The New York magazine blogger speculates that some sort of “mental breakdown led [Republicans] to a place where [a shutdown] has received serious consideration” and claims such a move would be “almost a masterpiece of self-sabotage” for the GOP heading into 2016.
Jonathan Chait
By Tom Johnson | November 8, 2014 | 12:42 AM EST
According to the blogger for New York magazine, “Republicans conceive of black voting as a kind of mass, unthinking act, something distinctly unlike the conscious thought process of white citizens,” and they push a “partywide agenda of imposing vote restrictions designed to dampen African-American turnout.”
By Tom Johnson | October 14, 2014 | 9:14 PM EDT
The blogger argues that Paul Ryan’s “ideological fantasies prevent him from accepting even basic scientific facts” after Ryan says scientists don’t know if humans have contributed to global warming.
Jonathan Chait: Limbaugh Upset That White Americans Don’t Get Credit For ‘Their Relative Lack of Slavery’
By Tom Johnson | October 8, 2014 | 9:46 PM EDT The New York magazine blogger says that Rush not only “cannot stop talking about” slavery but “believes that, rather than a blight on white America, it should be seen, in a world-historical context, as a point in its favor.”
By Tom Johnson | August 26, 2014 | 6:56 PM EDT
Don’t look now, but there may be a Paul Ryan scandal, or at least a scandalette, and in this context New York magazine blogger Jonathan Chait is both Woodward and Bernstein. In a Monday post, Chait related that Ryan, in the newsmagazine The Week, had named his “six favorite books about economics and democracy,” and that the “huge omission” from the list was Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which Ryan has so often praised to the skies.
Chait remarked that Ryan appears to be backing away from his politically problematic Randian makers/takers rhetoric and readopting a previous persona: “The new Ryan looks like the Bush-era version, with lots of giving to the rich without all the taking from the poor.”
By Tom Johnson | August 22, 2014 | 11:19 AM EDT
Breaking news: next year’s CPAC will be sponsored exclusively by Ivory soap, Purell, Lysol, Pine-Sol, and Mr. Clean.
OK, not really, but the joke is based on New York magazine blogger Jonathan Chait’s assertion in a Thursday post that the “hygenic impulse” -- or, as the post’s headline puts it, the “cleanliness fetish” -- of conservatives “helps explain the primal character of the right’s Obamacare hate — its obsession with ‘full repeal,’ a way of conceiving the issue that transcends any specific analysis of policy and instead calls to mind the expunging of a toxin.”
New York's Jonathan Chait: ‘True Contribution’ of Reform Conservatives Is Their Opposition to Far-Right ‘Hysteria’
By Tom Johnson | July 7, 2014 | 10:25 PM EDT New York magazine political writer Jonathan Chait isn’t a big fan of reform conservatives, but he did comment in a Sunday post that their “worldview,” unlike that of the Republican base, isn’t expressed as “a series of furious scrawlings on mental chalkboards.” (Presumably, Chait figures that the reformicons favor a crisp PowerPoint presentation.)
Chait lauds the reformers for implicitly rejecting the “apocalypticism” of movement conservatives, which holds, in his words, “that Barack Obama’s agenda poses a dire threat to the fabric of American life, that a reversal must be sweeping in its scope and undertaken immediately.”
By Tom Johnson | June 26, 2014 | 6:35 AM EDT
Hillary Clinton is touring to promote her State Department memoir “Hard Choices,” but most of the news she’s made along the way relates to her personal finances, not her tenure in Foggy Bottom. On Tuesday, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait examined Hillary’s “dead broke” comment and other recent remarks and revelations about the Clintons’ money with an eye toward whether or not they’ll hamper her presumed presidential campaign.
Chait opined that while some of the Clintons’ “buckraking” constitutes “both a problem of perception and a problem of substance,” Hillary nonetheless has two big economic things going for her heading into 2016: voters’ memories of the strong economy during Bill’s presidency, and the near-certainty that if she becomes the nominee, her opponent will represent “a Republican Party still wedded to the upward redistribution of income as its central policy goal.”
By Tom Johnson | June 1, 2014 | 1:09 PM EDT
So-called reform conservatives such as David Frum, Michael Gerson, and Ramesh Ponnuru often get relatively favorable attention from liberal journalists -- relative, that is, to Tea Party types, which in turn reinforces the Tea Party's belief that the reformers aren't really conservatives.
Two lefty pundits recently examined the state of reform conservatism. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne penned an article for the spring issue of the quarterly Democracy in which he analyzed the work of certain reformers and discussed how they might pull the Republican party toward the center. He also denounced the GOP's current message discipline in the service of its supposedly extremist agenda -- or, as Dionne put it, "the right’s version of political correctness."
By Matt Vespa | June 13, 2013 | 4:00 PM EDT
On June 11, Slate editor Emily Bazelon whipped out the Nazi card against Congressman Trent Franks. The media site, which is an affiliate of the Washington Post, unsurprisingly went after the Republican legislator for his remarks about rape on Wednesday concerning a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks into a pregnancy.
Of course, liberals tried to tie these remarks to Todd Akin, who made scientifically inaccurate statements about sexual assault and pregnancy last year. Yet, even some notables on the left are saying Franks is no Akin.
By Noel Sheppard | May 29, 2013 | 10:39 AM EDT
With the announcement that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) will not seek re-election next year, the liberal media are out in force trashing this woman Wednesday.
New York magazine's Jonathan Chait quickly did his part with a piece intelligently titled "Michele Bachmann Retires As President of Crazyland":
By Scott Whitlock | April 15, 2011 | 4:27 PM EDT
The April 18 edition of Newsweek trashed Republican Paul Ryan as a "scrooge" who is declaring "war" on poor Americans. The piece by Jonathan Chait ripped the Representative's budget proposal and included this cover headline: "Why GOP Scrooge Paul Ryan Is a Fraud."
The failing publication, which was sold for $1 in 2010, featured an equally vicious headline inside the magazine: "War on the Weak: How the GOP Came to View the Poor as Parasites and the Rich as Our Rightful Rulers."