Wednesday night on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, MSNBC political analyst Jonathan Alter claimed that Grover Norquist’s anti-tax pledge “has helped to wreck the United States." The discussion centered around New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s decision to sign the pledge, and Jeb Bush’s refusal to do so. The Newsweek veteran declared the pledge was “about the worst kind of public policy for the reasons you just heard...[i]t’s terribly destructive.”
James Traub
NYT's James Traub on John Kerry, Latest 'Decent, Serious, Honorable' Dem Destroyed by GOP 'Attack Machine'
By Clay Waters | July 19, 2011 | 8:46 AM EDT James Traub, a contributing writer for the New York Times Sunday magazine, contributed a very positive 5,000-word profile of Obama foreign-affairs maven (and failed liberal Democratic presidential candidate) Sen. John Kerry for the Sunday magazine, under the online headline “How John Kerry Tries to Put Out Diplomatic Fires.” The table of contents and print edition headlines simply hailed Kerry as “The All-American,” while deep in the article itself Traub lamented that in 2004, “Kerry seemed to be the latest in a long line of decent, serious, honorable Democratic presidential candidates cut to ribbons by the Republican attack machine and bested by G.O.P. contenders whom voters would much rather have a beer with.”
(Traub isn’t fond of the G.O.P. In October 2010 Traub took to CNN to rant against the newly conservative Republican Party’s “war on competence and professionalism.”)