Kevin Drum and other pundits take the press to task for misleading Iowa voters by, in Drum's words, pushing a “charade” that Republican Senate contender Joni Ernst is a “pragmatic centrist.”
Kevin Drum
By Tom Johnson | September 10, 2014 | 12:59 PM EDT
For now, President Obama’s “no-drama” handling of the ISIS situation counters both Americans’ fondness for “the same kind of bloody-shirt waving that got us into” Iraq and “the usual gang of conservative jingoists” now pushing for war.
By Tom Johnson | August 21, 2014 | 12:39 PM EDT
The Obama administration is in the doldrums, and not only because it’s August. Is it that the president has a short attention span, or that he’s insufficiently ideological, or have Republicans just worn him down? Three lefty pundits opined on the issue earlier this week.
In a Tuesday New Republic piece, Georgetown history professor Michael Kazin identified “Obama’s sober mistrust of ideology and partisanship” as an obstacle to progress and urged Obama to go beyond “pragmatism” (emphasis added):
By Tom Johnson | August 16, 2014 | 7:01 AM EDT
This week, three of the most prominent liberal bloggers agreed that when it comes to criticizing presidents of either party about their vacations, people really need to, as one of the bloggers put it, “STFU.”
Do they have a point, or should the appropriateness of presidential vacations be evaluated on a POTUS-by-POTUS basis? Check out their thoughts and comment if you’d like.
By Tom Blumer | August 8, 2014 | 12:39 AM EDT
The left constantly and falsely characterizes the right, particularly those sympathetic to Tea Party-related causes, for their alleged incivility, racism, bigotry, nativism, blah-blah-blah.
This stereotype apparently drives Kevin Drum's contention, expressed at at Mother Jones, that Americans who say the believe that abortion is murder really don't feel that abortion is murder. After all, even the most passionate of abortion opponents generally engage in orderly protests, counsel guilt-ridden women who have had abortions, and work calmly and persistently to change abortion law and promote a culture of life. To Drum, the fact that they don't go ballistic upon learning of each and every abortion must somehow mean they don't really care that much, and — get this — that their opposition to abortion is really the product of sexual prudishness (bolds are mine):
By Tom Johnson | July 31, 2014 | 5:02 PM EDT
NewsBusters readers presumably would laugh at the proposition that the media are biased against Hillary Clinton, but plenty of liberals, including Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum, believe it.
In a Tuesday post, Drum, regarding the media’s fascination with Hillary’s “dead broke” remark, wrote, “Hillary could have responded to questions about her wealth a little better. She's not the natural politician Bill is. But really, there's not much else here. So why does it continue to be news a full month later?” Drum then touched on Mark Halperin’s recent comment on Morning Joe that “the press loves to cover [Hillary] hard.” Halperin also said on another recent Morning Joe broadcast that Hillary is “destined to get horrible coverage if she runs for president.” Drum went on (emphasis added):
By Tom Johnson | July 10, 2014 | 5:48 AM EDT
Washington Monthly blogger Ed Kilgore has found some people he thinks conservatives hate even more than they hate President Obama: the thousands of Central American children trying to enter the U.S. at its border with Mexico. After all, righties are merely obsessed with making Obama at least as unpopular in his second term as George W. Bush was in his, but they want to “immediately ship [the] children back across the border in cattle cars,” or maybe just shoot them. But Obama's apparently so much more compassionate than Bush.
From Kilgore’s Wednesday post (emphasis added):
By Tom Johnson | July 5, 2014 | 2:09 PM EDT
Many of the claims made for, and sometimes by, Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign were amazingly lofty, hyperbolic, or both, even by political standards. Remember the columnist who speculated that Obama might be “a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being…who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet”? Remember Obama’s own “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”?
In a Wednesday post, Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum asserted that back then, at least two persons weren’t riding the Obama wave. One was Drum himself, who felt conservatives made Obama out to be much more messianic-sounding than he was. Drum thought the Obama of ’08 was a typical Democrat who gave “soaring speeches” because “[t]hat's what presidential candidates do.” Now, however, Drum sees that “millions of Obama voters really believed all that boilerplate rhetoric.”
By Tom Johnson | June 14, 2014 | 6:43 AM EDT
Newt Gingrich hasn’t been an elected official in more than fifteen years, but according to Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum, Gingrich’s vitriolic approach to politics during his years in the House of Representatives remains influential via Fox News. (Even though Gingrich stars on CNN.)
Piggybacking on an Andrew Sullivan blog post in which Sullivan alleged that watching Fox News was “like slipping into an alternative universe” where “hysteria is the constant norm,” Drum wrote on Thursday that Gingrich “brought conservative politics to a truly new, truly unprecedented level of toxic rancor,” and that Fox News is now “the ongoing, institutional expression of Gingrichism.”
Kevin Drum: Hard to Blame Obama for Tuning Out the Constant Anger ‘Ginned Up’ by ‘Insane’ Tea Party Republicans
By Tom Johnson | June 7, 2014 | 10:13 PM EDT
The belief that President Obama is aloof and detached is found on both the left and the right; the major difference between the two sides on that topic is that liberals don’t always see those qualities as negative.
Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum wrote in a Friday post that he finds it “almost impossible to blame” Obama for “tak[ing] the long view and ignor[ing] all the childish nonsense” generated by both the superficial mainstream media and “the insane tea-party style of no-compromise governing adopted by the modern Republican Party.” Drum says he hopes against hope that the media – the GOP apparently is hopeless -- will join Obama in “act[ing] like an adult.”
By Tom Johnson | June 4, 2014 | 7:15 AM EDT
Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum favors reducing the federal workforce...by one position. Specifically, that of White House press secretary.
In a Monday post, Drum argued that junking the position would eliminate the routine posturing at White House briefings from journalists who are "less interested in gaining actual information than in simply playing gotcha." The source of that approach, opined Drum, is reporters' post-Watergate "habit of treating everything like a scandal."
Press Ignores How Judicial Watch Had to Go to Court to Force Obama Admin to Respond to FOIA Requests
By Tom Blumer | May 21, 2014 | 9:27 AM EDT During the Obama administration, the Associated Press has annually gone through the motions of noting its lack of transparency in responding to Freedom of Information Act requests. In March, its coverage of 2013 FOIA results led with the following sentence: "The Obama administration more often than ever censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, according to a new analysis of federal data." Then everyone went back to work defending the administration against the information seekers.
Part of that defense includes mischaracterizing the legal hurdles those who file FOIA requests must overcome to get the administration to do what it is legally required to do right off the bat. Three sentences from recent coverage of Judicial Watch's attempts to pry information out of the State Department will make my point.