The MRC Brings Back The Clinton Equivocation
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center is bringing back the Clinton Equivocation. The 2016 spin: The MRC will help Donald Trump escape accountable for anything he has done in his life, no matter how terrible, because the Clintons will somehow have done something worse.

The MRC's Clay Waters did it in May. Now NewsBusters blogger Jack Coleman takes it to the next level in a July 10 screed. He starts off by unleashing venom at "McLaughlin Group" panelist Eleanor Clift, declaring that she's actually Baghdad Bob after he "apparently escaped to the United States [and] underwent  sex-change surgery -- sorry, gender enhancement therapy."

What set Coleman off on his vicious attack was Clift saying that questions about Hillary Clinton's private server are "like jaywalking compared to everything Donald Trump has put out there." Coleman rants:

Except that not a single thing Trump has "put out there" has occurred while Trump held one of the most significant positions in government, nor has any of it involved the most sensitive of national secrets. In the alt-reality inhabited by the left, Trump's hate speech is deemed far worse than Clinton's casual indifference to our security.

Is it remotely possible to believe that if Clinton and Trump were reversed in this scenario -- that it was Secretary of State Trump using a private email account, one with less security than my Gmail, even while abroad amid "hostile actors" -- that Clift would shrug it off?

While it was always unlikely that Clinton would serve time for her misdeeds, it takes an apologist of Clift's magnitude to blindly reject the indisputable justice that Clinton should never again receive a security clearance. This would render Clinton unfit as commander in chief, except for liberals like Clift who'd vote for her anyway.

So Trump's hate speech -- which Coleman apparently has no problem with -- is perfectly fine even if it ruins relations with American allies and divides Americans, so long as he didn't put on a private server?

Way to lower the expectations bar for your preferred presidential candidate, Jack.

Tim Graham plays the same equivocation game in a July 15 post complaining that reporters are pointing out that "Donald Trump is far worse for restricting access to reporters he doesn't like" than Hillary Clinton and how they ignore "how much more accessible Trump has been to reporters." Graham whines:

Hillary's failure to submit herself to press scrutiny likewise costs her next to nothing in the tone of her press clips. When she submits herself to interviews, they've been sappy and toothless -- see the anodyne TV questioning after the strange Comey non-indictment. The press that claims to value "independence" and "investigation" seem to think those don't apply when they cover the Clintons, and they actually hound Republicans (see Chuck Todd) when they dare to investigate Clinton scandals that the press doesn't want investigated.

The Trump aide's sorry manhandling of Michelle Fields is somewhat matched by the Clinton campaign's roping journalists like cattle. But again, they don't seem to find that embarrassing (or even worth remembering) when they compare the two candidates. Trump has been an arrogant, hypersensitive, fact-mangling candidate....and guess what? The record shows Hillary Clinton is, too.

Yes, Graham is really trying to  equate denying press access to physically assaulting -- er, "manhandling" -- a member of the press. And then he claims (without proof) that Hillary is equally "an arrogant, hypersensitive, fact-mangling candidate" as Trump.

But then, Graham is upset that Trump is even being held to basic factual standards, so he would say that.

AIM Is Mad One Reporter Showed Its Benghazi Kangaroo Court Sham
Topic: Accuracy in Media

In his July 5 column, Accuracy in Media's Roger Aronoff predictably complained that the "liberal media" mostly ignored the final report from AIM's Benghazi kangaroo court -- er, the Citizens' Commission on Benghazi. And he also complained about the one "liberal media" member that did, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, who allegedly "regularly trolls conservative gatherings to heap scorn, sarcasm and peddle misinformation to his waiting readers. That is the sad state of journalism in this country today." Aronoff complains:

During the course of Milbank’s article, he called the members of the CCB “a coalition of far-right ­foreign-policy types,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “agitators.” This is all part of the attempt to discredit the messenger, because Milbank can’t really dispute the message—although he has certainly tried. But at least he was there, and spelled the names correctly, though he was wrong about the number of members on the commission (it’s 14, plus two advisory, not 11). Apparently the Post’s Fact-Checker was busy on other stories that day. Maybe they should hire more.

Milbank found our report to be what he called “full of inventive accusations.”

“They found ‘troubling evidence that Obama and Clinton were deeply and knowingly involved in running guns to al-Qaeda in Libya,’” writes Milbank, “as well as ‘a clear case of official U.S. government submission to the Islamic Law on slander.’”

“They determined that the Obama administration ‘switched sides in what was then called the Global War on Terror’ and ‘benefited this country’s worst enemies,’” he continues. “They wrote that Clinton herself blocked U.S. military forces from attempting a rescue mission, and they attributed the decision to oust Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi in part to financial interests of the Clinton Foundation.”

When Milbank quotes from the CCB’s findings, the obvious inference is that he finds these points to be baseless—and believes they could only originate from the minds of right-wing conspiracy theorists. The findings in the CCB’s latest report are, indeed, very damning accusations. But we back them up in every case, and encourage people to read the report and judge for themselves. Our military and intelligence experts—former admirals, generals, colonels, congressmen and CIA officers—are people with vast service to this country and outstanding reputations.

Aronoff doesn't want to talk about how the CCB is filled with far-right foreign policy types and conspiracy theorists because he knows that's indisputably true. His insistence that "our military and intelligence experts—former admirals, generals, colonels, congressmen and CIA officers—are people with vast service to this country and outstanding reputations" doesn't contradict the fact that they are, in fact, Obama-haters and birthers who had no intention of conducting a fair and balanced investigation.

Indeed, according to Milbank, one of the speakersat the press conference referred to Obama as "Barack Hussein Soetero Obama," a name only birthers and Obama-haters would use. Aronoff doesn't mention that.

Milbank also pointed out that the CCB included as a member Wayne Simmons, who was recently sentenced to prison on various fraud charges after it was  discovered that he apparently lied about being a longtime CIA operative. Aronoff didn't note Milbank's reference to Simmons, let alone address why a commission that had him as a member has any credibility.

Aronoff is apparently under orders from AIM chief Don Irvine not to discuss Simmons; after news of Simmons' arrest broke last fall, AIM scrubbed its website of most references to Simmons and issued a statement on him that is the last public statement anyone at AIM has made about Simmons.

Like it or not, the presence of Simmons on the CCB, as much as AIM is now pretending it never happened, is a(nother) reason not to take the CCB seriously, as is Aronoff's refusal to discuss him.

Aronoff continues his complaint against Milbank:

It is Milbank who is being played for the fool by not looking at the evidence.

Apparently he doesn’t believe that Hillary Clinton, or anyone else, for that matter, “blocked U.S. military forces from attempting a rescue mission.” Yet American military assets were not sent to aid those in Benghazi. The Americans in Benghazi were left to withstand multiple terror attacks on their own, lasting approximately 13 hours from start to finish.

Actually, the reason to believe that Cliinton "blocked U.S. military forces from attempting a rescue mission" is because the commission offered no evidence that it happened.

Looking at the CCB report, the main source for that is an article at the far-right FrontPageMag.com by right-winger Ken Timmerman, whose headline falsely states that Clinton issued a "stand-down order" to troops purportedly ready to go to Benghazi on a rescue mission. Timmerman himself doesn't even claim that; he simply speculates that Clinton refused to authorize a military rescue into Benghazi, based on a memo issued by Jeremy Bash, an aide to then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

In fact, as the Democratic members of the House Selecddt Committee on Benghazi point out, the Bash memo confirms previous testimony by Panetta and others that even if military assets were blocked from going in (which they weren't), Americans at the Benghazi facility were evacuated before they would have arrived.

Meanwhile, note who does get Aronoff's praise for reporting on AIM's little kangaroo court:

Jerome Corsi at WorldNetDaily did read the report, and he wrote a different sort of article illuminating the dereliction of duty by the Obama administration.

[...]

Corsi recounts how Charles Woods, the father of Ty Woods, spoke at the June 29 press conference, and asked to know who is “responsible” for his son’s death. Ty was a former Navy SEAL who was part of the CIA Annex Security Team. In fact, I hope every American will get the chance to watch the movie “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.” It is available on demand on most cable TV services. I attended the premiere last January in Dallas.

Jennifer Harper of The Washington Times also highlighted the new report from the CCB.

Needless to say, neither Corsi nor Harper mention the conspiratorial, Obama-hating nature of the CCB members or that the discredited criminal Simmons was a member. And Aronoff doesn't admit that WND and the Washington Times have right-wing editorial biases.

In other words, Aronoff is praising WND and the WashTimes for uncritically repeating what it wanted to be made public. That's not "accuracy in media"; that's stenography.

And he's mad that one media outlet did raise uncomfortable truths about the CCB that he did not want discussed, an attitude that appears to contradict the whole "accuracy in media" thing AIM claims to be all about.

WND Columnist Builds Another Column Around A Chain Email
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Ben Kinchlow really needs to stop copying and pasting into his columns what he sees in Internet chain emails.

Kinchlow did this a few months back. Now he's at it again in his July 3 WorldNetDaily column (italics his):

It has been proven scientifically that a vacuum cannot exist in nature. If American citizens do not participate in their political system, a republic, then a vacuum is created and government of the people will be replaced with government over the people.

More than 200 years ago, it is asserted that an historian named Alexander Tytler bemoaned the fact that the “American way of life” might not long endure. His reasons were chillingly accurate:  “[P]eople will invariably hand over their sovereign responsibility and freedom to the government that promises the most benefits…”

He continued, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority only votes for candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result, a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship.”

Does any of that sound familiar?

Why, yes, it does, Ben. It's been floating around right-wing chain-email circles for years.  Heck, we wrote about it back in 2004, and it had been around since 2000.

Kinchlow didn't repeat most of the falsehoods around this purported quoting, getting it correct that the statement is attributed to "an historian named Alexander Tytler." Had Kinchlow bothered to dig a little deeper -- say, a visit to Snopes, which we made in 2013 when CNS columnist Alan Caruba repeated it -- there's no evidence Tytler actually wrote such a thing.

A little more digging from someone who actually dug into it (Loren Collins, the guy who also discredited Joel Gilbert) shows that the quote appears to date back only to 1943, when industrialist Henning Webb Prentis Jr. said it in a speech.

Nevertheless, Kinchlow goes on later in his column to repeat the cycle of society quote typically attributed to Tytler -- "from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual fate to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency again into bondage" -- and attributes it directly to him. But this too apparently is also from Prentis' speech.

If WND cared anything about editing, they would have alerted Kinchlow to his error. But they don't.

WND Columnist Bashes Gays, National Monuments, Gay National Monuments
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Brent Smith starts off his June 27 WorldNetDaily column with some anti-gay sneering:

Congratulations, America – we now have our first homosexual national monument. While America and the world are all caught in the drama that is Brexit, Obama has declared a gay bar in Greenwich Village, NYC, a national monument under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service.

Yep – tearing down our society one brick at a time.

The Stonewall Inn was a homosexual hangout in the ’60s. In 1969 police raided the joint, and riots ensued. From then on it has become known as the birthplace of the homosexual movement – as there was no LGBTQ back then. They were just cross-dressers and didn’t spend their time “questioning.”

Smith then expands his attack to the Antiquities Act under which the president is authorized to make such national monument declarations. He rants that the federal government has no authority to do much of anything in the U.S.:

All of this was and is unconstitutional. The president can’t be granted the authority to declare national monuments “in his discretion” because the legislative branch has no constitutional authority to grant it.

Whether you and I are big fans of national parks and historic preservation or not is completely irrelevant. Nowhere in the Constitution is authority granted to anyone in the national (federal) government to create national parks. In fact, the federal government has no authority to make any internal improvements in the United States – of any kind – not parks, roads and bridges – not even the interstate highway system. Yes, the interstate is unconstitutional. These functions were to be left to the states.

But those days are long gone, and there appears to be no way to get that genie back in the bottle.

Smith ignores the fact that challenges to the Antiquities Act on constitutional rounds have generally been upheld.

Smith then makes the weirdly specific claim: "Eight acres of land in New York City now off-limits to development of any kind. Brilliant!" Given that New York City encompasses 300,000 acres, there's hardly a dearth of developable land.

But it appears that Smith was referring to the size of the Stonewall National Monument, which includes part of the street the Stonewall In was on as well as a small park that was already spared from development. And, of course, the reason one protects the area around an historic site is to preserve the character of the area in a way that enhances said site.

But then, Smith thinks the federal government has no role to preserve anything, and he probably wouldn't mind if the Grand Canyon was plowed under like he apparently hopes the Stonewall Inn would be.

NewsBusters Blogger Pretends Trump Is An Ordinary Candidate
Topic: NewsBusters

Dylan Gwinn writes in a June 27 NewsBusters post:

Herschel Walker has attempted, finished, and excelled at many things in his life. But he’s finding supporting a Republican candidate in America in 2016 to be particularly hard.

How, specifically, is the NFL legend suffering for his public endorsement of Trump?

Well, as Walker explained it to TMZ, a lot of people basically don’t want to invite him to speaking gigs anymore:

[...]

Wouldn’t it be great if the story wasn’t what Herschel was doing despite the backlash, but instead, that there should be no backlash, retribution or price to pay for a citizen celebrity endorsing a Republican candidate? I mean, full credit to Walker for sticking to his guns. But why should he have to? Isn’t the real issue here that a highly respected and largely beloved American sports legend is being punished by organizations for simply endorsing a candidate?

Wouldn’t that be the story if companies were canceling his speaking gigs because he supported Hillary?

Wouldn't it be great if Gwinn wasn't pretending that Trump is just an ordinary, run-of-the-mill presidential candidate? Wouldn't it be great if Gwinn had noted that Trump is so controversial that prominent conservatives are leaving the Republican Party rather than be associated with him? Or that the man who publishes the website where Gwinn's blog post appears editorialized against him? Or that prominent Republicans are staying away in droves from the Republican National Convention that will award Trump his nomination?

Gwinn also glosses over the fact that Walker is no recent convert who's resigned to Trump being the GOP nominee. He endorsed Trump months ago and didn't withdraw his support even when Trump made anti-Muslim comments that angered Walker's fellow pro athletes.

Gwinn demands backlash against athletes who say liberal things (or, in the case of Michael Sam, who happen to be gay), yet he thinksWalker should be immune from backlash for backing a man who is still, despite earning the Republican nomination, an extreme candidate? Your MRC double standard in action.

WND Reporter Proves Himself A Liar
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Bob Unruh begins a July 12 WorldNetDaily article by asserting:

A new report released by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations concludes the Obama administration funded an effort to overthrow Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, one of America’s closest and most ardent allies.

The investigation concerned about $350,000 in grants given by the United States to a group called OneVoice to “support peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine.”

The organization pursued that goal but later used the grant money to campaign against Netanyahu, with whom President Obama had been at odds.

But the rest of Unruh's article disproves that assertion. Unruh quotes the report as saying the following:

• "The subcommittee found no evidence that OneVoice spent grant funds to influence the 2015 Israeli elections."
• "OneVoice Israel fully complied with the terms of its State Department grants."
• "OneVoice’s use of government-funded resources for political purposes was not prohibited by the grant agreement because the State Department placed no limitations on the post-grant use of those resources."

That's right -- two assertions by Unruh are lies: the Obama administration did not fund OneVoice's campaign against Netanyahu, and OneVoice did not use grant money to do so.

Unruh is mad that OneVoice used the infrastructure paid for with the grant money for its anti-Netanyahu campaign -- which, by the way, was not an "overthrow" attempt. It was part of the 2015 Israeli election process, as we pointed out when WND editor Joseph Farah told these exact same lies when the election was going on.

Even the headline of Unruh's article -- "Obama funded secret strategy to oust Netanyahu" -- is a lie. It was so "secret," apparently, that it didn't even happen.

The fact that WND will tell lies about a report detailing the exact opposite of what it's claiming is just another reason WND has no credibility.

NEW ARTICLE: The MRC's Trump Flip
Topic: Media Research Center
In the space of just a couple of months, the Media Research Center went from demanding negative media coverage of Donald Trump -- which it didn't even order its own "news" division to do -- to complaining when it happens. Read more >>

WND's Farah Tries to Rewrite Birther History Again
Topic: WorldNetDaily

It's taken more than a week, but Joseph Farah has finally responded in his July 11 column to the New York Times article about how he advised Donald Trump during his birther phase in 2011 -- in his usual thin-skinned way, of course. First, he takes exception to being described as being "on the fringes of political life, publishing a six-part series claiming that soybeans caused homosexuality and fretting that ‘cultural Marxists’ were plotting to destroy the country":

For the record, I have never been in “political life” – either on the fringes or laboring. The “six-part series” was not a series at all, but the personal obsession of one of WND’s 45 weekly columnists. That columnist died a number of years ago, so that will give you an idea of how far back the Times had to look for embarrassing stuff to write. (By the way, unlike the Times or practically any other significant newspaper or news site, these days, WND actually publishes the opinions of columnists from across the political spectrum. What a concept!)

So working in the 1990s trying to destroy the Clintons and for the past eight years trying to destroy Obama had no political motivation whatsoever? Please. And as we point out every time Farah makes this claim, only two of those 45 columnists on WND's "spectrum," Bill Press and Ellen Ratner, are actually liberal, while almost every single one of the rest are on the conservative/libertarian end. That's not much of a "spectrum."

Farah continues complaining:

The story goes on to say that I spoke to Trump on the phone a few times because he wanted to take one of my theories “mainstream.”

“That developer, Donald J. Trump, told Mr. Farah that he shared his suspicion that President Obama might have been born outside the United States and that he was looking for a way to prove it,” the article said.

There are just three problems with that statement:

• I never believed, said or wrote that Obama was born outside the U.S.;
• I explained that to the one and only reporter who interviewed me several times – giving her my full cooperation;
• Trump didn’t say he believed Obama was born outside the U.S. either, nor did he say he was looking for a way to prove it.

From there the article descends into ideological insults – from “the birther idea – long debunked, and until then confined to right-wing conspiracy theorists” to playing the old race card against Trump.

In fact, Farah has on at least two occasions repeated the (completely false) claim that Obama's grandmother has said that Obama was born in Kenya. And if Farah wasn't questioning whether Obama is a citizen, he wouldn't have published a supposed "Kenyan birth certificate" without first trying to verify if it was authentic (it wasn't).

Then, Farahr writes this:

Through the entire eligibility issue that lasted from 2008 until late 2011, the New York Times apparently never thought it was strange that Obama wouldn’t release his birth certificate – or practically any other information about his life, from academic records to Harvard Law School writings to passport records to health reports. Apparently, it still has not occurred to the Old York Times that it was unusual. Of course, it could only be racism that would cause anyone to ask for such things.

For me, this was always an issue of transparency.

Oh, bull. It was never about transparency for Farah; otherwise, he would have accepted the birth certificate Obama released during the 2008 campaign. The only thing Farah cared about was turning the birth certificate into Obama's Vince Foster. If Farah really cared about transparency, he would have told his readers that all of WND's birther conspiracy theories have been discredited (oh, and that he worked with Trump on the birther stuff in 2011, which he has never admitted at WND until now).

Also: The "eligibility issue" ended in "late 2011"? Really? According to who? Farah has apparently forgotten that late 2011 was when WND's Jerome Corsi was working with Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio to sleaze the incompetent and dishonest "cold case posse" into existence.

Is Farah so desperate to distance WND from its extensive involvement in the cold case posse that he's now trying to erase it from the birther timeline? Does this mean that he now accepts Obama's long-form birth certificate as legitimate after spending years trying to discredit it? If so, wow.

Then again, this is not the first time Farah has tried to rewrite the birther timeline.

Farah then writes something we shockingly agree with:

And, as for me, I can honestly say that all of the garbage they wrote about me was simply drudged up from old reports in Media Matters. You’d think with five reporters on the story, they could have come up with something really embarrassing from 20 years of publishing WND and 20 years of personally written daily columns!

He's right -- he and WND have done much more embarrassing things. Like libelously smearing a man as a drug dealer, for instance. Or those fraudulent documents Corsi flew to Kenya to get. Or portraying Obama as the Antichrist, not to mention a Nazi. Or that Farah- and Corsi-endorsed super PAC that didn't help any candidate as it claimed it would. Or its dangerous anti-vaccine crusade. We could go on.

We're disappointed that the Times didn't check out ConWebWatch for background on WND's lack of credibility. Farah's continued telling of falsehoods and trying to rewrite history, however, isn't helping the whole credibility thing.

MRC Is In Full Trump Campaign PR Mode
Topic: Media Research Center

In addition to outright denying that Donald Trump should be held accountable for his lies, the Media Research Center is fully on board the Trump campaign in order to spin his record.

In a July 6 post, Nicholas Fondacaro pushed back on protests over how Trump used bankruptcy proceedings at his Atlantic City casinos to avoid taking a personal financial hit on the casino's problems, complaining that the media "parroted Clinton’s attacks on Trump and talked about Trump’s bankrupted casinos as if they were the only casinos to have closed":

But the truth is, Trump’s casinos were not the only ones to shut down. Four of the city’s 12 casinos closed in 2014 after they all saw their incomes plummet by 50 percent in eight years. And in December 2015 CNN Money reported that, “three of the remaining casinos are "already on the brink," with the Trump Taj Mahal, Caesar's and Bally's having filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.” Atlantic City as a whole was so bad the state government was forced to restructure how the casinos payed taxes. 

That's true but mostly irrelevant. As the New York Times reported, Trump made little effort to invest in the city where his casinos were or even do much reinvestment into his casinos, pulling his casino profits out of the city to put into his Manhattan real estate. Trump's manipulations over the nearly 30 years his casinos have been in Atlantic -- including three bankruptcy filings -- have been geared toward removing any personal financial responsibility for them while still reaping revenue from them, as others were left on the hook for the casinos' debts.

Clay Waters took the Trump apologist mantle in a July 9 post complaining about a New York Times' article on Trump's birther fixation in 2011. Trump tries to pretend that right-wingers-- and, thus, Trump -- had nothing to do with birtherism, narrowly focusing on how the birther claim originated with rogue Hillary Clinton supporters.

But Waters ignores that regardless of its origin, the birther movement grew almost exclusively due to right-wingers who hated Obama, like Trump. The MRC itself was not immune to promoting birtherism, and it only aggressively denounced birthers when they started going after Ted Cruz.

These are the kind of deflections and spin you'd expect to see from campaign spokespeople. Hopefully Trump is paying the MRC accordingly for its PR work.

Self-Proclaimed Ex-Clinton Mistress Speculates on Hillary's Health (At WND, Of Course)
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Remember earlier this year, when WorldNetDaily was spreading rumors about Hillary Clinton's supposedly precarious health, based on doctors who have never examined her? Well, they never really stopped ... and they've looped another conspiracy-monger into the mix.

We've already noted how Dolly Kyle, the self-proclaimed former Bill Clinton mistress and WND author, dutifully regurgitated WND's obsession with Hillary Clinton's purported health issues, suggesting that she's "cognitively impaired" and medically unfit to be president. But she's not a doctor, and presumably has had no contact with her in at least 20 years, if ever (we haven't read her book, and WND has not seen fit to send a review copy to us so we could see whether she claims ever having any personal contact with Hillary).

WND gave Kyle a chance to regurgitate more dubious speculation about Clinton's health in a July 10 article:

The author of “Hillary The Other Woman” said Hillary Clinton is characterized by a combination of carelessness, ignorance and entitlement.

“Hillary’s lack of the most minimal technological knowledge not only illustrates her increasing cognitive impairment, but it also illustrates her lifelong above-it-all arrogance,” she said. “Hillary does not need to know what the little details mean because none of those details apply to her and none of the requirements of the law apply to her, as we have seen for the past 30 years.”

In “Hillary The Other Woman,” Kyle assembles a formidable case Hillary Clinton’s mental ability is beginning to deteriorate, as the candidate has shown emotional instability, memory loss and difficulty planning and carrying out tasks. Kyle also details how Hillary Clinton’s troublesome temperament has manifested over the years, including her long history of what Kyle calls a “pathological” tendency to lie, even where there is nothing to be gained.

More importantly, Kyle alleges Hillary Clinton has an inability to handle situations spontaneously and without a script.

“Note her irate response about Benghazi, when she yelled, ‘What difference does it make?'” said Kyle. “Hillary Clinton has not had a press conference since December 4, 2015. She’s terrified to have a press conference because she is unable to listen attentively to a question and formulate an answer under pressure. Don’t forget, she recently even read the word ‘sigh’ when reading off the teleprompter!

“She has now told so many lies on so many topics on so many different occasions that even if she were playing with a full deck, she would have trouble pulling out the right card.”

Regardless, Kyle said the American people cannot allow someone who she believes may be mentally incapable of handling responsibility to become commander in chief.

“Hillary has already proven that she is incapable of playing with matches after the disasters she set in motion in Libya and throughout the Middle East,” Kyle said. “She is too cognitively impaired to recognize and appreciate the potential consequences of her actions. We cannot let the cognitively impaired Hillary Clinton escalate from playing with matches as secretary of state to controlling the nuclear arsenal of the United States of America as commander in chief. Clinton’s Muslim aide Huma Abedin, with her Muslim Brotherhood family, would become the shadowy figure in control.

“Anyone who cannot see the danger there is probably on the way to cognitive impairment as well.”

Kyle (or whichever WND employee wrote this in her name) managed to use "cognitively impaired" or a variation of it five times in her remarks. She she's complaining about Hillary being a slave to a script?

MRC Getting Into The Right-Wing-Screed Business
Topic: Media Research Center

The Media Research Center seems to be getting further and further away from all that "media research" stuff (not that they're all that good at it) and is moving toward hateful right-wing screeds. The MRC has been into these in the past month.

For example, P.J. Gladnick sneered in a June 10 post:

When you hear Elizabeth Warren loudly ranting about Donald Trump do her screechings sound vaguely familiar? Perhaps you were sure you heard someone like that in the past but you can't quite put your finger on it. Well, a recent caller to the Laura Ingraham radio show, Mark from Virginia, finally lifted the veil on that maddening ​mystery when he revealed that Warren was an almost exact vocal twin of the Ruth Buzzi's bag lady character of many eons ago on the Laugh-In television comedy show.

Aha! Now it is clear to you. Of course. And if you doubt the very similar vocal patterns, listen to this clip of Laura Ingraham comparing Elizabeth Warren's rants with those of Ruth Buzzi. They are eerily similar in both voice and attitude.

MRC VP Dan Gainor wrote a post titled "6 Radical, Crazy, Insane, Nutball, Liberal Things," declaring that "Tracking liberal insanity is like playing Whack-A-Mole only instead of pesky moles, you get to bash bizarro lefties." Again, not exactly forwarding the whole "media research" thing.

And Maggie McKneely made her hate clear in the headline of her NewsBusters post: "Make it Stop: Media Hype FLOTUS Snapchatting and Carpool Karaoke." Yes, McKneely is all bent out of shape because Michelle Obama is doing a "Carpool Karaoke" segment with James Corden. No, really:

Corden is undoubtedly a fan of his next guest, but First Lady Michelle Obama is an unconventional choice because she has no original songs. Maybe they can sing Fifth Harmony’s tribute to the FLOTUS.

To announce the upcoming appearance, Obama joined the world of Snapchat. Although she’s only used the app for a day, the ever-worshipful media has already dubbed her the “Snapqueen.” Cosmo, though, just prefers to call her their “Queen” in general. 

[...]

Michelle Obama was already the most televised first lady in history, appearing on everything from Jimmy Kimmel to NCIS to even Nickelodeon. But considering Hillary Clinton has had a snapchat account for almost a year, Obama has been surprisingly slow to join the bandwagon.  And since 71% of its users are under 25 years old, there’s no better way to reach the college-age demographic.

Snapchat’s appeal to its users is that everything that gets posted disappears forever after 24 hours, no matter how dumb and ridiculous it was. What better way to advertise karaoke? 

Again, this is all over Michelle Obama doing a harmless bit of TV. What is McKneely's problem?

UPDATE: Gladnick strikes again in a July 12 post, having apparently decided that Hillary Clinton is the Manchurian candidate:

Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.

Anybody who ever saw the movie The Manchurian Candidate would have quickly thought it rather odd that every soldier captured in Korea with Raymond Shaw gave identical answers when asked to describe him. However, when associates of Hillary used identical answers to describe her, Ezra Klein of Vox seems not to notice anything strange there. Here is Ezra making the observation about those identical (robotic?) descriptions without the least hint of curiosity as to the Manchurian Candidate quality about them:

The answers startled me in their consistency. Every single person brought up, in some way or another, the exact same quality they feel leads Clinton to excel in governance and struggle in campaigns. On the one hand, that makes my job as a reporter easy. There actually is an answer to the question. On the other hand, it makes my job as a writer harder: It isn’t a very satisfying answer to the question, at least not when you first hear it.

Hillary Clinton, they said over and over again, listens.

Hillary Clinton is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful listener I have ever known in my life.

And to make sure you know she is a good listener, Klein repeats "listen," listens," and "listener" 41 times in his shill Hill piece. Whenever the Red Queen flashes by, we get this response:

[...]

Except Klein did not question why every single person associated with Hillary gave that same Manchurian Candidatish "listen" answer. A skeptical mind would suspect that it was a mandatory talking point Hillary description answer handed down from on high. Instead, Klein went on to unsubtly press that "listen" shtick over and over again  much like 1950s TV commercials pitching aspirin products by showing a cartoon hammer pounding repetitively against a skull:

[...]

Agghhhh!!! Enough already, Ezra! You've pounded that Hillary "listen" bit so relentlessly against my skull that now I need an aspirin.

Exit question: If I flash the Red Queen in front of Ezra Klein and make a certain demand, would he jump into a vat of Kool Aid along with his fellow Hillary-enabling JournoLists?

So when Obama stop being the Manchurian candidate (or president)? Gladnick should ask Aaron Klein about that.

CNS Writers Spread Birth Control Misinformation
Topic: CNSNews.com

In his July 6 column, CNSNews.com editor Terry Jeffrey decries the Supreme Court failing to take up a right-wing favorite case in which a pharmacy in Washington state claim their religious rights have been violated because it's being punished under state law for refusing to stock the morning-after pill.

Jeffrey repeatedly calls the morning-after pill an "abortifacient" or an "abortifacient drug," and he even quotes Justice Samuel Alito referring to "abortifacient emergency contraceptives."

Just one problem: the morning-after pill is not an abortifacient under the medical definition of the word. As we've previously documented, morning-after pills like Plan B primarily work by suppressing ovulation, thus preventing fertilization.

Jeffrey quotes the right-wing groups pushing the case claiming that "the FDA has recognized" that the morning-after pill "can prevent implantation of an embryo." But research has not definitively shown that the pill works this way, but even if it did, it would not be an "abortifacient" because, medically speaking, an abortion can only take place on a implanted egg.

Plus, as many as 80 percent of a woman's fertilized eggs fail to implant naturally, which would seem to make every woman a walking "abortion" factory. Jeffrey doesn't address that little issue.

Jeffrey also uncritically repeats the right-wing activists' case that "over 30 pharmacies carry Plan B" within a five-mile radius of the pharmacy involved in the case, as well as "from nearby doctors' offices, government health centers, emergency rooms, Planned Parenthood, a toll-free hotline and the internet."

But as the Atlantic points out, the flaw with that argument is that the case would seek to invalidate the law across the state, not just the urban area where the plaintiff's pharmacy is:

In its decision, the Ninth Circuit argued that there are good reasons for Washington not to make religious exemptions to its drug-delivery rules. While the  owners of Storman’s argued that they would have been happy to refer customers to other pharmacies, “Speed is particularly important considering the time-sensitive nature of emergency contraception and of many other medications,” the Ninth Circuit said. “The time taken to travel to another pharmacy, especially in rural areas where pharmacies are sparse, may reduce the efficacy of those drugs.” Customers also shouldn’t get sent somewhere else when they ask for medication, the decision said, because “referrals could lead to feelings of shame in the patient that could dissuade her from obtaining emergency contraception altogether.”

At its conceptual core, that’s what this case is about: whether religious business owners and employees should be able to refuse to provide contraceptives to women, even when state regulations require them to do so.

Jeffrey, however, wasn't the only CNS employee dispensing contraception misinformation last week. Penny Starr wrote in a July 1 article bashing "longtime abortion advocate" Carmen Barroso discussing an abortion she had that "Barroso said she got pregnant while using an abortion-inducing intra-uterine device, which failed."

No, IUDs are not "abortion-inducing." As the Atlantic again explains, IUDs work mainly by killing sperm -- which is not abortion -- and it could also possibly work by preventing implantation (it's not clear whether it acually does), but that is, again, also not abortion under the medically accepted definition.

Jeffrey and Starr would better serve the public interest it claims to provide as a "news" operation if they would report facts instead of peddling biased misinformation.

WND Now Trying to Blame Obama for Dallas Shooting
Topic: WorldNetDaily

Having falsely linked Dallas police shooting perpetrator Micah Johnson to Black Lives Matter, WorldNetDaily continued on its fact-free way and tried to blame President Obama for the massacre as well.

Right-wing ambulance-chasing terrible attorney Larry Klayman spewed in his July 7 column:

In the wake of the massacre of five Dallas, Texas, policemen, with seven shot and wounded, President Barack Hussein Obama, as he has with his Muslim brothers, refused to refer to this heinous crime as a “hate crime” – despite the fact the shooter had admitted that he wanted to kill whites and in particular white cops, motivated by the hateful anti-white rhetoric spewed forth by Black Lives Matter and thus by extension the support this insidious group has gotten from Obama himself.

Not only does Obama have blood on his hands as having encouraged if not furthered this hate crime against whites and white cops, but so too does his “soul brothers,” the virulent anti-white, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian so-called Rev. Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, and his co-enablers like another so-called reverend, Al Sharpton, a charlatan and white hater. Indeed, Obama has, as usual, chosen to associate himself with these lowlifes in his quest to ram his latent hatred of whites, Jews and Christians down everyone’s throats. When the leader of the United States and supposedly the Western world, who was born to a Muslim father, schooled in Muslim schools, and has close ties to black-Muslim leaders like Farrakhan seeks to incite violence by virtue of his running interference for Muslims and blacks who are not even representative of African-Americans generally, it’s no wonder Obama-inspired massacres like Dallas happen. In two words, “Obama Happens!”

Klayman then showed off his ambulance-chasing ways:

I am filing in the next day a lawsuit, with myself as the initial plaintiff, against Obama, Black Lives Matter, Farrakhan and Sharpton for endangering not just my life, as a white law enforcement person of Jewish origin, but also for all Americans, white, black, yellow or brown, no matter what their race or religion. Someone has to take the first step, and I have concluded it has to be me.

Bercause Klayman is just that narcissistic and delusional.

The same day, WND editor Joseph Farah declared that "Obama himself provided plenty of excuses beyond his inclination to enflame racial strife and deter racial reconciliation. He has done everything a president of the United States could do to bring us such a tragedy – with potentially more on the way."

Farah then lists several bullet points to attempt to prove his point, such as the tired, irrelevant claim that "Obama will not use the term 'Islamic terrorism.'" But it's a sign of WND's overall lack of credibility that two of Farah's bullet points reference "FBI counter-terror specialist John Guandolo."

Why? Guandolo is actually a former FBI counter-terror specialist (which Farah concedes in his second reference to Guandolo), and the reason he's a former FBI counter-terror specialist is because he's a serial philanderer and adulterer who jeopardized a federal investigation by having sex with a witness and trying to get her to donate money to a right-wing "anti-terrorism" organization.

Still, WND insists Guandolo is actually credible. Which is just one more reason people think WND isn't.

NewsBusters Blogger Has Selective Memory on Klan, Double Standard on Rhetoric Leading to Shootings
Topic: NewsBusters

Tom Blumer devotes a July 4 NewsBusters post whining that the Associated Press did an article on the 150th anniversary of the Ku Klux Klan. What he's really mad about, though, is that the AP referenced Donald Trump in its article, noting that "Klan leaders say Donald Trump's ascendancy in the GOP is a sign things are going their way," noting Trump's support for building a wall on the Mexican border, something the anti-immigrant Klan also supports. Blumer huffs:

There you go. The AP wants readers to believe that any supporter of nationalism, only-lawful immigration which doesn't take jobs away from current citizens, and building a wall to stem the tide of illegal immigration is really no different than the racists in the KKK.

Blumer, however, doesn't explain why there is a substantive difference between the two. Nor does he square these conservative views that are a part of the platform of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and the Klan with his assertion that "All three incarnations of the Klan were either arms of, had close ties to, or were dominated by members of the Democratic Party." 

Of course, Blumer omits the fact that it was Southern Democrats who provided this support for the Klan, and after Democratic support for civil rights laws in the 1960s made it clear that racism would no longer be tolerated through the entire Democratic Party, the Republicans drew up the "Southern strategy" to use race as an issue to woo southern Democrats to their party, which played a significant role in the current Republican dominance of Southern politics.

Also, Blumer's desperate attempt to try and separate Trump from racists might have worked a little better if his post didn't come in the midst of the Trump campaign trying (and failing miserably) to spin away an anti-Semetic image attacking Hillary Clinton that originated on a white nationalist website that the campaign tweeted out.

Blumer also misleadingly attacks the Southern Poverty Law Center, claiming it engaged in purported "irresponsibility" that led to an attempt by an armed gunman to enter the Family Research Council headquarters because "it has taken to calling any group which advocates traditional one-man, one-woman marriage (e.g., the Family Research Council) as a hate group." In fact, the SPLC has explained that its listing of the FRC as a hate group has reasoning that goes far beyond merely "advocating traditional one-man, one-woman marriage":

The SPLC has listed the FRC as a hate group since 2010 because it has knowingly spread false and denigrating propaganda about LGBT people — not, as some claim, because it opposes same-sex marriage. The FRC and its allies on the religious right are saying, in effect, that offering legitimate and fact-based criticism in a democratic society is tantamount to suggesting that the objects of criticism should be the targets of criminal violence.

As the SPLC made clear at the time and in hundreds of subsequent statements and press interviews, we criticize the FRC for claiming, in Perkins’ words, that pedophilia is “a homosexual problem” — an utter falsehood, as every relevant scientific authority has stated. An FRC official has said he wanted to “export homosexuals from the United States.” The same official advocated the criminalizing of homosexuality.

If Blumer really believes that about the SPLC, he then has to admit that Operation Rescue played a role in the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller because killer Scott Roeder had several contacts with the group before committing his crime, or the Center for Medical Progress played a role in the massacre of three employees at a Planned Parenthood clinic because of its dishonestly edited secret-video attacks on Planned Parenthood and shooter Robert Dear was echoing what CMP and others (like the MRC) said about "baby parts" allegedly being sold from the clinics.

But Blumer will never admit that because it takes away his own argument, as he admits:

Outfits like SPLC think it's "outrageous" that people blamed them when someone attempted mass murder based on their false evaluation of a mainstream Christian group. But in [historian quoted by the AP] David Cunningham's world, every person on earth who is patriotic, or advocates reasonable controls on immigration, or thinks a border wall is necessary, deserves to be blamed for any and all violence which might be committed by people who claim to hold similar positions.

So, the double standard continues, and Blumer is OK with it.

CNS Unemployment Numbers Distortion Watch
Topic: CNSNews.com

Susan Jones throws out a bunch of numbers to start her July 8 article on the latest unemployment numbers:

The civilian labor force expanded in June, adding 414,000 people, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

The number of employed people increased by 67,000 to 151,097,000 in June, but the number of unemployed people increased even more, by 347,000 to 7,783,000.

The unemployment rate ticked up two-tenths of a point to 4.9 percent.

BLS said 94,517,000 Americans were not in the labor force in June, a slight improvement from May's record 94,708,000; and after dropping for three straight months, the labor force participation rate increased a tenth of a point to 62.7 percent in June.

Note that none of the numbers she's tossing around is the really important one: number of jobs created. Taht number -- 287,000 -- doesn't get mentioned until the sixth paragraph of her article.

Jones also surprisingly undermines her and CNS' obsession with presenting the labor force participation rate as a meaningful measure of employment by admitting the large number is largely driven by retiring baby boomers:

Last month, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen told Congress the Fed is keeping a close eye on the labor force participation rate. She said she expects that rate to "continue declining in the coming years because we have an aging population."

As baby-boomers retire, "they work less," she noted, even though younger people "participate more."

People who have not actively looked for work in the previous month are not counted as participating in the labor force. 

Of course, that didn't get mentioned until the ninth paragraph of the article. Jones'noting that "Yellen told Congress that 'a sign of a strengthening labor market is to see people who were discouraged brought back into the labor force'" -- which further undermines the way Jones presented her numbers -- is buried even farther down.