Military

At the top of Monday’s CBS "Early Show," co-host Russ Mitchell teased a segment about a new McCain campaign ad criticizing Barack Obama for not visiting wounded American soldiers in Germany: "...it is 99 days until election day and John McCain this weekend took off the gloves off with an ad criticizing Barack Obama for among other things, going to the gym while on his trip overseas last week."…

Robert Burns and Robert H. Reid created quite a stir in the blogosphere yesterday with their dispatch from Baghdad, "Analysis: US now winning Iraq war that seemed lost." NewsBusters colleague Noel Sheppard accurately called it a "stop the presses" story, and ended his post with an important perspective that you really must read if you haven't already. Now that the story has had one overnight news…

On July 16, Andrew Malcolm at the Los Angeles Times's Top of the Ticket Blog wrote the following (bold is mine): When President Bush ordered the surge in January 2007, (Barack) Obama said: "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse," a position he maintained throughout 2007. This year he…

** Now With Update... A Soldier Speaks ** The New York Times is miffed. They aren't happy that there has been a dearth of news photos showing dead American soldiers in the war in Iraq. The Times is lamenting that there have been "4,000 U.S. Combat Deaths, and Just a Handful of Images," so more carnage and death is their druthers. Well, more American dead, anyway. They aren't interested in the…

Are reporters in the business of reporting fact or rumor?  Andrea Mitchell, for one, doesn't scruple to circulate "scuttlebutt" that if true would be deeply damaging to John McCain.  Barack Obama's cancellation of plans to visit injured military members at bases in Germany has drawn considerable attention and criticism.  On today's Morning Joe, Mitchell passed along an Obama-campaign inspired…

The screencap captures it nicely: Heather Wilson, smiling.  Robert Wexler, mouth agape. On this afternoon's Hardball, the feisty, brilliant GOP representative from New Mexico took on the duo of the combative congressman from Florida and host Chris Matthews, and walked away a winner.  The subject was Obama's Berlin speech, and by extension his presidential qualifications.You'll find excerpts…

NBC outdid itself in promoting the pro-gay view in its Nightly News coverage Wednesday of a hearing held by the House Armed Services Committee's subcommittee on personnel. NBC served up a litany of gay "victims" of the military's ban on open homosexuality, plus pro-gay congressmen, and played up a recent poll showing most Americans wanting to overturn the ban. NBC cited only one pro-ban witness,…

Update at bottom of post.Leave it to CNN to worry that the Colombian government committed a war crime in its recent rescue of FARC hostages, including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.This morning in the Latest News menu on CNN.com, I found this teaser headline (shown in screen capture at right): "Did Colombia skirt law in hostage rescue?"My curiosity piqued, I followed the link to…

A couple days ago at the gym, listening to a Hugh Hewitt podcast and perhaps not paying as much attention as I should have while pedaling away, I heard Hugh mention that Barack Obama doesn't understand the role of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What was Hugh referring to? As the British would say: the penny just dropped.  A few minutes ago, CNN's Situation Room played a clip of Obama saying this…

You would be hard-pressed to find a "better" example of a walking, talking, typing Old Media double standard-bearer than New York Times columnist and International Herald Tribune (IHT) contributor Nicholas Kristof.Keep in mind as you read this post that Kristof infamously wrote the following in a 2005 New York Times book review about the person who was "the worst monster in world history," China…

The Armed Forces Press Service issued a press release on Thursday morning, July 10, in celebration of the fact that the U.S. military has had 13 consecutive months of meeting and/or exceeding recruitment goals. Sadly, the media stayed sullenly quite all day, taking no notice of the success of our military on OR off the field. Regardless of the fact that the media ignored the good news, there is…

Although the term isn't used, it's clear that the Obama campaign sees itself and their candidate as victims of a vast conspiracy of right-wingers. Going all the way back to the 1988 presidential election, Obama's "Fight the Smears" chart (featuring the campaign's new sort-of "presidential seal," replacing the one that was "dropped," at the top left) purports to tell us "Who's Behind These Lies."…

Reuters has the story, as does the New York Times and the Associated Press (see below fold) but this is not exactly burning up the cable news networks today:BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's government has removed 550 tonnes of natural uranium left over from Saddam Hussein's era and sold it to a Canadian company, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said.The uranium, called yellowcake, had been stored in…

If you've watched any baseball this holiday weekend, you've likely seen a new public service announcement featuring actor Tom Hanks promoting a group called Welcome Back Veterans.In the 30-second segment, soldiers recount the welcome they received when they first returned home from either Iraq or Afghanistan.Hanks finishes the ad stating (video embedded right):