Michael Tomasky

Lefty Writer: ‘Much Truth’ to Idea That ‘National Media’ Are ‘Primed to Take Down Hillary’
By Tom Johnson | June 7, 2015 | 5:20 PM EDT

Never mind the vast right-wing conspiracy, suggests Michael Tomasky in the June 25 New York Review of Books. What Hillary Clinton needs to concern herself with are 1) a possible vast mainstream-media conspiracy and 2) her and her husband’s propensity for shadiness and avarice.

In a nearly 3,800-word article that’s ostensibly a review of Peter Schweizer’s Clinton Cash but in classic NYRB fashion is more about issues related to the book in question, Tomasky delves into topics including Clinton Foundation fundraising practices; the Clintons’ whopping income from speechmaking; and how they should clean up their act regarding both so that they don’t impede Hillary’s presidential campaign.

Tomasky also analyzes, and largely endorses, the idea stated in early May by Politico’s Dylan Byers that “the national media have never been more primed to take down Hillary Clinton (and, by the same token, elevate a Republican candidate).” Tomasky specifies one extremely prominent northeastern liberal newspaper that’s “worth keeping an eye on” given its putative record of anti-Clinton reporting.

Daily Beast Writer: GOP’s ‘Messianic Tax-Cutting,’ Opposition to Gay Marriage Could Be ‘Liberal Wedge Issues’
By Tom Johnson | May 30, 2015 | 11:55 AM EDT

A recent Gallup poll found that 31 percent of Americans self-identify as social liberals, and that an equal percentage call themselves social conservatives -- the first time since Gallup began conducting such surveys in 1999 that conservatives haven’t outnumbered liberals. On Tuesday, pundit Michael Tomasky seized on this development as an indication that Republicans no longer will be able to use so-called wedge issues to gain Democratic crossover votes, but that maybe now Dems can win away GOPers who aren’t thrilled with their party’s stands on matters like gay marriage.

Tomasky added that any Democratic wedge issues would have a different “psychic ingredient” than those that Republicans have pressed, given that the GOP has relied on “fear-mongering…Conservatives are much better at this than liberals are, and in any case, if liberals tried this it just wouldn’t make sense or work. Everybody knows that the anti-same-sex-marriage side is losing fast.”

Daily Beast Writer: Why Can’t Religious Conservatives Be As Flexible As the Gay-Rights Movement?
By Tom Johnson | May 8, 2015 | 6:10 PM EDT

The faltering religious right would be well served to borrow a strategy from gay activists, but it almost certainly won’t, contended The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky in a Friday column.

In Tomasky’s telling, the gay-rights movement in the 1980s alienated many because it could be self-righteous to the point of belligerence, but eventually “the leaders of the movement saw that it was more important to persuade public opinion than to shock it. And so the public-relations strategy around the movement for same-sex marriage became ‘we’re just like you.’ And it worked.”

The religious right, Tomasky argued, “can’t change. When you believe the Big Guy Himself handed you down your positions, you’re not going to alter them or indeed even the way you talk about them. What is the religious right’s version of ‘we’re just like you’? I don’t think there is one. Because they are not like the rest of us, at least when it comes to politics.”

Daily Beast's Tomasky Trash Talk: 'The Clintons Still Aren't Corrupt'
By Tim Graham | April 22, 2015 | 2:11 PM EDT

Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast is prone to wild overstatement. For example, after the last elections, he counseled the Democrats to just avoid the Southern states after Sen. Mary Landrieu lost. It was "just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment....Forget about the whole fetid place. Write it off.”

That same wild overstatement came in this new Daily Beast headline: “The Clintons Still Aren’t Corrupt.” The website pulled out this wisecrack for a text box: “I know the fact that she walks freely among us suggests to many people that she and Bill are so brilliantly devious that they always knew exactly how to get away with it.”

Daily Beast Writer: Republican Primaries Would Be Much Better Without All Those Far-Right Voters
By Tom Johnson | April 16, 2015 | 12:10 AM EDT

Lefty pundit Michael Tomasky is no populist, at least when it comes to the Republican party. He gives props to GOP politicians like Marco Rubio who have “serious and unorthodox ideas,” but expects that Rubio, et al will soft-pedal said ideas during the presidential primaries since “you can’t be a smart candidate in a party that wants to be stupid.” In a Wednesday column, Tomasky asserted that “the 800-pound gorilla of this [Republican] primary process is…the aging, white, very conservative, revanchist, fearful voter.”

Daily Beast Writer: ‘Astonishingly Weak Field’ of GOP Presidential Candidates Is What Party’s ‘Stupid’ Base Deserves
By Tom Johnson | February 3, 2015 | 9:36 PM EST

Michael Tomasky opines that the Republican candidates are “hostil[e] to actual ideas that might stand a chance of addressing the country’s actual problems,” and that even if one of them were “Lincoln and TR and Reagan all rolled into one, with a little bit of Thatcher on the side…it wouldn’t matter. He wouldn’t be able to demonstrate the breadth of his vision, because that isn’t what the GOP base of today wants.”

Tomasky Trashes The South: 'Reactionary', 'Fetid', 'Nuclear Waste Site' of Racial Resentment
By Mark Finkelstein | December 8, 2014 | 9:15 AM EST

Michael Tomasky is not content to argue, in the wake of Mary Landrieu's defeat, that Democrats should write off the South as politically unfriendly territory.  In his Daily Beast item of today, Tomasky goes to great lengths to trash the region in the ugliest of terms.

"Reactionary, prejudice-infested, fetid, reject[ing] nearly everything that’s good about this country, just one big nuclear waste site of choleric, and extremely racialized, resentment," is how Tomasky slurs most of the South, saying "almost the entire region" is as he describes it. 

Even MSNBC Won’t Support Controversial Wendy Davis Wheelchair Ad
By Jeffrey Meyer | October 12, 2014 | 10:59 AM EDT

Last week, Wendy Davis, the Democratic Party candidate for governor of Texas, aired a controversial ad attacking her opponent, Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott, depicting him as an empty wheelchair who had turned his back on disabled people in Texas. Despite MSNBC doing everything it could to promote Ms. Davis, her latest attack ad appeared indefensible for the “Lean Forward” network. On Sunday morning, an entire panel on Up w/ Steve Kornacki condemned the Davis ad, with liberal columnist Michael Tomasky declaring “this makes liberals squirm in their chairs.” 

Daily Beast Writer: It's Okay to Merely 'Contain' ISIS and Obama Should Say So
By Ken Shepherd | September 15, 2014 | 5:30 PM EDT

Insisting that "crush[ing]" or destroying ISIS is simply impossible to achieve, liberal Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky devoted an 11-paragraph piece entitled "Please—Let's Not Destroy ISIS" to explaining why he "wish[es] Obama had the conviction to stand up and say" that "contain[ing] [ISIS] is what we should do."

AP, LA Times and USA Today All Avoid Naming Obama in Stories on Libya
By Tom Blumer | September 4, 2014 | 3:38 PM EDT

The establishment press is working mightily to shield President Barack Obama from blame for, or even association with, decisions he has made and actions he has taken — unilaterally and with dubious constitutional authority in many instances.

One particularly egregious example is Libya. When Obama decided on his own to engage in "kinetic miliitary action" to topple Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the press was thrilled. Now, as will be seen after the jump, three stories from major establishment press outlets don't even contain Obama's name, or any direct reference to him.

'Dark... Spectral' Dick Cheney Still Living Rent-free in Chris Matthews's Head
By Ken Shepherd | July 14, 2014 | 9:45 PM EDT

Although more subdued compared to his June 18 anti-Dick Cheney diatribe, MSNBC's Chris Matthews returned on his Monday, July 14 program once again to his unhealthy, creepy obsession with the former vice president. The relevant news hook was what Matthews derided as a "Cheney family offensive," referring to a Politico Playbook lunch event held earlier in the day in Washington, D.C., featuring Cheney, wife Lynne, and daughter Liz.

"Cheney, who was the number one force pushing was on the American people, said he's sticking to his tragic position of 2003," Matthews groused before playing a clip of Cheney saying he "believed it in then" and "looking back on it now, it was the right thing to do." "What did anyone expect, is what I have to say," Matthews huffed, adding, "Is it news that Dick Cheney [chay-nee] is Dick Cheney [chee-nee]?"

Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky: Bergdahl Controversy is the Right's New Benghazi
By Connor Williams | June 3, 2014 | 12:50 PM EDT

Addressing the critics of the Obama administration’s prisoner swap for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky posited that this controversy represents the Right’s new Benghazi, by which he means a new scandal obsession which will prove fruitless.

The absurdity in the piece is unrelenting; Tomasky claims that “Bergdahl may well end up being the flimsy excuse for the impeachment hearings they’ve been dreaming of.”