Foreign Policy

While his fellow network news colleagues all but ignored any criticism of President Obama’s speech on Wednesday afternoon and his avoidance of using the term Islamic extremism, NBC News chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel ripped the current U.S. strategy for defeating ISIS during NBC Nightly News. “ISIS is spreading like a virus and months of U.S.-led air strikes don't seem to be containing…

Railing against Speaker Boehner's decision to invite Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress on his concerns about Iran, Hardball host Chris Matthews sneered that the Ohio Republican essentially attempted to "sneak" the Israeli Prime Minister into the country with the president completely unawares, and that all to curry favor with "crazy right-wing" evangelical Christians. But of course the facts…

Reporting on an upcoming foreign policy speech by former Florida governor and 2016 contender Jeb Bush on Wednesday's NBC Today, correspondent Peter Alexander was quick to hype a liability for the Republican: "It's one of the biggest challenges facing Jeb Bush, how he addresses the violence and volatility in Iraq, the country his brother, former President George W. Bush, invaded more than a decade…

Latest dispatch from President Obama's Department of Terrible Deeds in the Name of Christ . . . Morning Joe invited the State Department spox Marie Harf on today to give her a chance to clarify what she said to Chris Matthews about the US being unable to "kill our way" out of the ISIS problem and the need to focus on the "root causes" of terrorism. After brushing off the suggestion by General…

There are still 10 months to go in 2015, but Mike Barnicle is a strong frontrunner for Clumsiest Comment of the Year. In a Morning Joe segment today on ISIS outrages, and shortly after mentioning the atrocity in which ISIS burned dozens of people to death in Iraq, Barnicle said that the complexity of dealing with ISIS makes "you want to set your hair on fire."

In a rundown of the deteriorating situation in Libya in its February 23 issue, New Yorker Magazine's Jon Lee Anderson quoted "a senior (Obama) Administration official" (the capital "A" is Anderson's) who, incredibly, claimed that the country's descent into virtual chaos resulted from "the politicization" of the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack which killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and…

Of all the broadcast network coverage Monday evening and Tuesday morning of ISIS terrorists beheading twenty-one Christians in Libya, only one reference was made on NBC's Today to President Obama's failed policy in Libya providing an opening to the Islamic extremists.

Mike Barnicle: proud member of the Barack Obama "terrible deeds in the name of Christ" school of moral blindness . . .  Joe Scarborough opened today's Morning Joe with a protracted and impassioned plea for America—and in particular President Obama—to call out radical Islam by name. Mika Brzezinski was dubious, citing unspecified "difficult times" in the past when presidents used the wrong…

On Monday night, the panelists on the Fox News Channel (FNC) show Special Report excoriated the Obama administration for saying in a statement that the Coptic Christian men from Egyptian beheaded by ISIS in a video along the Libyan coast were “Egyptian citizens” and labeling Islamic State fights as merely “ISIL-affiliated terrorists” instead of further identifying them as Muslims or Islamic…

If once is an MSNBC aberration, is twice is a trend? Earlier today we reported on Ed Schultz getting surprisingly angry over the Obama administration's weakness in confronting ISIS, calling the situation a "religious war." Just two hours later, Chris Matthews sounded a similar alarm, saying "if I were ISIS I wouldn't be afraid . . . the American people are getting humiliated . . . it sounds like…

Holy schnikes: was that really Ed Schultz, or has the soul of Norman Schwarzkopf suddenly assumed control of the MSNBC host's body? On his show this afternoon, Schultz—discussing the latest ISIS outrages—stunningly declared that we are in a "religious war" in which we haven't been "strong enough," and repeatedly raised the possibility that ground troops might be necessary to defeat ISIS.

On Sunday, veteran journalist Carl Bernstein appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources to discuss the ongoing controversy surrounding NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams and the revelation that he lied multiple times about his reporting from Iraq. 

On Sunday, CNN’s Reliable Sources hosted former SEAL Team Six member Don Mann to discuss NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams’ questionable claim that he was embedded with them at the start of the Iraq war. Speaking to host Brian Stelter, Mann resoundingly refuted Williams’ story and said “For a reporter to be embedded with SEAL Team Six or any tier one unit, that just doesn't happen…The last…

Joe Scarborough says he doesn't want to be "torn to shreds online" for analogizing the threat of radical Christianity to that of radical Islam.  Simple solution: stop analogizing the threat of radical Christianity to that of radical Islam. On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough twice suggested such parallels, analogizing radical Islamists to "ultrafundamentalist Christians who believe every single…