Military

In trying to explain the current situation in Venezuela, the Washington Post's Matt O'Brien, in a post at the paper's Wonkblog, also inadvertently identified two reasons why authoritarian socialist tyrants like Huge Chavez and Nicolas Maduro are able to achieve and retain power. The formula is simple: When you first gain power, garner international and media goodwill by giving stuff away, like…

This afternoon, Catherine Herridge at Fox News reported that "the intelligence community has deemed some of Hillary Clinton’s emails 'too damaging' to national security to release under any circumstances." This eighth "smoking gun" — on top of the seven an Investor's Business Daily editorial identified last week — wasn't enough to move the Associated Press Bradley Klapper from the AP's default…

These people play the press and the courts like a fiddle. At 2 p.m. Friday — just in time for a slow-news weekend and the onset of what is supposed to be a serious blizzard in the Northeast — the State Department asked a federal court for an extension of time to February 29 to complete its interagency review and release of Hillary Clinton's private-server emails. But State didn't merely use the…

Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's Anderson Cooper 360 and again on Thursday morning's At This Hour with Berman and Bolduan, liberal CNN political commentator Donna Brazile ranted against Sarah Palin's recent criticism of President Barack Obama as commander-in-chief, and called her a "liar" after the CNN commentator interpreted Palin's comments as blaming the President for her veteran son's…

On Wednesday's AC360, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin downplayed the latest development in Hillary Clinton's e-mail scandal — the revelation that her private e-mail server "contained highly-classified intelligence from the most top secret of programs," as host Anderson Cooper reported. Toobin asserted that "it's a huge political problem," but added, "I don't think it's a big legal problem. I don…

The Dallas-Fort Worth area is, of course, part of the Bible Belt. Nonetheless, according to Christopher Hooks, another faith flourishes there: “It’s also a place that’s responsible in large part for the rise of the new civic religion built around the worship of the most lethal among us.” Hooks, an Austin-based journalist, was one of about 30,000 persons who attended last week’s world premiere of…

Wow! That was Mika Brzezinski's repeated reaction to Robert Gates' amazingly frank take on the presidential field. Appearing on today's Morning Joe, the former Defense Secretary shot down all contenders mentioned, dumped on two who have not yet entered the race, and retroactively knocked President Obama for always thinking he was the smartest guy in the room.  Here was Gates' rap on various…

In contrast to the other post-Democratic debate analyses on Sunday night, the guests assembled on the Fox News Channel (FNC) repeatedly ripped the three presidential candidates for failing to mention national security or foreign policy in the debates’s first question from NBC co-moderator Lester Holt on what three things they would do in their first 100 days in office.

During the 1980s, a favorite talking point of liberals was that President Reagan tended to confuse movies with reality. In a Friday article, Zack Beauchamp accused a current Republican presidential candidate, Ted Cruz, of doing something similar, and alleged that the GOPers who took part in Thursday’s prime-time debate stand for a “view of the world [that] is as much a work of fiction as” Michael…

ISIS has made a habit of targeting Americans. Though this time it appears the “JV squad” has picked a fight with the Varsity.

Paramount Pictures is releasing 13 Hours: Secret Soldiers of Benghazi nation-wide on Friday. It tells the story of the attack on two U.S. diplomatic outposts in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012 that took four American lives, including that of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya. Despite claims from Paramount and director Michael Bay that the film isn’t political (the book on which it’s based…

Bing West was a Marine infantry officer in the Vietnam war and a frequent embedded reporter in Iraq, yet Drum likens him to a tantrum-throwing kid and lectures him, “It's time to grow up, Bing.” (West is 75 years old.) After West commented, “The lesson of Iraq is that after American troops achieved stability, Mr. Obama quit, leading to a larger war and more American deaths,” Drum vented, “Jesus…

Discussing Iran’s seizure of 10 U.S. Sailors (and release) on Wednesday’s edition of MSNBC’s The Last Word, former UK Ministry of Defense official and foreign affairs correspondent Michael Kay declared that there was “nothing alarming” and instead “standard protocol” taking place in the video released by Iranian state TV of the nine men and one woman being boarded and held for one day.