Iraq

Twitter users happening upon a Monday evening tweet by the Associated Press's Josh Lederman can be forgiven if they thought they were visiting a parody account. Lederman is a White House reporter for the AP. His LinkedIn profile indicates that his journalism career began about three years ago. His education, up to and including "a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s…

The New York Times fessed up in its Tuesday edition about an erroneous claim it made nearly two weeks earlier. Mark Landler, in his reporting on President Obama's September 10, 2014 prime time address on ISIS, asserted in an article the following morning that "unlike Mr. Bush in the Iraq war, Mr. Obama has sought to surround the United States with partners."

Starting Friday night, CBS began previewing an exclusive 60 Minutes interview with Leon Panetta, which aired on Sunday night, where the former Secretary of Defense said he had advised President Obama to arm the Syrian rebels as early as 2012. Despite Panetta’s criticism of President Obama’s strategy to combat ISIS, ABC and NBC have ignored the story altogether despite having multiple…

Could the "Islamic" in "Islamic State" be a clue?  Not for John Kerry.  Appearing on today's Morning Joe, our clueless Secretary of State insisted that what drives ISIS is a "radical, extremist, cultish" philosophy, but not—perish the thought!—a "religious attitude." Kerry was of course echoing the analysis of that noted theologian, Barack Obama, who two weeks ago declared that ISIS is "not…

On Sunday, CBS's "60 Minutes" will broadcast Scott Pelley's recent interview of former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. In CBS's promotional tease, which was broadcast on Friday, in response to Pelley's question about whether he was confident that the U.S. troop withdrawal "was the right thing to do" at the time it was done, Panetta said, "No, I wasn't." That's big news. How big? So big that,…

When White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest made his first Fox News appearance in that role, he may have thought that having Shepard Smith interview him would make the exercise a relative cakewalk. It didn't happen. Even though Smith, as Matt Sheffield observed last year at NewsBusters, is "not known as any sort of conservative," he was clearly critical of Earnest's breezy claims about the…

Nicolle Wallace, the token "conservative" on "The View," went out of her way to to express her faith in the Obama administration in the war on ISIS. Trust he was a "very reluctant warrior," she said, but now "he is deadly serious."

On Wednesday's The Lead, CNN's Jake Tapper tried to pull former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney out of acting like an apologist for President Obama. Tapper turned to his guest, who had just spent an entire segment defending his former boss's ISIS policy, and asked, "What is the difficulty in getting Arab allies to kick in with military assistance? Jay, you don't work for the White House…

On Thursday morning, CBS continued to ignore key results of the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, which show President Obama’s approval rating at 40 percent and his foreign policy approval rating at only 34 percent.  In contrast, the front-page New York Times article by Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Dalia Sussman included dire statistics about the President’s low domestic approval rating: “The…

On Wednesday, CBS and The New York Times made the point of omitting results from their own poll which show President Obama’s job approval at 40 percent and his approval on foreign policy at only 34 percent from the newscasts and print newspaper, respectively. CBS This Morning and the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley only mentioned the latest CBS News/New York Times poll in regards to how 57…

President Obama cited American exceptionalism at least ten times in his speech at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa today. Early in his administration, Obama went out of his way to downplay the nature of U.S. exceptionalism, claiming that it was really no different than how any other nation's citizens saw their own country's uniqueness. So his speechwriters knew better than to use that word. But…

Both Old Media and Old Medea were at it again yesterday. Old Medea is Medea Benjamin, the head of Code Pink, who led the disruption of a Senate hearing on ISIS and was eventually hauled away. Old Media demonstrated its double standards by giving Ms. Benjamin's temper tantrum little attention. That treatment sharply contrasts with that seen in September 2002, when, with a Republican in the White…

Paging the MSNBC PC police! On his All In show this evening, Chris Hayes used some indubitably un-PC language to dismiss concerns that ISIS or other terrorist groups might be infiltrating across our porous southern border. Huffed Hayes: "in the years since September 11, there have been occasional stories of this type. Sort of, a kind of girl talk mash-up of the fear about the border and the fear…