Free Republic

>CNN’s dedicated Hillary Clinton fan, Van Jones, on Wednesday praised the Democrat’s performance at the debate as “dazzling” and a “tour de force.” During post-debate coverage, he cheered, “ Hillary Clinton just, at times, displaying just a dazzling mastery of policy nuance.”  Jones rhapsodized, “Hillary Clinton's response on the clean energy question, talking about resilience and how that could be a bipartisan issue and how she could use that, that was just a tour de force.” Van Jones Raves Over ‘Dazzling Hillary’s Debate Performance: ‘Tour De Force’Jones’s enthusiasm for Clinton and Democrats is well documented. On October 14, he compared the...

Humorist Dave Barry hammered the media on Wednesday's New Day for their "daily obsession with Donald Trump: "We keep asking why he's doing so well — and he's on TV all the time. He's on more than the GEICO gecko." When CNN's Alisyn Camerota defended the press coverage of Trump by using his front-runner status, Barry countered that "you can't deny the incredible impact...at this point, Kim Kardashian also could run for president and would do okay if we gave her the same level of coverage that we give to Donald Trump." [video below] Camerota first prompted the Miami Herald...

In the early moments of CNN’s Super Tuesday 2 coverage, Atlantic contributing editor and CNN political commentator Peter Beinart encouraged viewers to consider “how brilliant was Hillary Clinton” to accept President Obama’s offer to become his secretary of state and “politically de facto his vice president” even though “[a] lot of people at the time didn't see” this so-called “wisdom.” Not long before a commercial break, Beinart chimed in to exclaim: “If you think about it, how brilliant was Hillary Clinton. Let’s go back to becoming Obama's Secretary of State. Let’s think about it now. She is running as the...

On Friday, the NBC, CBS, and ABC morning shows all blasted Thursday’s Republican presidential debate as “vulgar” “silly” and “childish.” The same networks that have routinely provided ample airtime to Donald Trump’s personal attacks on his rivals, lectured the GOP contenders on civility. Co-host Matt Lauer began NBC’s Today: “Vitriol and vulgarity. The Republican race reaches new lows during last night's debate....Is this any way to elect a president?” Minutes later, fellow co-host Savannah Guthrie lamented: “New nastiness, new lows in the Republican presidential race.”Nets Slam ‘Vulgar’ and ‘Childish’ GOP Debate Reaching ‘New Lows’In the report that followed, correspondent Peter...

he Washington Post's obsession over Donald Trump is a sight to behold — but not a pretty one. On Monday, following two week-earlier Trump-demonizing columns, one comparing the billionaire to medieval emperor Charlemagne, and another claiming that Trump's electoral progress thus far had helped her understand "exactly how Hitler could have come to power in Germany," the Post issued a house editorial directly comparing Trump's "assault on democracy" to Hitler's rise to power. In other words, last week's columns were merely appetizers for the paper's institutional assertion that, as far as they're concerned, the "authoritarian" Trump should be rejected because of the likelihood...

On Wednesday's CNN Tonight, W. Kamau Bell claimed that white supremacy is the new ideology of the Republican Party: "If the Republican Party is a gumbo...the roux of that gumbo is white supremacy, and the core of that is the Ku Klux Klan." Bell later asserted that the Obama birther issue was when white supremacy supposedly became dominant in the GOP: "It came from the first four years of Barack Obama's presidency...where they allowed Donald Trump to demand the President show his birth certificate — and they just stood by and went, maybe he's not born here." [video below] Host...

It may not be good for America, but it's good for CBS." That's how network executive chairman and reliable Democratic donor Les Moonves described Donald Trump's frontrunner status in the GOP primary, noted the Hollywood Reporter's Paul Bond today. "Bring it on, Donald," cheered Moonves in remarks to the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference being held in San Francisco.  While Bond didn't note as such, a quick check of the FEC's donor database – see screenshot below – shows Moonves has a long track record of contributing to Democrats John Kerry and Al Gore as well as Democratic political action committees...

Conservative and center-right columnists often have to do far more digging than their liberal counterparts, simply because overwhelmingly left-leaning beat journalists, aka "Democrats with bylines," provide such unbalanced reporting on current events on a daily basis. Fortunately, the Washington Post's Marc Thiessen did the entirely necessary work of rummaging through available information about federal court nominations in 1988 and 1992. Any beat reporter could have done the same thing, but either didn't, or decided not to report what was found. What Thiessen unearthed makes an argument-ending mockery of Vice President Joe Biden's claim, made in a Monday evening tweet, that when he...

Continuing to operate at full speed well past the 1:00 a.m. Eastern hour on Tuesday (10:00 p.m. Pacific), MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews attempted to analyze Donald Trump’s victory speech after winning the Nevada caucuses by comparing his interaction with supporters to the late Johnny Carson’s relationship with Tonight Show viewers.  Matthews repeatedly claimed that his supporters recognize much of what Trump tells them is “nonsense” and “all shtick” and he “shar[es] with the audience” in the way that “Carson used to do that, Letterman did that” because “[i]t was always the jokes you share” plus “[t]he connection with the...

On Wednesday's edition of Hardball with Chris Matthews, a shouting match about how the black community views Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan was brought to a screeching halt when Matthews insisted: “You’re right about Reince. I agree with your one point or a lot of what she says. But when Reince Priebus’—his number one goal is to keep blacks from voting.” Both of Matthews's guests, Republican strategist Matt Schlapp and April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks, who is liberal and African-American, were caught off guard and shocked by his comment. “No, no, no, no, no. He’s talking about getting...

What a surprise it's not that ex-MSNBC action hero Ed Schultz just served up a textbook example of why Godwin's Law -- he who first invokes the Nazis in making an argument, loses -- still applies. When he's not toiling away at his new Kremlin-backed Russia Today "news" show, Schultz does a podcast weekdays that's available at YouTube and his website. Right out of the gate in Monday's podcast, Schultz mocked GOP frontrunner Donald Trump's repeated claims that, once elected, he'll build a wall to secure the border with Mexico -- while getting Mexico to pay for it. Based on...

They say "honesty is the best policy" but apparently Democratic presidential candidate frontrunner Hilary Clinton didn’t get that memo either. Nevertheless, comedian Stephen Colbert tried passing along the message to her this past Friday on The Late Show when he joked, “lying should be the easiest part of campaigning,” reacting to the cringe-worthy, face-palm inducing statement the former secretary of state made to interviewer Scott Pelley of CBS: Well, but, you know, you're asking me to say, "Have I ever?" I don't believe I ever have. I don't believe I ever have. I don't believe I ever will. I'm going...

Appearing as a guest on Sunday's Reliable Sources, CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley claimed that President Ronald Reagan "used to fabricate stories," and alluded to a story about the Holocaust as an example. After fellow guest James Fallows of The Atlantic recalled possible holes in stories told by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, lamenting that voters do not seem to care, Brinkley brought up false stories that circulated in 1972 about Ed Muskie, and then moved to Reagan as he added: So there are these fake kind of stories that come in, but I agree with James Fallows completely with...

Appearing as a guest on Saturday's CNN Newsroom with Poppy Harlow, CNN political commentator Carl Bernstein declared that, after spending time talking to the White House about Hillary Clinton's paid speeches to Goldman-Sachs, that they are "horrified" that Clinton is "blowing up her own campaign," and invoked President Richard Nixon's tapes as possibly comparable to the transcripts of her speeches. As he described apparent panic at the White House, Bernstein used words and phrases like "terrified," "dumbfounded," "tied up in knots," and "beside themselves" to describe reaction to Clinton's "unfathomable" behavior that "has endangered President Obama's legacy." Bernstein: Obama White...

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin referred to Madeline Albright's somewhat well-known saying, found on a Starbucks coffee cup, that "There's a special place in Hell for women who don't help other women." At the time, Albright, who served as Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, huffed: "Though I am flattered that Governor Palin has chosen to cite me as a source of wisdom, what I said had nothing to do with politics." She naturally followed that statement with an intense political attack on Palin and GOP presidential nominee John McCain. Now that Democrat Hillary...

The Washington Post is dragging out one of the oldest and phoniest arguments against the charge of liberal bias, an argument that has all the freshness of four-month-old milk. To sum up in a headline: "The media's biggest bias isn't partisan -- it's for a juicy story." If this claim hadn't been completely obliterated by every juicy thing Bill Clinton did with women he hadn't married, we can apply it to nearly every Obama scandal - especially when journalists try to claim Obama has been "scandal-free." Callum Borchers, the media reporter of the Post political team at "The Fix," starts...

The Times’ online headline, “Drop Dead? Not The Newly Relevant Daily News,” refers of course to it's rival's infamous 1975 headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The Daily News also rehashed its own headline recently to attack Ted Cruz for his crack about “New York values.” You guessed it: “Drop Dead, Ted.” That passes for “relevance” among the left and the NYT. Mahler took us inside the liberal hive mind, buzzing with giddy self-congratulation over yet another puerile attack on Republicans, while the Times dutifully reprinted the controversial Daily News covers that made liberals go giddy. On a recent afternoon,...

NBC Meet the Press host Chuck Todd conducted a pretty soft interview with Hillary Clinton on Sunday, especially the way he let Mrs. Clinton get away with suggesting there is no e-mail scandal and “I cannot control what the Republicans leak,” as if the Inspector General of the intelligence community is some kind of Republican plant. Chuck Todd's Softball to Hillary on E-Mails: 'Are You Concerned?'Todd left it for the end of the interview, and only asked her if she was “concerned” – the softest possible way of putting it, not the Tim Russert way. Last week you were asked...

On the Monday night edition of MSNBC's All In, longtime liberal columnist Jonathan Alter reacted to President Obama's executive actions on gun control by comparing it to President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and remarking how heartbreaking it was for Obama to have met with the families of Sandy Hook victims and "see those six-year-olds stacked up like cord wood." Host Chris Hayes began the segment with a number of soundbites from the President and Republican presidential candidates opposed to the move before remarking: "While the substantive reason to be concerned about guns seems clear, in a country where...

On Thursday night and Friday morning, NBC News tried their best to go after Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson by attempting to make a mountain out of a molehill of his relationship with a man who was convicted nearly a decade ago of insurance fraud while ignoring the ongoing investigation of Hillary Clinton over her private e-mail server. Even though competitors ABC and CBS didn’t cover this story, NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt hyped on Thursday that “Republican frontrunner Ben Carson is facing new questions about his friendship with a convicted felon. NBC Tries (and Fails) to Make...