CPAC

On Thursday’s NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer accused Donald Trump of reversing an Obama administration school transgender policy just to appease conservative activists gathering at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference: “Or is the timing more tied to the fact that CPAC starts today? Conservatives around the country coming for a victory party and he wants to fire up that base.”

The Washington Examiner’s T. Becket Adams exposed on Tuesday morning in a series of tweets the very problem that besets a liberal media obsessed with placing legitimate conservative sites into the sphere of the fake news when a number of journalists chided Speaker of the House Paul Ryan for comments at CPAC 2014 regarding school lunches thanks to a dishonest hatchet job by Time magazine.

Republican presidential candidate and Senator Ted Cruz (Tex.) sat for an interview with CBS’s John Dickerson Friday afternoon in National Harbor, Maryland that aired on Face the Nation. Cruz lambasted the media for “hav[ing] a coronation” of Donald Trump as the GOP nominee so he could be viciously defeated by Hillary Clinton in November.

NATIONAL HARBOR, MD — Senator Marco Rubio (Fl.) brought the boisterous crowd at the 2016 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to their feet early Saturday afternoon and tangled with CNN chief political correspondent Dana Bash as she spent large portion of the question and answer session harping on Donald Trump and the campaign’s rhetoric.

The media have developed a predictable and equally annoying habit every presidential election cycle. We hear the Republicans are going to be crushed by pandering too much to conservatives. The Democrats are firmly moderate and need a push from the left so they don’t forget their “compassion.” So it was with Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter 35 years ago. So will it be in 2016, no matter who is…

The Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman argues that Republican base voters routinely wind up hurting the party’s center-right presidential nominee because he feels he has to throw them one or more bones: “Poppy [George H. W. Bush] didn’t really need to promise no new taxes, but it was a broken promise that cost him dearly. [John] McCain overcompensated for his weakness with the base by giving us…

On Sunday, ABC’s This Week discussed the political fallout from the annual CPAC conference and the entire panel, excluding conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, deemed the conservative gathering politically dangerous for any potential Republican presidential candidate. ABC’s Matthew Dowd claimed that CPAC was so far to the right “[w]hat would happen if Ronald Reagan, with that record…

On Friday, NBC finally noticed the corruption scandal swirling around Hillary Clinton. However, the coverage on the Today show was relegated to a 49-second mention within a story slamming Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. By contrast, the morning show devoted 3 minutes 56 seconds to a social media debate about the color of a dress.  

Desperate to tear down 2016 Republican frontrunner Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, co-host Matt Lauer led off Friday's NBC Today by proclaiming: "Governor's gaffe?...Presidential hopeful Scott Walker under fire for saying his experience with union protesters has prepared him to take on ISIS. Is it the first major blunder of the presidential race?"

Liberals like to opine that righty Republicans of the fairly recent past, such as Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr., or even Ronald Reagan, were nowhere near as wild-eyed as the Tea Party crowd. In a Tuesday Daily Kos post by the mononymous Hunter, it was Bob Dole (granted, no one’s idea of a movement conservative) who represented the party’s rational “old guard” against the “clearly…

Talking to Donald Trump on Thursday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer complained about the Celebrity Apprentice host and CPAC speaker criticizing President Obama's poor handling of the Ukranian crisis: "You've been critical of the President and his handling of the situation with Ukraine and Crimea. I think you said, I'm paraphrasing here, but basically Putin was playing with or toying with Obama…

OXON HILL, Md. -- The first "people" I recognized on arriving at last week's Conservative Political Action Committee gathering just outside Washington were two "stormtroopers" and a Wookiee from the 1977 film "Star Wars." Some of the speeches also expressed sentiments from the past, though not as cleverly as those in costume: Obama is a bad president, even a bad man. America looks weak before…

Jimmy Fallon is now the newly minted host of NBC’s “The Tonight Show”, replacing long-time host Jay Leno as the network’s newest late night comedian. Unfortunately for Fallon, the NBC host took an unnecessary swipe at former Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK) this week. During his monologue on Monday March 10, Fallon mocked Palin’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) speech, specifically…

It was an absolute certainty that MSNBC would attack Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) following his Thursday morning speech at CPAC. On Saturday’s Weekends with Alex Witt, the host wrung her hands over Cruz’s continued criticism of ObamaCare. With the air of an impatient mother, Witt fumed, “I know he’s just serving up red meat to the base. Republicans believe this is going to help them in the midterms.…