“MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Thinks Iran was a US Ally Until Bad Old Bush Came Along,” Bryan Preston writes, linking to this Mediaite post from Noah Rothman along with video of Mitchell’s astonishing gaffe:
Washington Post reporter Chris Cillizza said that the “Axis of Evil” address was among the most important State of the Union addresses delivered in recent memory. “That speech, arguably, turned this country in a direction on foreign policy,” Mitchell concurred. “Those words, Axis of Evil, I was standing there in Congress and called the control room, I said ‘This is a big deal.’”
“State Department, with all due respect, Colin Powell did not focus enough on those words and get them taken out of the State of the Union,” she continued. “Up until that moment, Iran was cooperating with the United States on the border of Afghanistan, it was post 9/11, Iran was more or less an American ally.”
“But being included in the Axis of Evil, it turned the Iranian government in a completely different direction,” she concluded. “And it was a turning point in American politics and foreign policy.”
As Bryan adds, “Iran had been an enemy of the United States since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. What part of ‘Death to America!’ and ‘Death to the Great Satan!’ do Mitchell and Cilizza not understand?”
To be fair to Mitchell, she’s long been an employee of NBC, and ABC’s Nightline had the lock on coverage of the Iranian Hostage Crisis in 1979-1980. Since it was on another network, perhaps she simply missed that minor news story…
Somewhere on the Great Golf Course in the Sky, Gerald Ford, who was pilloried mercilessly by NBC’s Saturday Night Live, including over his “There is no Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe” gaffe in his 1976 debate with Jimmy Carter must by enjoying Mitchell’s epic facepalm moment right now.
Hey @mitchellreports, you may want to check your history: https://t.co/vpQhUVQ9YB pic.twitter.com/8GA1PLOt6F
— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) January 28, 2014
Update: At Big Journalism, John Nolte adds: “As you can see, no one is playing gotcha with Mitchell. She wholeheartedly believes this:”
Mitchell then attributed the quote “The era of big government is over” to Ronald Reagan. In reality, it was Bill Clinton who said it.
It is not very comforting to know that the Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for a major television news network was and is under the delusion that Iran was an American ally in the War on Terror for a period of time.
MSNBC is going even further off the rails. You have their serious people blaming Obama’s problems on unicorns named “Washington” and “cynicism,” as opposed to “no” and “jobs,” and Andrea Mitchell just making stuff up.
A fun exercise would be for Sarah Palin to tweet something out about Iran being our one-time War on Terror ally and then watch MSNBC lose its mind pounding her over it.
Pat Dollard adds that Mitchell’s Iran gaffe “is beyond offensive. And she’s doing it not so much to make Bush look bad, but to make Iran look warm and fuzzy so Obama doesn’t look like an idiot, psycho or traitor by giving our top enemy a nuclear energy/weapons program.”
The president’s eagerness to hop into bed with Tehran brings new meaning to Glenn Reynolds’ oft-repeated line about a Jimmy Carter rerun being a best-case scenario for the Obama administration.
More: Noah Rothman adds, “Hey Andrea Mitchell, Here Are Some Americans Killed by Our ‘Ally’ Iran Before 2002.”
As the network used to say, before ignorance became bliss at NBC:
[jwplayer config=”pjmedia_eddriscoll” mediaid=”70824″]
Join the conversation as a VIP Member