Syria

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…

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…

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…