DOWNLOADS: (146)

PLAYS: (1551)

Embed

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) says that President Barack Obama "is the most radical president we've ever seen," but Republicans who failed to stick to conservative principles are also to blame for the nation's problems.

In an interview that aired Wednesday on Pat Robertson's 700 Club, CBN's David Brody told Cruz that the media had dubbed him "the Republican Barack Obama" and a "GOP rock star."

"I try to pay very little attention to the media," Cruz insisted. "It is, as you know, a fickle creature."

Instead, Brody said Cruz was focused on creating a "new Republican Party."

"I think President Obama is the most radical president we've ever seen, but I think an awful lot of Republicans failed to stand for principle and contributed to getting us into this mess," the senator explained.

During an appearance at a weapons manufacturer in Texas on Tuesday, Cruz accused both Democrats and Republicans of trying to "silence" him for using McCarthyism to smear Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel with suggestions that the former Nebraska senator had taken $200,000 from North Korea.

"Washington has a long tradition of trying to hurl insults to silence those who they don't like what they're saying," Cruz told the crowd.

"A lot of media attention has been focused on the attacks leveled on me and I would encourage all of you if you want to write stories on that great, knock yourself out, but I would ask for every ten stories you write, attacking me, perhaps write one story on the substance of Chuck Hagel's record."

Salon's Joan Walsh on Wednesday observed that Cruz was just the latest tea party lawmaker to use former Sen. Joe McCarthy's tactics while playing the victim.

"Playing the persecuted, he challenged reporters to at least investigate Hagel a little bit while they’re attacking him," Walsh wrote. "That’s good advice. Because if they do, they’ll find no substance to Cruz’s charges in Hagel’s 'record,' but a lot of substance to charges that he’s a 21stcentury Joe McCarthy in Cruz’s."

(h/t: The Huffington Post)

DOWNLOADS: (210)

PLAYS: (2020)

Embed

Franklin Graham, the son of Rev. Billy Graham, says that President Barack Obama's re-election is just further evidence that "we've turned our back on God."

In an interview that aired Friday on the ABC Family Channel, CBN's David Brody asked Franklin Graham where the country is going now that a president who approves of same sex marriage will be in office four more years.

Graham explained that the "secularization of America wasn't going to stop" even if Obama had been defeated, but it could have been slowed down.

"That's why we need to get out and vote, and vote for candidates who support moral values," he insisted. "We need someone like a Jerry Falwell to come back and resurrect the Moral Majority movement where you get people that have a moral background who are willing to come together and vote for moral issues that are important to this nation."

"If that would take place, we would see a great change in this country, but our country is in trouble. It’s in trouble spiritually. We’ve turned our back on God."

Franklin Graham also suggested that Mitt Romney lost the election because the "vast majority of evangelicals did not go to the polls."

But a national post-election survey published by the Faith and Freedom Coalition found that a record 27 percent of the electorate in 2012 were evangelical voters. And about 78 percent of white evangelicals cast their ballots for Romney.

"Evangelicals turned out in record numbers and voted as heavily for Mitt Romney yesterday as they did for George W. Bush in 2004," Faith and Freedom Coalition Chairman Ralph Reed said in a statement last week. "That is an astonishing outcome that few would have predicted even a few months ago. But Romney underperformed with younger voters and minorities and that in the end made the difference for Obama."

DOWNLOADS: (151)

PLAYS: (1737)

Embed

The woman who married former House Speaker Newt Gingrich after cheating wuth him while he was married to his second wife says that former CIA Director David Petraeus' extramarital affair is "sad" and "painful" for his family.

"I think it's personally very sad for he and his family," Callista Gingrich told ABC's Barbara Walters on Monday. "I think he did the right thing by resigning. But this is painful and they'll have to work together through this as a family. And that will take some time."

The former House Speaker pointed out that Petraeus would have been in an "impossible situation" if he had tried to stay on as director of the CIA.

"This man served 37 years," he pointed out. "We need to remember, he was the key to winning in Iraq. If he had not turned around the surge, we would have literally lost the war. He was the key to giving a fighting chance in Afghanistan. He is a brilliant, very hard-working person. And I hope he and his family can work through this."

Newt Gingrich's second wife, Marianne, revealed to Esquire in 2010 how the former speaker had presented his first wife with the terms of their divorce while she was in the hospital recovering from surgery for uterine cancer in 1980.

Rumors about Gingrich’s fondness for oral sex with other women have circulated for some time. A 1995 Vanity Fair profile explained how Anne Manning had claimed she had been intimate with him.

In 1999, over the Mother’s Day weekend and on the same day his second wife had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Gingrich informed her he had found someone else.

In fact, he had reportedly been having an affair with Callista Bisek for six years.

Gingrich divorced his second wife in 2000 and married Callista that same year.

In 2011, the then-Republican presidential candidate suggested to CBN's David Brody that he had strayed from his marriages because he felt so "passionately" about the country.

"There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate," he explained.

DOWNLOADS: (107)

PLAYS: (624)

Embed

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich says that the politicians in his party are guilty of relying on talking points instead of "actually knowing things."

As Herman Cain's poll numbers continue to collapse, CBN took another look at Gingrich on Tuesday and released never-before-seen clips of an interview he did with David Brody last month.

"One of the Republican weaknesses is that we rely too much on consultants and too much on talking points," the former Speaker of the House explained. "We don't rely enough on actually knowing things."

"If you're going to lead the country and change history, you better know a heck of a lot before you start because there's not much time for learning on the job."

A survey released Monday by Public Policy Polling (PPP) found that Gingrich was ahead of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by double digits. Another poll from CNN showed that Gingrich had a gained 14 points since October, putting him only 2 points behind Romney.

DOWNLOADS: (701)

PLAYS: (1794)

Embed

CBN aired for the first time Wednesday clips of an earlier interview where former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin explained that she just wants to help the mainstream media.

"Much of the mainstream media is already becoming so irrelevant because there is not balance, there is, in many cases, David, there is not truth," she told CBN's David Brody. "I know that firsthand. I lived it every day."

"And what would give me great joy is if what would become irrelevant is just the untruthful, the misreporting out there. I want the mainstream media -- and I've said this for a couple of years now -- I want to help 'em. I have a journalism degree. That is what I studied. I understand that this cornerstone of our democracy is a free press, is sound journalism. I want to help them build back their reputation and allow Americans to be able to trust what it is that they are reporting. We are so far from being able to trust what so many of the mainstream media personalities, characters feed the American public that it scares me for our country. What would give me great joy is what would become irrelevant is the misreporting that comes out of the mainstream media."

Palin also shared her thoughts about Twitter.

"I'm so thankful for the 140 characters, I'm going to use every single one of them. If you go back and you look at my tweets for the most part, it's 140 characters on the nose. I want that space," she said.

"We've been griping about it for years in the world of media, that a politician, any person cannot get a real idea across in a ten-second soundbite. Why do you think we can get anything across in 140 characters? A lot of times, our tweets just create more confusion and more problems than they provide solutions."

Dave N.: Palin has trotted out this line previously, and I commented on it back then:

A word about Sarah Palin's journalism degree: She and I graduated from the same school, the University of Idaho. (She arrived at the school a year after I graduated.) The difference is that when I attended there, I was highly active in the communications community, and was editor of the school paper for a year. Sarah Palin, in contrast, never even wrote a story for the Argonaut, let alone for the J school's other chief outlet, the UI News Bureau; no one at the school's TV station remembers her or has any record of her doing work there. Indeed, the professor who signed her degree barely remembers her, as she was one of those students who simply showed up for class, got a grade, and went home.

Given that kind of background, Palin was lucky to even get a shot at sports reporting for a small Alaska TV station, which was the extent of her actual experience as a journalist.

So it hasn't been surprising to watch Palin attack the "lamestream media", because she is obviously someone whose understanding of modern communications is eggshell-thin, and whose insights are about as deep as Bristol Bay at a minus-5 tide. The idea that this woman considers herself capable of reforming the media is enough to give any professional journalist the shudders.

DOWNLOADS: (295)

PLAYS: (2403)

Embed

Newt Gingrich (R-GA) loves the country so much that it has caused him to stray from his marriages.

At least, that what the former House speaker seemed to be saying in a recent interview with CBN's David Brody.

"There's no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate," Gingrich said.

"What I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn't trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them," he said.

Gingrich has been married three times and divorced twice.

His second wife, Marianne, revealed to Esquire last year how the former speaker had presented his first wife with the terms of their divorce while she was in the hospital recovering from surgery for uterine cancer in 1980.

Rumors about Gingrich's fondness for oral sex with other women have circulated for some time. A 1995 Vanity Fair profile explained how Anne Manning had claimed she had been intimate with him.

In 1999, over the Mother's Day weekend and on the same day his second wife had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Gingrich informed her he had found someone else.

In fact, he had reportedly been having an affair with Callista Bisek for six years.

Gingrich divorced his second wife in 2000 and married Callista that same year.

The Georgia Republican has launched a website to take donations for a possible 2012 presidential bid, but he will have to work hard to get conservative votes.

"He's the last person I'd vote for for president of the United States," Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) told the Tulsa World in August. "His life indicates he does not have a commitment to the character traits necessary to be a great president."

Gingrich "doesn't know anything about commitment to marriage," he added.

DOWNLOADS: (259)

PLAYS: (1059)

Embed

So much for toning down the violent political rhetoric in Washington.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) used gun imagery Sunday while discussing public workers' collective bargaining rights.

"In some of these states you've got collective bargaining laws that are so weighted in favor of the public employees that there’s almost no bargaining," he told CBN's David Brody.

"We've given them a machine gun and put it right at the heads of the local officials and they really have their hands tied."

Republican governors in some states have moved to force unions to pay more for benefits, and to strip them of collective bargaining rights. Thousands have recently protested union-busting bills in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana.

"I think what you're seeing in these states is they're trying to bring some balance to these negotiations that when you look at the pay of public employees today and you look at their retirement benefits they are way out of line with many other working Americans," Boehner added.

In the wake of a mass shooting in Arizona that left six dead and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) in the hospital, Boehner did temporarily moderate his word choice.

After the shooting, the House Speaker chose to refer to President Obama's signature health care law as "job destroying" instead of "job killing."

The Ohio Republican may be testing the waters for more violent words in the future.

Earlier this year, Rep. Mike Lee (R-UT) said that toning down the rhetoric means "the shooter wins."

"What happened to Boehner here is a symptom a lot of politicians are noticing," Talking Points Memo's Brian Beutler noted. "As the weeks tick away since the Arizona shooting, they're slipping back into modes of rhetoric they'd grown comfortable with over the last years. Of course, they'll continually readjust and correct themselves for the next long interim, but they're on the slow slide back to the status quo ante."

DOWNLOADS: (1974)

PLAYS: (5904)

Embed

Howard Kurtz asks his panel of the editor of The New York Times Week in Review and The New York Times Book Review Sam Tanenhaus, the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody and the Washington Post's Ceci Connolly what they think of the right wing's preemptive freak out over President Obama's speech to school children last week.

Tanenhaus says it is an indication of what he calls "the death of conservatism" which is the theme and name of his book.

Brody thinks the President has a "perception problem". Hmmmm.... I wonder what might have contributed to that. The media overplaying the right wing screechers that should otherwise be dismissed couldn't have possibly contributed to that, could it David?

And Ceci Connolly says the "media are addicted to conflict". And don't blame them for feeding us crap on a daily basis since that 24 hour news cycle is so hard to fill up. Well here's a thought. Why not fill it with something besides crap? Somehow Amy Goodman manages to find an hours worth of news every day that you guys can't find the time to report on in that 24 hour cycle. Imagine that. I would imagine that a good deal of our readers here at Crooks and Liars could recommend more stories that are worth reporting on than there would be time for in the 24 hour news cycle, even on a "slow day".

I'd like to think that Sam Tanenhaus' observation is the correct one and that this over the top rhetoric does mean the death of the conservative movement, but our "mainstream media" along with a lot of other powerful forces are going to do their best to make sure it doesn't happen any time soon.

Transcript below the fold.

Continue reading »

DOWNLOAD (146)

PLAY (275)

You Tube

The conservative panel of David Brody, Stephen Hayes, Amy Holmes and Brian Debose on CNN's "The After Party" have themselves a little wing-nut delusion festival over how George Bush will be remembered. Hayes continues to perpetuate the myth that George Bush has kept us safe from a terrorist attack. Holmes has a big chuckle over whether Dick Cheney admitting to torture will be a problem for them or not and thinks it won't matter since Bush has only got a month left in office. I guess she thinks there is some statute of limitations on what's been done that expires when Bush leaves office or that The Hague won't deal with if our country and the Obama administration sadly does not. And Brian Debose seems to think that torturing prisoners is legal but maybe not moral and that is his only concern with what's happened. Rough transcript for anyone that can't watch the video:

Brody: Alright let's move on to President Bush, his legacy. He's on the magical mystery tour now, whatever he's doing and do you get a sense Steve, what is this going to be like exactly for George Bush? How will he be remembered? Is this going to be a Harry Truman type situation where he wasn't looked upon all that great coming out of office but maybe give it ten, fifteen, fifty, seventy five years?

Hayes: Well I think that's their hope but they're certainly not taking any chances so I think the Bush administration and his top advisers have been working now for more than six months to help shape this legacy. They've been working on this thing called the Bush Legacy Project where they've been meeting regularly talking about the kind of things that they want to highlight to the country as he's on his way out.

I mean I think, you know it was easy to listen to the progressives sort of down play the fact that we haven't been attacked since 9-11. But if you look back at the public opinion polls taken at the time you know some eighty percent of Americans thought we'd not only be attacked again but we'd be subject to a major catastrophic attack. It's a big deal and it's because of his policies that we haven't been attacked.

Brody: This administration has taken some major hits over waterboarding and torture, especially Dick Cheney. Let me play a clip of Dick Cheney this week on ABC.

[Cut to video.]

Brody: Amy, how much of a problem is this for the administration?

Holmes: With one month to go, not very much and when you look at Gitmo even in the New York Times a few weeks ago said well letting them out, that could be a little tricky. Do we want to throw them into our Federal court system where they could maybe use it against us. Rendition is difficult because these countries actually don't want these guys. These are actual real terrorists that are down there. And we don't have any easy answers and all of the sudden the New York Times figured that out now that Barack Obama is going to be the Commander in Chief.

Debose: That has been the argument all together. The only problem I have with some of the messaging that has come out with respect to Dick Cheney is trying to defend the morality of torture and other things that went on versus the legality. You can defend the legality. Morally that is something totally different and I don't like the merger of those two things. That's, that's the only thing that's really been problematic.