Kevin Drum

Lefty Blogger: GOP, Romney Should Have Had 'The Taste Slapped Out of Their Mouths' on Benghazi In 2012
By Tom Johnson | May 11, 2014 | 4:57 PM EDT

The right has directed most of its anger over the handling of the Benghazi terrorist attack at President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Susan Rice, but when lefty blogger Martin Longman reflects on reactions to Benghazi, he thinks of a different villain: Mitt Romney.

In a Saturday post for the Washington Monthly web site, Longman recalls that a few days after the attack, he was "seething about Romney’s behavior" re Benghazi, and that within three weeks, he "was in disbelief that the Romney campaign was chortling with glee at the death of four Americans." 

Kevin Drum: Right-Wingers Deny 'Anything Even Slightly Positive' About Obamacare
By Tom Johnson | April 13, 2014 | 4:27 PM EDT

Imagine a Yankees-Red Sox game during which the Yankees broadcasters acknowledged mistakes by their team and good plays by the Sox, while the Boston announcers ranted relentlessly that the Yankees stank and were lucky not to finish 0-162.
 
According to Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, something similar happens routinely in political media. Drum believes that both in general and regarding Obamacare specifically, liberal pundits are far more likely than their conservative counterparts to discuss their side's failures and give the other side credit where it's due.

Conservative Books Now Dumber and Crazier, Much Like the Whole Conservative Movement
By Tom Johnson | March 21, 2014 | 10:48 PM EDT

On Friday, McKay Coppins of BuzzFeed detailed two major developments over the past decade or so that, according to some on the right, have hurt conservative book publishing: specialty imprints such as Threshold Editions have had the effect of relegating most righty books to a "niche" a la "science fiction or nutritional self-help guides," and this segregation has created economic pressure for those imprints to issue titles by "cable news and radio provocateurs" instead of "combative intellectuals" in the tradition of the late Allan Bloom.

Coppins presents the massive popularity of Bloom's 1987 work The Closing of the American Mind as the Big Bang for right-leaning books. He opines that it forced establishment publishers to realize "a potentially lucrative fact: Conservatives knew how to read."

Liberal Blogger Learns the Hard Way What It's Like to Be Conservative
By Randy Hall | August 20, 2013 | 4:10 AM EDT

As conservatives, we know what happens every time we criticize the policies of the liberal occupant of the White House: We're instantly branded as “racist” and “intolerant” while our views are quickly and summarily dismissed.

However, Kevin Drum, a political blogger for the liberal Mother Jones website, has received similar treatment as he learned that no matter which side of an issue he supports, his mailbox on the Twitter social media website quickly fills up with emails from people taking the opposite view.

Imagine That: California Health Care Exchange's Claimed Premium Cuts Are Really 64%-146% Hikes
By Tom Blumer | May 31, 2013 | 5:14 PM EDT

When Covered California, the Golden States' health insurance exchange being set up under ObamaCare, initially announced its rates beginning in 2014, it claimed that rates will go down. Kevin Drum at Mother Jones ("if these early results hold up, Obamacare's structure seems to be doing a pretty good job at its core mission of controlling prices.") and Rick Ungar at Forbes ("the reality is that the early report card on Obamacare—at least in those states willing to give the law a chance to succeed—is looking pretty darn good") got suckered in.

It isn't so, as Avik Roy explained yesterday at Forbes (bolds are mine):

Richard Holbrooke's Dying Words Taken Out of Context, Politicized by Lefty Mother Jones Mag
By Ken Shepherd | December 15, 2010 | 1:07 PM EST

Tuesday's Washington Post print edition ran a front-page obituary for Richard Holbrooke which closed by noting that the veteran diplomat told his surgeon "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan."

Of course numerous news outlets latched onto that quote. Leftist magazine Mother Jones even made the line their quote of the day late Monday evening as blogger Kevin Drum approvingly added in a December 13 post, "That would be a fitting memorial."

[See screen capture after page break]

But politicizing a dying man's last words has its risks. It turns out Holbrooke's exchange with his doctors taken out of context:

From Time magazine's Michael Crowley:

Liberal Writer Ponders Media Double Standard on Unemployment, Can't See Liberal Bias
By Lachlan Markay | May 14, 2010 | 3:12 PM EDT
Believe it or not, there are some who still fail to grasp the notion that the legacy media are overwhelmingly liberal. They act shocked when the media do what they usually do -- toe the liberal line -- and search in vain for some way to explain the apparent bias.

"Does the Media Care About Unemployment?" asked Kevin Drum, a writer for the liberal Mother Jones. Drum postulated that that "the media focused way more on economic hard luck stories in the early 80s than they do now."

While a liberal noting the double standard is refreshing, Drum went on to attribute it to a litany of possible reasons, all the while ignoring the obvious, and painfully simple answer right before his eyes: as B. Daniel Blatt writes, "Because a Republican’s Not in the White House."
Pollster.com: 'Remarkable' Positive Opinion Change on Iraq
By Mark Finkelstein | November 9, 2007 | 6:59 AM EST
Being against the war after she was for it, could it be soon be time for Hillary to be for it again?

The question arises in light of the findings by Charles Franklin [pictured here] at Pollster.com. According to his November 6th Pollster.com analysis, there has been a "remarkable" shift, in a positive direction, in public opinion on the war in Iraq.

Excerpts from Franklin's Ten Months of Opinion Change on War and More [emphasis added]: