Free Republic

uring the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama famously became so frustrated by his running mate’s logorrhea that he asked an aide, “How many times is Biden going to say something stupid?” According to authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, the VP’s stock had dropped so low by late 2011 that the Obama reelection team considered replacing Biden with Hillary Clinton on the 2012 ticket. And, as his busing blunder clearly demonstrated, Biden still has the old gift for gaffes. According to a new Washington Post-ABC poll, however, if the 2020 election were held today, Biden would beat President Trump by...

This wasn't some slip of the tongue. Appearing on Nicolle Wallace's MSNBC show, Deadline: White House, this afternoon, John Heilemann warned that "I'm about to use some language that might need to be bleeped out." Heilemann then proceeded to use barnyard vulgarity to attack Fox News in general and Sean Hannity in particular: "I yield to no one in my tendency to call 'bulls---' on people at Fox News when they lie. And so, obviously, Sean's full of it, right? . . . The political reality she [Nancy Pelosi] is confronting is the political reality created by Sean Hannity and...

Damned if you do . . . When Jeannine Pirro of Fox News asked President Trump this past Saturday if he had ever worked for Russia, Trump responded by saying her question was "the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked." The liberal media proceeded to accuse Trump of having "dodged" or "evaded" the question. Yesterday, Trump addressed the issue in unequivocal terms, flatly stating, "I never worked for Russia." So naturally, now the MSM is ripping him for that, too. Take MSNBC analyst John Heilemann on today's Morning Joe: "The fact that he said yesterday, I've never worked for...

Who’s “anonymous?” On today’s Morning Joe, several members of the panel made the case that “anonymous” is Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump. First up, John Heilemann made the following points in support of The Conway Conjecture: 1. The “perspicacious” wife of Charles Pierce of Esquire detected an “unmistakably feminine” tone to the op-ed. 2. Conway is “very cagey; she’s the kind of person who would find out that Mike Pence used the word ‘lodestar’ a lot, and put ‘lodestar’ in to try to pin it on Mike Pence.” 3. Trying to set herself up to be the Carville &...

Not that this will come as a surprise, but it is entertaining to watch NBC’s John Heilemann gleefully explain how “we” have a great opportunity to bludgeon President Trump and the GOP with the faux crisis at the border. In a mere 47 seconds, he gives the game away on a couple of fronts:

In its unremitting attack on President Trump, Morning Joe might have hit a vulgar new low today when MSNBC analyst John Heilemann alluded to President Trump as a “total scumbag.” Here’s the context: what changed Morning Joe from merely another MSM Trump antagonist into raging, Trump-hating fanatics was a 2017 Trump tweet claiming that Mika Brzezinski had turned up at Mar-a-Lago bleeding from a facelift. So when Trump yesterday tweeted criticism of those who speculated that Melania’s recent absence from public view was attributable to a facelift, Morning Joe pounced. Scarborough and Heilemann unleashed a string of epithets, including Heilemann’s...

There has been an outpouring of conservative condemnation of Roseanne for her racist comment about Valerie Jarrett. But the left-wing media is largely rallying around Samantha Bee for calling Ivanka Trump the c-word. Take the Daily Beast, where Amy Zimmerman dismissed Bee’s attack as merely “cussing” and “naughty words,” claiming that to compare it with Roseanne’s tweet is “the false equivalency to end all false equivalencies.” Along similar lines, on today’s Morning Joe MSNBC analyst John Heilemann argued that the punishment for Bee shouldn’t be as harsh as the show cancellation that Roseanne promptly suffered. Heilemann: “In the scale of...

That’s Mika Brzezinski in the screengrab, presumably trying not to throw up as she imagines photos of Donald Trump with Stormy Daniels. On today’s Morning Joe, panelist John Heilemann said that there was speculation that Daniels might possess “intimate” photos of herself with Trump. Heilemann vowed that “if those photographs exist, they will come out.” Said Heilemann: “Mika, I will hope, as you conjure an image of that, I’ll try to just urge you not to throw up in your mouth.” Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

NBC News and MSNBC national affairs analyst John Heilemann on Tuesday asked Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) if he thought House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) had "been compromised by the Russians." The question comes following a Monday vote in the House Intelligence Committee to make a controversial Republican-crafted memo public. The memo purports to show bias within the FBI and the Department of Justice. "Congressman, I’m going to ask you a question I asked Sen. [Chris] Murphy (D-Conn.) a little earlier. It’s an impolitic question and one that would have seemed absurd in almost any other circumstance," said Heilemann,...

In an apparent desperate attempt to undermine the presumably soon-to-be-released FISA memo, on today’s Morning Joe, MSNBC analyst John Heilemann suggested that Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intel Committee, is a Russian agent. H/t @Nuk3dawg. Heilemann said to Dem Sen. Chris Murphy: “I want to ask you a question that under almost any other circumstances would be ridiculous and absurd, but under these circumstances I think is actually warranted. Is it possible that the Republican chairman of the House intel committee has been compromised by the Russians. Is it possible we actually have a Russian agent running the...

Talk about your strange bedfellows . . . Both Pat Buchanan and Donny Deutsch have advocated the arrest of Pastor Terry Jones to prevent his possible burning of Korans and the danger to US troops such act would threaten. The paleo-conservative and the New York liberal made common cause on today's Morning Joe. They were outnumbered by Mika Brzezinski, Dan Senor and John Heilemann, all of whom opposed the arrest-the-pastor proposal on First Amendment grounds. Buchanan and Deutsch expressed disregard for the First Amendment implications. Buchanan asserted that if Pres. Obama were to follow his advice, conservatives would support him...

MSNBC’s meltdown over Fox News‘ criticism of the Mueller investigation continues. This morning, we reported Joe Scarborough’s overwrought assertion that Fox News was fomenting a “constitutional crisis” that could lead to “violence.” The handwringing continued on this evening’s Hardball. First, MSNBC regular John Heilemann claimed that Fox’s language was “dangerous” in a way that leads to “blowing up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.” Chris Matthews then weighed in, saying it sounded like “Third World talk . . . where the guy loses the election, so you put him in jail or hang him.” Get the rest of the story...

Ain’t that odd: based just on the transcript of his interview with Sean Hannity, John Heilemann can look at Roy Moore and say, “that’s a perp right there.” . . . So surely supersleuth Heilemann must have been aware of the sexual misconduct by Mark Halperin, which led to his firing from MSNBC and loss of other engagements. After all, Heilemann worked side-by-side with Halperin for a decade, co-authoring two books and co-hosting a TV show with him, among other projects. Get the rest of the story and view the video at FinkelBlog.

On With All Due Respect, John Heilemann was aggressively questioning Kellayanne Conway, arguing that conflicts of interests would arise when the Trump administration makes decisions that could affect Trump business interests at home or abroad. Conway eventually had enough. She shot back: “look, John, I know the election results are very tough to swallow, particularly for those of you who just couldn’t see it coming, couldn’t even conceive of the possibility that the other candidate may actually win, that you don’t understand America.” Ouch. View the video here.

The set of With All Due Respect was a sad place today due to the shocking revelation that the computer seized in the Anthony Weiner probe has caused FBI Director James Comey to announce that he is reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. In addition to being irked at  Comey, Halperin and Heilemann seemed to be searching for lifeline assurances that this probe might soon go away and have little or no affect on the upcoming election in eleven days. Of course, the problem with that hope is that any news story involving Anthony Weiner is almost guaranteed to...

The horror...the horror... And the latest entry in a long line of mainstream media attempts to marginalize Donald Trump came today on With All Due Respect. Co-host John Heilemann obviously wanted to portray Trump as over the top crazy by comparing him to Colonel Kurtz of the Apocalypse Now movie. Let us join Heilemann as he attempted to divert attention from the Wikileaks revelations, which he later wrote off as mere insider politics stuff, by focusing on Trump as Kurtz. You can enter the Heilemann's Heart of Darkness at the 1:44 mark in the following video:

The MSM can’t stop talking about Donald Trump having brought onto his campaign the Chairman of Breitbart News. But Hillary’s closest aide being for 12 years an editor of an Islamist magazine that among other things blamed the US for 9/11? Meh! On today’s With All Due Respect, guest co-host Alex Wagner seconded the excuse that the Clinton campaign is shopping. Said Wagner: “as you and I have both worked on magazines, we know that there are a lot of editors who do absolutely nothing but are listed on mastheads anyway.” John Heilemann similarly argued that while his title at...

Have you ever had somebody try to sell you on something but the pitch goes on and on and on with a complicated explanation which is almost impossible to understand? If you were smart, you would walk away with your hand on your wallet. Such was the case yesterday when Gene Sperling, Hillary Clinton's economic adviser, attempted to explain her economic policies on Bloomberg's With All Due Respect to hosts John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. His seemingly endless complex explanations seemed to frustrate the hosts until Heilemann asked Sperling to very briefly explain her economic policy. The result? Sperling went on another yet...

John Heilemann, co-host of Bloomberg TV’s With All Due Respect, surely leans left, but is generally a savvy political analyst in my book. But Heilemann went haywire with his prediction today. He suggested that violence in the streets of Cleveland would hurt Donald Trump’s chances of being elected president. Really? If there are, as Heilemann said,”images of chaos and disorder” in the streets, wouldn’t Americans tend to turn to Trump, who has cast himself as “the law and order candidate?” And violent anti-Trump protesters, whether or not they expressly say so, would be in essence urging people to support Hillary,...

Oops! It was quite an amusing moment yesterday on Bloomberg's With All Due Respect when Mark Halperin corrected his co-host, John Heilemann, on delegate math history. As you can see in the video below starting at the 8:05 mark, Heilemann asserted that Donald Trump was not doing as well as he should be because at this point in the 2012 Republican primary, Mitt Romney already had enough delegates to lock up the nomination. Halperin then interjected to point out that Romney did not have the nomination locked up until much  later than now. The funniest thing about this exchange was the sheepish...