Howard Kurtz, media critic for the Washington Post, profiled MSNBC Political Director Chuck Todd. That guy works his tail off.
The image of Chuck Todd as a mediator and straight-shooter, however, goes way back:
He is accustomed to the role. During his boyhood in Miami, Todd recalls, his conservative father and a liberal cousin often got sloshed and argued about politics.
FOX News commentator Bill O’Reilly continues masquerading whatever it is that he does on television under the banner of “news” and “journalism.”
Last night, O’Reilly unveiled a new defense on the continued American involvement in Iraq, just two days before “Mission Accomplished Day” on Thursday: “We didn’t invade Iraq.”
Yesterday, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly made the incredible claim that the United States never invaded Iraq: “We didn’t invade Iraq.” He added, “It was a declaration of war, it was a declaration to enforce the first Gulf War Treaty.”
First, the United States did not declare war on Iraq. Congress authorized President Bush to use force against Iraq. In fact, the U.S. has not declared war against any nation since the Second World War. The U.S. declared war on other nations five times and Iraq was not one of them — in 1991, or 2003.
Second, the maneuvers that led to open warfare are immaterial to the point that a nation was, in fact, physically invaded by another nation. In fact, O’Reilly himself referred to the invasion on a number of occasions, as well as the Bush administration.
Third, there is no such thing as the “First Gulf War Treaty.”
O’REILLY: [W]e liberate Iraq — liberate Kuwait, all right, and then we have a treaty, and the treaty says U.N. weapons inspectors are allowed to do X, Y, and Z, and 17 times Saddam says — violates those. Now you can understand why the United States government might be a little teed off about that. […]
O’REILLY: But do you understand that when you have 17 violations of a treaty, a war treaty, that you basically have to take action?
BLIX: Well, you’re talking about a war treaty. It was a cease-fire. It was not a war treaty.
O’REILLY: Oh, come on. Now don’t play semantics here, sir.
BLIX: Second — all right. I’m trying to be precise. You are imprecise.
“Semantics!”
Most free-thinking people who are aware of O’Reilly’s track record and loose handling of the facts would take the opinion of former United Nations weapons expert Hans Blix over a cable television commentator who worked for Inside Edition.
The kicker: after O’Reilly’s back and forth with guest Warren Ballentine, he says to him: “It was a declaration of war, it was a declaration to enforce the first Gulf War Treaty, which you don’t know anything about, Mr. Ballentine.”
Priceless.
Think Progress posted the findings of a recent Brookings Institution survey on Arab attitudes towards the United States. The results showed 80 percent of those survey cited American foreign policy as the root of their criticisms of the United States. Only 12 percent cited “American values” as the primary reason.
These findings contradict the central thesis of the craptacular Dinesh D’Souza book blaming anti-Americanism and the September 11 terrorist attacks on liberals and popular culture. (And, of course, liberals are responsible for popular culture because conservatives are major tools and produce lame programming like this.)
D’Souza wrote in his Washington Post op-ed that he has faced an “onslaught” of criticism because his book “argue[s] that the American left bears a measure of responsibility for the volcano of anger from the Muslim world that produced the 9/11 attacks.” In his January 25 op-ed in The Christian Science Monitor, D’Souza asserted that Muslim distaste for the “popular culture” of “blue” America “can blossom into the kind of anti-American pathology that partly fueled the 9/11 attacks.” Yet in the book itself, D’Souza does not argue that the cultural left “bears a measure of responsibility” for provoking the anger of the 9-11 hijackers or that it “partly fueled” 9-11. Rather, he asserts that the “cultural left” is the “primary cause” of the “visceral rage” that produced the terrorists who attacked America, and that “without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.” [emphasis added]