WND's Muslim Derangement Syndrome, 'Islamic Zombie Apocalypse' Edition Topic: WorldNetDaily
The current edition of WorldNetDaily's barely relevant Whistleblower magazins carries the theme "Killing Jihad," but appears to be your typical right-wing Muslim-hating -- assuming that all Muslims are terrorists -- and Obama-bashing, to judge by the WND article promoting it:
Almost 15 years after the horrendous 9/11 attacks and the ensuing “war on terror,” waged at a cost of thousands of American soldiers’ lives and trillions of dollars, America is losing that war.
Today, Islamic jihad is a bigger problem for Americans than ever. With terror attacks on the homeland coming with increasing frequency and ferocity – the worst massacre since 9/11 occurring recently in Orlando – polls show neutralizing terrorism is at the top of most Americans’ priorities.
Although President Obama and his former secretary of state and chosen successor, Hillary Clinton, live in a state of perpetual denial as to who is our enemy and how to defeat it, most Americans have managed to cut through the politically correct fog and finally see their enemy for what it truly is: an ultra-violent worldwide religious cult totally bent on global conquest.
While Obama pretends the threat doesn’t exist, he ironically created its most virulent and dangerous manifestation – ISIS – by ignoring top military advisers and recklessly pulling all American troops out of Iraq. And he has been fueling ISIS ever since by refusing to attack it with anything resembling a serious strategy.
As ISIS boasts in a recent recruiting video: “[The Islamic State’s] territory is already greater than Britain, eight times the size of Belgium, and 30 times the size of Qatar!” Indeed, the apparent success of ISIS’ self-proclaimed caliphate is attracting wave upon wave of “radicalized” young converts, male and female, from around the world, including America.
And yet there is hope. Obama’s time is coming to an end (unless Hillary Clinton is elected, which most believe would amount to a third and possibly fourth Obama term). On the other hand, Donald Trump insists that as president he would stop the endless flood of immigrants into the U.S. from terror hotbeds and would lead America’s allies in seriously engaging, militarily and in all other ways, the jihadist enemy and defeating it.
How deranged is this magazine? Here is the actual title of one of the articles:
“The Islamic zombie apocalypse: Understanding how ‘radicalization’ works – and how to prevent it” by David Kupelian
The article is even promoted in the upper left of the cover.
So apparently Muslims are zombies now. We had no idea.
Bozell's Hypocrisy on Demanding A Full Retraction For a Misquote Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Reserarch Center is nothing if not a loyal supporter and protector of Fox News (if only to guarantee that Brent Bozell and his underlings regularly appear on it). It won't even criticize blatantly biased pro-Trump propaganda on the channel even though it's indisputably an example of media bias.
Thus, it's unsurprising that NewsBusters, the MRC's main portal, has been totally silent about the sexual harrassment lawsuit former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson has filed against Fox News chief Roger Ailes. And the only time the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, has ever mentioned it on its front page is a July 15 Associated Press article on Ailes trying to move the case to arbitration.
So when MRC chief Brent Bozell made appearances on Fox News and Fox Business on July 18, network officials knew he would never talk about the Ailes lawsuit. So what did he talk about instead? How the Washington Post misattributed a statement by Marco Rubio to Fox News (and Fox Business) host Neil Cavuto. And of course, Bozell ramps this up to a full conspiracy-level scandal:
Fox Business Network brought on MRC President Brent Bozell Monday afternoon to talk about how the Washington Post smeared FBN host Neil Cavuto in an article in Sunday’s paper. In a roundup list of conservatives who were wrong about Trump getting the likely nomination, the Post inaccurately attributed a Marco Rubio quote to Neil Cavuto. After host Charles Payne asked Brent Bozell if this was “sloppy reporting,” Bozell responded that it was “absolutely sloppy” and that he thought the paper “owes an apology and a retraction.”
Payne observed that it seemed like the liberal media liked to pit conservatives against each other, with articles like this. Bozell agreed, that "the establishment press" like the New York Times and the Washington Post have always had a “certain disdain” for Fox News and because of that, they get loose with the facts and “gravitate” towards this kind of journalism. “I wonder how many people on the left they would look at in journalism?” Bozell asked. “They don’t. They want to find an opportunity to go after Fox at every chance that they get,” he added.
As usual, Bozell is being utterly hypocritical in his demands. Back in the mid-1990s, the MRC pulled random quotes from a book by then-New York Times editor Howell Raines and claimed that they maliciously disparaged Ronald Reagan. In fact, the MRC cobbled together statements 28 pages apart in Raines' book to make the claim.
When the Daily Howler's Bob Somerby called out the MRC on its egregious error several years later, did Bozell admit the “absolutely sloppy” work and issue "an apology and a retraction"? Of course not -- it simply appended a "clarifiaction" to the false posts and added the tepid statement, "We regret the confusion." No correction, no apology.
Unless Bozell can offer on the MRC's Raines misquotes what he demands the Post do for Cavuto, he needs to shut up about this. Then again, he was able to parlay his faux outrage into two TV appearances, so maybe that's all that matters to him.
WorldNetDaily haslongbeen an opponent of vaccines, a promoter of discredited anti-vaxxer activists and blithe to the danger unvaccinated people pose to the public at large.
WND does this again in a July 15 article by Bob Unruh, who begins by devoting the opening seven paragrpahs to rehashing WND columnist Barry Farber's enthusiastic touting of an anti-vaccine film made by discredited doctor Andrew Wakefield, who ultimately lost his medical license for conducting a fraudulent, unethical study claiming that vaccines cause autism.
This, by the way, has nothing whatsoever to do with the ostensible subject of Unruh's article, which tells you all you need to know about just how anti-vaxxer WND is.
The rest of the article is Unruh rewriting a press release by the right-wing Thomas More Law Center about the case of a Michigan woman who objected to vaccinating her children on religious grounds since some are descended from the cells of aborted fetuses. Neither Unruh nor the Thomas More Law Center make clear whether the woman objects to all vaccines on those grounds or just the few that actually are -- Unruh is in stenography mode and isn't curious about finding out things that weren't in the press release. But if Unruh had bothered to read the complaint the law center filed, it states tha the woman's "personal religious beliefs also oppose all vaccines, even those that are not manufactured from aborted fetal cells, because she believes that the body is God’s temple and injecting it with chemicals that permanently alter the body violates the will of God."
The center of the complaint is about a fact sheet used by Michigan officials to claim that no religion opposes the use of vaccinesand claimed that Pope Benedict said that, according to the law center, "parents who chose not to give vaccines derived from [aborted fetal] cells would be in ‘more proximate cooperation with evil’ than those who gave their children the vaccines in question because of the life-saving nature of vaccines." Unruh responds, dutifully transcribing the Thomas More Law Center:
However, it said Pope Benedict never made such a statement.
“‘Moral Reflections,’ the Vatican document produced on vaccines containing the cells of aborted children by the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life, also did not contain any condemnation of parents who refuse to vaccinate, especially not the MDHHS characterization of parents who do not vaccinate their children as ‘evil.'”
But neither Unruh nor the law center state what exactly the pope said about vaccines. According to the statement by the pope, "there is a grave responsibility to use alternative vaccines" that did not involve aborted fetal cells "and to make a conscientious objection with regard to those which have moral problems." But he also stated that for those vaccines available only through fetal cell lines, the public good must also be considered:
As regards the vaccines without an alternative, the need to contest so that others may be prepared must be reaffirmed, as should be the lawfulness of using the former in the meantime insomuch as is necessary in order to avoid a serious risk not only for one's own children but also, and perhaps more specifically, for the health conditions of the population as a whole -- especially for pregnant women
The lawfulness of the use of these vaccines should not be misinterpreted as a declaration of the lawfulness of their production, marketing and use, but is to be understood as being a passive material cooperation and, in its mildest and remotest sense, also active, morally justified as an "extrema ratio" due to the necessity to provide for the good of one's children and of the people who come in contact with the children -- pregnant women.
While the pope did counsel against vaccines descended from aborted fetal cells, he did not issue a blanket prohibition against them and he did not forbid the use of vaccines not created using that method. The Thomas More Law Center -- and, thus, Unruh -- is not being completely honest in their defense.
The irony is that WND and the law center are promoting this case while there is a sizable measles outbreak occurring in Arizona, the spread of which is being driven by people who have not been vaccinated. Indeed, measles outbreaks in recent years have been driven by the unvaccinated. Whoops.
CNS Buries Story of Melania Trump's Plagiarism Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com did do some original reporting on the Melania Trump plagiarism controversy, but you wouldn't know it from looking at the CNS front page.
The headline on Susan Jones' story reads "Melania Trump: 'Our Country Is Underperforming'" and it begins with sycophantic slobbering over the speech:
In her well-received speech to the Republican National Convention Monday night, Melania Trump promised that the presidential race "will be hard fought all the way to November. There will be good times and hard times and unexpected turns. It would not be a Trump contest without excitement and drama," she added with a smile.
It's not until the second paragraph that Jones got around to noting that "The drama exploded shortly after Mrs. Trump left the stage, as accusations of plagiarism swirled around two passages in her speech, copied almost word for word from a speech delivered to the Democratic National Convention in 2008 by Michelle Obama."
But after noting that "Those similarities, played side-by-side on televisions across America on Tuesday morning, are noted below," Jones returned to stenography mode, explaining how "the heart of Melania's speech centered on her husband's love of family and country -- and how he will deliver the change that he says the country needs."
That was apparently more important to Jones than the details of Melania's apparent plagiarism, complete with a quote from the Trump campaign that avoided addressing the issue at hand.
Later, an update was added to the top of Jones' article in italics that uncritically transcribed Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's nonsensical denial plagiarism took place. But the plagiarism-avoiding headline remains.
Meanwhile, over at CNS parent the Media Research Center, they're trying to dismiss the story entirely by complaining that it's being covered, calling the coverage a "feeding frenzy" and grumbling that "In contrast, ABC, CBS, NBC and FNC during these hours collectively provided a mere 1 minute, 48 seconds of coverage to Pat Smith's emotional speech condemning Hillary Clinton's inept handling of Benghazi." It took seven MRC employees to register that complaint: authors Mike Ciandella and Rich Noyes and five others doing research.
MRC Defends Race-Baiting CNN Commentator Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center is so completely aboard the Trump train, it appears, that it's starting to reflect his retrograde attitudes.
When race-baiting right-wing CNN commentator Harry Houck actually said that blacks are "prone to criminality," what did the MRC's Brad Wilmouth do in a July 11 post? He defended Houck as being "completely accurate" and blamed fellow CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill for freaking out about it and causing a lack of a civil conversation on the issue:
Monday's New Day on CNN displayed a classic example of how difficult it is to have a conversation with a liberal about racial issues. If you present relevant facts that are completely accurate, you run the risk of being accused of racism, especially if the liberal you're speaking to has a different vision of what your choice of words should have been.
Moments after CNN law enforcement analyst Harry Houck recited NYPD stats finding that New York City's black population commits crime at a rate much more disproportionate compared to their percentage of the population, he and liberal CNN political commentator Marc Lamont Hill got into a debate about whether the Ferguson police department was found to be racist based on emails that had been circulated.
After Hill declared, "If Harry stood on national TV and just said that black people are prone to criminality, I wouldn't even respond to that," leading Houck to respond, "Well, they are," as he referred back to the aforementioned crime statistics. The two then got into a heated exchange that went on for almost three minutes.
The problem here is that while Houck's numbers may be "accurate," they are incomplete and lack context. As the Daily Kos' Frank Vyan Walton details, the numbers Houck was citing date from the days of New York's controversial stop-and-frisk policy, which overly targeted minorities and was ineffective at deterring crime -- only 6.2 percent of people stopped under stop-and-frisk were ever arrested and only 2 percent were convicted of a crime.
Further, Walton notes, in nearly every category of crime in the NYPD stats, the number of blacks arrested are significantly lower than the number of blacks considered as suspects, which would seem to suggest a certain amount of reflexive racism among the NYPD.
Houck is the kind of person whose attitudes on race the MRC now considers acceptable. That's what happens when you get on board the Trump train.
WND Censors Baton Rouge Shooter's Links to Sovereign Citizen Movement Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily knows how to pander to the fears of its audience: make black men, especially if they've committed horrible crimes, as scary as possible with as many trigger buzzwords as possible, like "Islam."
Here's WND began its initial, unbylined story on the alleged shooter of police officeers in Baton Rouge, La.:
The shooter who gunned down three Baton Rouge law-enforcement officers and injured three more has ties with the Nation of Islam.
Gavin Eugene Long of Kansas City, Missouri apparently coincided his 29th birthday – July 17, 1987 – with his rampage. In his extensive online presence, which included tweets, self-published books, YouTube videos and a website, he said he was once a member of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, but said he had no affiliations with outside groups.
[...]
However the Daily Caller reports YouTube videos on Long’s account show that he was a former Nation of Islam member. He also ranted against “crackers” and made references to Alton Sterling, the black man killed by police in Baton Rouge on July 5. Phone numbers on buildings in the video show that it was filmed in Baton Rouge.
Yes, WND would like you to think Long was an Islamic terrorist, even though he really isn't.
Bob Unruh reinforces the meme in a July 18 follow-up article that begins, "The Nation of Islam-linked Gavin Eugene Long, dead after a weekend shootout with Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police officers in which he allegedly killed three and injured three more, was 'targeting' law enforcement, according to a report today." Unruh also dutifully repeats that Long claimed he had been "a Nation of Islam member."
But WND won't tell you about a more relevant affiliation that's much closer to WND's heart.
The Kansas City Star reported that Long was a member of the sovereign citizen movement, extremists who don't recognize the authority of the federal government. Long had filed sovereign citizen documents in Kansas City -- saying he was with the United Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah Mu’ur Nation, Mid-West Washita Tribes, a sovereign group -- and reportedly had a sovereign-related card on him when he died in a police shootout.
WND has long been symathetic to the sovereign citizen movement. In 2009, WND managing editor David Kupelian complained about increased governemnt scrutiny of conservative groups that are "Christian, patriotic, gun-rights, pro-life, sovereignty and so on." He suggested that the Obama administration was trying to provoke sovereign citizens and other right-wingers into committing violence to justify "a massive official crackdown on 'domestic terrorists' and a severe assault on freedom in America."
In 2013, it tried to deny the FBI's assertion that sovereign citizens can be violent, and it also tried to whitewash the tax-related crimes of a creationist pastor who was also a sovereign citizen activist.
WND tried again in 2015 to deny sovereign-citizen violence, distorting a governement report on the sovereign citizen movement to falsely claim that "The Obama administration has named a national security threat it believes is more dangerous than even the Islamic State terrorists beheading, crucifying and burning innocent human beings: Right-wing extremists." WND columnist Pamela Geller screeched that through the report, "Obama and his appointed thugs have made the good guys the enemy." Um, no, Pam, sovereign citizens who murder cops are not "good guys."
So WND is a lot closer to the views of Gavin Long than it wants you to believe. Do Joseph Farah and Co. have the guts (and journalistic integrity) to tell their readers that? (Highly unlikely.)
UPDATE: In a brief, sudden outbreak of journalism, CNSNews.com's Melanie Hunter reported that Long "considered himself a 'sovereign citizen,' part of a group that believes government and law enforcement does not hold any authority, which the FBI considers 'a domestic terrorist movement.'" What say you, WND?
Newsmax Still Won't Acknowledge Kessler Used to Work There Topic: Newsmax
Poor Ronald Kessler. Even as Newsmax keeps featuring his latest work on its website, it stillwon'tacknowledge he worked there for six years.
It happened again in a July 12 Newsmax article by Joe Crowe featuring Kessler's claim that "The FBI rarely prosecute officials for mishandling classified information,"effectively a rewrite of Kessler's column at the Washington Times.
Crowe describes Kessler only as "former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter." Presumably that gives Kessler more mainstream-ish cred at Newsmax than describing as a "former Newsmax chief Washington correspondent."
Of course, the bio at the end of his Washington Times column also omits his time at Newsmax, even though it's his most recent full-time position at a news organization.
Last Week's Trump Coverage At CNS: Finally, Actual Coverage Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com finally got around to acting like the "news" organization it claims to be by finally putting Donald Trump on its front page -- something it hasavoideddoingforweeks.
CNS did runseveralwirearticles on Trump on its front page, which surprisingly focused on the actual news of the week, which mainly involved Trump's vice presidential pick. CNS also ran its first original Trump-related "news" articles since June 29, and the subjects it chose were, well, a bit odd.
In a July 11 article -- closing the 13-day gap between original CNS Trump articles -- managing editor Michael W. Chapman huffed that possible Trump VP pick Michael Flynn "supports abortion and thinks homosexual marriage is fine." The next day, Chapman dutifully reported Flynn's flip-flop and his new declaration of being “a pro-life Democrat.”
Those were followed by a July 14 article by Patrick Goodenough on new British foreign secretary and former London mayor Boris Johnson, noting that Johnson is "no fan of presumptive GOP presidential nominee Trump" but has also said mean things about Hillary Clinton as well.
WND Tries to Add to Bogus 'Clinton Body Count' Topic: WorldNetDaily
Not only is WorldNetDaily trying to revive the discredited "Clinton body count" as a way to attack Hillary Clinton, it's actively trying to add to the list.
A former United Nations official, John Ashe, has been found dead in his New York home, and some are speculating whether it’s a case of “Hillary Clinton silencing people who ‘know too much.'”
That question was pointedly raised by Kosar at the Political Insider on word of the death of Ashe, who was found at his Dobbs Ferry, New York, home last week.
The cause of death was reported as a heart attack, but the New York Post reported the local Dobbs Ferry police said “his throat had been crushed, presumably by a barbell he dropped while pumping iron.”
“The death by barbell of disgraced U.N. official John Ashe could become a bigger obsession for conspiracy theorists than Vince Foster’s 1993 suicide,” the report by Richard Johnson said.
It’s because Ashe was scheduled to testify in just days with Chinese businessman and co-defendant Ng Lap Seng, who was accused of smuggling $4.5 million into the U.S. and lying that it was to buy casino chips and more.
The New York Post said Ng earlier was identified in a 1998 Senate document “as the source of hundreds of thousands of dollars illegally funneled through an Arkansas restaurant owner, Charlie Trie, to the Democratic National Committee during the Clinton administration.”
“One source told me,” Johnson wrote, “‘During the trial, the prosecutors would have linked Ashe to the Clinton bagman Ng. It would have been very embarrassing. His death was conveniently timed.”
Yep, Unruh is treating some random conspiracy theorist as credible. And since he's doing that instead of doing any actual investigating of the claim, he's promoting false information. Snopes, by contrast, did bother to look into things, and here's what they found out:
We contacted the U.S. District Attorney for the Southern District of New York to verify the claims about Ashe and Clinton. According to the individual with whom we spoke, CNN's report that Ashe's corruption trial was set to begin just five days after his death was not accurate: Ashe was only scheduled to attend some standard pre-trial meetings in the following days.
Moreover, the U.S. District Attorney's spokesperson told us that no portion of Ashe's court case pertained to Hillary Clinton. Not only was he not set to testify against Clinton five days before he died, neither was he slated to do so at any point during the trial.
Promoting discredited, politically motivated conspiracy theories is just one more reason why WND is not credible.
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.
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.
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.
The current edition of WorldNetDaily's barely relevant Whistleblower magazins carries the theme "Killing Jihad," but appears to be your typical right-wing Muslim-hating -- assuming that all Muslims are terrorists -- and Obama-bashing, to judge by the WND article promoting it:
The Media Reserarch Center is nothing if not a 
WorldNetDaily 
CNSNews.com did do some original reporting on the Melania Trump plagiarism controversy, but you wouldn't know it from looking at the CNS front page.
WorldNetDaily knows how to pander to the fears of its audience: make black men, especially if they've committed horrible crimes, as scary as possible with as many trigger buzzwords as possible, like "Islam." 
Poor Ronald Kessler. Even as Newsmax keeps featuring his latest work on its website, it 
CNSNews.com finally got around to acting like the "news" organization it claims to be by finally putting Donald Trump on its front page -- something it 
Not only is WorldNetDaily 
The Media Research Center is bringing back the 
In his July 5 
Ben Kinchlow really needs to stop copying and pasting into his columns what he sees in Internet chain emails.
Brent Smith starts off his June 27 WorldNetDaily 
Dylan Gwinn writes in a June 27 NewsBusters 
Bob Unruh begins a July 12 WorldNetDaily 
