Foreign Policy

In a conversation on Twitter with Fox News Channel (FNC) contributor Richard Grenell, Boston Globe reporter Bryan Bender continued the media’s double standard of slamming then-President George W. Bush’s international coalition for the Iraq War and President Obama’s current coalition for fighting the Islamic terrorist group ISIS.  Writing in a tweet addressed to Grenell, Bender stated that “Bush…

Insisting that "crush[ing]" or destroying ISIS is simply impossible to achieve, liberal Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky devoted an 11-paragraph piece entitled "Please—Let's Not Destroy ISIS" to explaining why he "wish[es] Obama had the conviction to stand up and say" that "contain[ing] [ISIS] is what we should do."

Charles Pierce thinks the campaign against ISIS may cause a spike in the national “derangement” that started on 9/11, and Jonathan Chait sees neoconservatives making the same mistakes now as they did more than a decade ago: “The hysterical threat assessment, the simplistic conflation of mutually antagonistic strains of Islam, and the complete lack of concern for the possibility of overreach.”

Phyllis Bennis is a defender of Iran and its nuclear ambitions, and wants Israel wiped off the map, to be replaced by a single Palestinian state. So naturally she's a Melissa Harris-Perry fave. Appearing yet again today on Harris-Perry's MSNBC show, Bennis put her radical views on display, arguing that many US soliders aren't truly volunteers, but are "forced in by poverty and lack of other…

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer interviewed President Obama’s National Security Adviser Susan Rice during Thursday’s edition of The Situation Room and neglected to bring up the second anniversary of the tragic attack in Benghazi, Libya that left U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, foreign service officer Sean Smith and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glenn Doherty dead. Instead, the nearly eight-and-a-half-minute…

On Thursday’s NBC Nightly News, senior White House correspondent Chris Jansing provided not only spin favorable to President Obama a day after his prime time speech on ISIS, but also suggested that this could help the President in the midterm elections. At the conclusion of her report, Jansing told viewers that: "It's a war the President inherited with decisions made now shaping his legacy and…

On Hardball, Chris Matthews describes himself as a "skeptic" about President Obama's ISIS strategy.  Matthews argues that since the president has excluded American boots on the ground, we will be forced to rely on foreign partners to hold territory, yet there are no such viable forces available.

Mark Sumner argues that ISIS “represents no threat to the United States," and that America has long suffered from “shaking-in-our-boots cowardice” over terrorism which has caused us to give terrorists “exactly what they want”: a massive military response.

A frequent tipster has informed me that on today's episode of "The Five" on Fox News, Bob Beckel actually said that he likes current White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest better than his predecessor James Carney because Earnest "looks better." Far be it from me to render a judgment on relative male handsomeness. But one thing I can say about Earnest is that, at certain times, when he gets a…

On Thursday's New Day, CNN's Kate Bolduan hounded Senator John McCain to back President Obama's new strategy to combat the Islamist terrorist group ISIS and help him gain congressional support: "We talk about how you are a critic of the administration. But now that there is a strategy, Senator – now that there is going to be action...how are you going to help the administration succeed now in…

On Thursday's NBC Today, several hours after NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel ripped President Obama's strategy to combat ISIS as being "wildly off-base," correspondent Peter Alexander promoted the commander-in-chief's Wednesday primetime address: "President Obama announced that he would lead a broad coalition to destroy ISIS....The war will be more like those in Yemen and Somalia,…

In the wake of President Obama announcing that the United States will use air strikes to target the terrorist group ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank decided to go after liberals’ favorite punching bag, former Vice President Dick Cheney. In an op-ed that appeared in Thursday’s Washington Post, Milbank proclaimed “Dick Cheney, Still Blindly Beating The Drums of War.” The…

A new Gallup poll reports that Americans trust the federal government less than they ever have. Given that President Obama has increasingly insisted on acting on his own, it's not unreasonable to infer that this result means, consistent with other polling the press has stubbornly ignored — documented in a new Media Research Center study — that they also trust his leadership less than they ever…