Bob Woodward getting the Gerald Walpin treatment

During a February 27th appearance on Morning Joe, Watergate icon Bob Woodward said that the action / inaction of Barack Obama relative to not sending a carrier to the Persian Gulf because of the sequestration cuts was a 'kind of madness'. It didn't take long for the White House to pull out the long knives and go after Woodward. Remember, this administration will say or do whatever it wants in order to protect and defend the progressive agenda.

One of those tactics involves impugning Woodward's mental faculty by implying that he is too old to remain relevant as a journalist. David Plouffe - one of Obama's hatchet men - used twitter to attack Woodward, saying (via Twitchy):

"Watching Woodward last 2 days is like imagining my idol Mike Schmidt facing live pitching again. Perfection gained once is rarely repeated."

Even Media Matters' Eric Boehlert went after Woodward's age for the same reason, despite having praised the former Watergate reporter ten days earlier (via Breitbart):

"funniest/saddest part is porr Bobby Woodward STILL doesn't seem to understand what sequester means"

Boehlert posted that tweet with the hash tag, timetoretire.

So, because Woodward made an intellectually honest critique of Obama, he had suddenly become senile. This is not a new technique from the Obama camp.

Does anyone remember a guy named Gerald Walpin who was the Inspector General for AmeriCorps back in 2009? That scandal unfolded when Walpin wouldn't back down relative to charges that Obama friend and Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson had misused taxpayer funds. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) pressed for more information about Walpin's abrupt firing by the White House, which was required by law to give Congress a 30 day notice of its intention to terminate any IG.

Guess what rationale the White House gave for firing Walpin. Yep, his age.

Via Hot Air at the time:

The Obama administration has tried to justify its firing of Inspector General Gerald Walpin by strongly implying that the 77-year-old attorney suffers from senility.  Norman Eisen, the White House lawyer who drafted a required notification to Congress, accused Walpin of being “confused and disoriented” at a May 20th meeting of the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Check out what the Washington Examiner's Byron York had to say about Walpin's firing:

Walpin and the management of the corporation clashed repeatedly over his investigations into AmeriCorps projects. The disagreements came to a head at a May 20 board meeting when Walpin, by his own account, "lectured" board members for going along with the corporation's politically appointed management and closing out his investigation of Kevin Johnson's educational organization, St. HOPE, which received about $850,000 in AmeriCorps money and misused at least half of it.

"Jerry can never get to the point where you can agree to disagree," the board member said of Walpin. "You either agree with him, or he keeps beating you up."

The board member says at one point in the meeting, Walpin seemed to have trouble concentrating. "There were long pauses on his part," the board member says. "He clearly was not able to answer the questions we were putting to him."

The White House later accused Walpin of being "confused, disoriented [and] unable to answer questions" at the meeting. Walpin concedes he was not feeling well but does not recall serious problems.

The Obama administration will stop at nothing to get what it wants. Had Walpin backed down, he would have been completely sane. Ditto for Woodward not the 69 year-old icon not challenged the president. It's beyond obvious that this administration is more than willing to assassinate someone's character if that someone says or does something the administration doesn't like, to include exercising one's first amendment right, as was the case with Woodward.

In Walpin's case, it was apparently just for doing his job.

Video: Morning Joe panel laughs over joke about Lindsey Graham being homosexual

A little over two years ago, William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration (ALIPAC) made news at a Tea Party when he demanded that Senator Lindsey Graham 'come out of the log cabin closet', a not-so-subtle charge that the senior Senator from South Carolina is a homosexual. Feeding that rumor has likely been Graham's status as an older, unmarried man.

Enter the Morning Joe crew. This morning, during their 6am airing of the show, guest John Heilemann referred to the 'three amigos' (John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte) as being made up of two women, an obvious jab at Graham over the rumors.

Consider...

1. MSNBC is a known ventriloquist dummy for the White House; that is much more well known than what Graham's sexual preference is.
2. Indications are that the three Senators were expected to play nice in their meeting with Susan Rice less than twenty-four hours before Heilemann's comment. It didn't. In fact, Graham said he's more troubled now than he was before the meeting.
3. Whether the rumors about Graham are true or not, the White House could conceivably benefit from someone like Heilemann joking about it. If there's truth to the rumor, the joke could be seen as a shot across the bow. If there's no truth to it, people are talking about it anyway (instead of Rice's credibility).

On the other hand, the 8am re-airing of the program edited this part out.

h/t WZ

Trumping accountability for Lying - the Race and Gender cards

An unbelievably ridiculous narrative is being pushed that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice is being targeted by old white guys because she is black and female. Forget the fact that she gave the American people false information five times on September 16th. That's not relevant. The Morning Joe panel is the latest place where you can find this egregious argument.

Via NewsBusters:



At the November 14th press conference, Barack Obama reacted strongly to a question about Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain going after U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice for her demonstrably false talking points on five September 16th talk shows. In response, Barack Obama urged the Senators to go after him instead of Rice while saying she had nothing to do with Benghazi (the logical follow-up question to that wasn't asked) and that the White House sent her onto those talk shows.



Frankly, McCain and Graham should take Obama up on this offer for a few reasons. First, according to CBS, these CIA talking points were altered prior not just to Susan Rice uttering them on September 16th but before Jay Carney seemed to make the same case on September 14th, that the Benghazi attack was a result of the anti-Muhammad video. Second, as the official mouthpiece for Obama, going after Carney would equate to doing exactly what Obama suggested those two old, white, male Senators should do - go after Obama. Third, by going after Carney instead of Rice, Graham and McCain cannot be accused of attacking him over his race or his sex; he's as white and male as they are.

Then again, perhaps Rice was traipsed out to all of those shows for a moment such as this - the race and  gender cards. Her making demonstrably false statements is irrelevant, apparently.

Video: How on Earth did THIS Happen on MSNBC?

His name is Niall Ferguson and he's a history professor at Harvard and Senior Fellow at Oxford. Maybe he appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe because his article made the cover of Newsweek, which is a publication the White House approves of so perhaps the producers didn't have to run the guest suggestion up the Presidential food chain of acceptable interviews. After all, we know the White House is in constant contact with Mika and Joe.

This is an absolute must-see because all five Morning Joe Panelists take their shots at Ferguson and fail miserably. Without batting an eye, Ferguson takes them each down one by one until there is absolutely no air in the MSNBC studio. If this were a movie, one guy totally fends off five attackers and the audience scornfully mocks the possibility as something that could never happen.

Niall is the proverbial pin and the Morning Joe crew is the balloon. The discussion is centered around the Obama administration's handling of the crisis in Egypt. Ferguson all but calls it an unmitigated disaster and warns the audience that the Muslim Brotherhood taking control is not a good thing at all. A female CBS reporter was attacked and sexually assaulted at Tahrir Square which only further backed up Ferguson's argument.

Via Freedom's Lighthouse

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VIDEO: TOOMEY TALKS JOBSGATE ON MORNING JOE

Democrats control both Houses of congress and there is no way Eric Holder is going to launch an investigation. Joe Sestak's opponent, Pat Toomey has the ability to be a lightning rod in this scandal. No one person in the media can control it. The scandal will either have a life of its own or it won't. Toomey, on the other hand, has the power to make hay over it.

The only way this scandal continues becoming a big deal is if public opinion drives it. Right now, the media is driving public opinion by continuing to cover it so Toomey's input can remain minimal. If the story dies down in the media, Toomey will have to drive it again.

So far, he is chiming in on the scandal and is calmly stating that something stinks here. That's exactly what he should be doing and he does so again on MSNBC'S Morning Joe.

An excellent point made by Toomey in this exchange is his Senate run in 2004 and the Republican establishment wanting him to drop out of that race because it had thrown its support behind Arlen Specter. Toomey says that he was never offered a job to drop out.

h/t to Hot Air

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VIDEO: TIME MAGAZINE EDITOR WILLFULLY IGNORANT ON JOBSGATE

Time Magazine's Rick Stengel appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe and came across as being nearly completely ignorant of the scandal involving Rep. Joe Sestak and the Obama administration. Mika Brzezinski actually had to say Sestak's name several times because Stengel looked like a deer in the proverbial headlights on the story.

As for the magazine, they should change their name to, "TIME TO QUIT".



h/t to NewsBusters

VIDEO: LIBERAL WHACK JOB UN-HINGED

Author of "Courting Disaster: How the CIA kept America Safe and how Barack Obama is inviting the next attack", Marc Thiessen appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe and was the object of unhinged derision coming directly from the cake hole of liberal whack job Laurence O'Donnell.

I don't know what was more entertaining, watching O'Donnell's rant or watching the smack down he got from Scarborough at the end in the form of cutting him off, having his mic turned off, and going to break right after saying O'Donnell wouldn't be returning when they came back.



h/t to Weekly Standard

VIDEO: CIA INFORMANT ACTUALLY AL-QAEDA DOUBLE AGENT

This is one of the most under-reported stories out there. The implications are potentially far more serious and detrimental in the war against Islamic terrorism than the story getting more attention - the near bombing of NW FLT 253 on Christmas Day. The video at the bottom from MSNBC's Morning Joe features a report from Richard Engle, who lays it all out in very stark detail and terms.

A man named Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi was a Jordanian who was supposed to infiltrate al-Qaeda for the CIA while in Afghanistan. He was supposed to be someone the CIA both trusted and relied upon. It turns out that he was a double-agent, working for al-Qaeda, whose final mission was a suicide bombing that killed seven CIA agents. al-Balawi was also from the same town as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

MSNBC reported:

Initial reports said that the attack, which killed seven CIA officers, was carried out by a member of the Afghan National Army.

According to Western intelligence officials, the perpetrator was Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, 36, an al-Qaida sympathizer from the town of Zarqa, which is also the hometown of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant Islamist responsible for several devastating attacks in Iraq.

Al-Balawi was arrested by Jordanian intelligence more than a year ago. However, the Jordanians believed that al-Balawi had been successfully reformed and brought over to the American and Jordanian side, setting him up as an agent and sending him off to Afghanistan and Pakistan to infiltrate al-Qaida.

The mission of al-Balawi was to get information on Ayman al Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's #2 man behind bin Laden. This video clip from MSNBC's Morning Joe is a MUST SEE. Richard Engle provides the information about the attack and explains that the seven CIA agents were not just agents but high value targets for al-Qaeda. These were very high-ranking officials inside the CIA, one of whom had been tracking bin Laden for many years and had a personal history doing so that cannot be simply transferred to others.

In addition, al-Balawi's intelligence handler was also killed in this attack. Having even more far-reaching implications is that Jordanian intelligence officer Sharif Ali bin Zeid accompanied al-Balawi to Camp Chapman and was one of the victims along with the seven CIA agents / officers. Complicating things further is that bin Zeid was related to the Abdullah royal family in Jordan.

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VIDEO: WHITE HOUSE DIRECTING MSNBC ON THE SPOT

Wow! On MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program, guest Katty Kay was opining about those who think the White House is "obsessing" over Fox News. Within seconds, co-host Mika Brzezinski interjected, saying that the White House had emailed her "to add to Katty's point". Yes, within seconds of hearing a guest speaking on the White House obsessing about Fox News, the White House emails MSNBC and gets immediate airtime "to add to Katty's point".

Are we beginning to see what's behind the curtain here? Is the White House behind the controls at MSNBC if they can get away with this in mere seconds?

The irony here is that the White House is obsessing about Fox News while MSNBC is having discussions about how the White House is NOT obsessing about Fox News.



h/t to VS