way to illustrate his bridge-building intentions.  Much like other reports, they tend to gloss over the more controversial aspects of Rauf's statements.  But, as is typical with the Ground Zero mosque imam, it can be demonstrated that he is frequently speaking…

On Monday's Today show, NBC's Matt Lauer opened the show suggesting that Julian Assange was was being smeared by the Pentagon as the Today co-anchor teased: "And payback? The founder of WikiLeaks, the Web site that leaked classified war documents, briefly named in a rape case in Sweden. He says he's innocent. Those charges have been dropped and now he suggests it's all part of a Pentagon smear…

On Saturday, The Washington Post devoted an entire article to left-wing praise and Facebook fan pages for Private Bradley Manning, suspected of the shocking leak of more than 90,000 documents on the war in Afghanistan. The headline was "Army analyst linked to WikiLeaks hailed as antiwar hero." Washington Post reporter Michael W. Savage (not that other Michael Savage) began: "For antiwar…

With his August 12 post, "Can a Child be Tried for Jihadist Crimes?", Time magazine's Tim McGirk hit the Obama administration from the left on the military tribunal prosecution of jihadist Omar Khadr.Khadr was captured on a battlefield in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was just 15 years old. He's charged with the murder of a U.S. soldier, a crime he's already confessed to, although he now claims…

A lot has been said over the years about how our media ignore heroes returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.On Friday, CNN aired an absolutely fabulous piece about Dale Beatty."In 2004, at the age of 26, Dale's vehicle hit a land mine in northern Iraq and at that moment, Dale's life was about to change forever," said Kyra Phillips on "CNN Newsroom.""I met Dale when we were partnered…

In her debut Sunday morning as host of ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour, the long-time CNN international correspondent brought a foreigner’s perspective to the program as she treated her lack of knowledge and familiarity with U.S. politics as an asset and the current New York City resident seemed to say that after more than two decades of covering the world she had decided to allow…

If Anne Applebaum is to be believed, the existence of primary sources is in and of itself the reason the dead-trees should be kept around. She writes for Slate:I didn't think it was possible, but Julian Assange has now done it: By releasing 92,000 documents full of Afghanistan intelligence onto the laptops of an unsuspecting public, the founder of Wikileaks has finally made an ironclad case for…

Missed? Perhaps, but this story of complacency by President Barack Obama's administration has certainly been under-reported thus far. On Fox News Channel's July 28 broadcast of "Studio B," the network's judicial analyst Andrew Napolitano discovered a potential lapse in responsibility by the Obama White House. For the broadcast of his July 31 Fox Business Network show "FreedomWatch," Napolitano…

So as you know, Wikileaks has posted a crapload of secret military reports about the Afghan war, including covert operations against Taliban figures. They claim their goal is to reveal “unethical behavior,” by the government and corporations. On their website they write “All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people.” This is pure…

CBS's Lara Logan may be in Uganda, but she recognized the skew of media coverage of the WikiLeaks war documents on the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan as she contended “the coverage would indicate that it's more of an issue for the U.S. to kill Afghan civilians than it is for the Taliban to do so.” CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric asked her about how the documents cite “the number of Afghan…

Mango diplomacy, maybe.  Mango defense, not so much.It would be much less disconcerting to say the above headline is a joke, ripped from the headlines of The Onion.  But alas, it is frighteningly accurate.Hillary Clinton recently lauded the benefits of Pakistani mangos in a discussion of better trade cooperation between Pakistan and Afghanistan.As Reuters reports, "Hillary Clinton has lots to…

Happy belated birthday, America, your presence in Afghanistan is "inherently corrupting." That's the message Rachel Maddow gave on her July 6 program.During the Bush administration, the Left often argued that the president had distracted America by engaging in hostilities in Iraq, bleeding resources and attention away from the real war on terror in Afghanistan, which had harbored al Qaeda pre-9…