***To read the full blog, please check out the complete post on NewsBusters***
Three days after President Trump ordered the killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, the liberal media were still tripping over themselves as they continued to clamor about the President supposedly starting a war (while downplaying the Iranian-backed attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq). But during NBC’s Sunday Today they took it another step, declaring Trump had started a “religious war” and insinuated it was a tactic to distract from his impeachment.
Correspondent Harry Smith was filling-in as host for the show when he asked NBC national security analyst and Obama-era CIA and Defense Department official Jeremy Bash:
The President was tweeting a lot last night saying, we've got all these targets picked up that we're ready to hit in Iran should Iran respond. To me, it almost sounds like the President is daring them to respond. What's your sense?
Off the bat, Bash insisted Trump was “framing this as a cultural war, it’s a religious war” for tweeting the military had 52 targets of importance to Iranians selected for destruction if Iran retaliated. “Now, I guarantee you, Harry that the Pentagon does not think of this in that way,” he declared. “There’s no one list of sites. If we were to be in an all-out military conflict with Iran, there would be many more targets. But the President, in framing it as a cultural or religious war I think is inflaming tensions.”
(...)