Many of the lefty writers who analyzed Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate at the Venetian suggested that had the event been promoted as if it were a Vegas show, the marquee might have read “Fright Night,” or perhaps “Be Afraid…Be Very Afraid,” given how much the candidates hyped the threat of jihadist terrorism.
Josh Marshall
Blogger Josh Marshall: Fox News a Major Reason Why Much of the GOP Base Is ‘Awash in Racism and Xenophobic Hysteria’
By Tom Johnson | December 9, 2015 | 11:56 AM EST A lot of people (not all of them liberals) consider Donald Trump a demagogue, but Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Marshall thinks Trump is as much of a collaborator as he is a leader. In Marshall’s telling, Trump’s invective derives in large part from an audience that’s been primed by Fox News’s nonstop emission of “hate, lies, nonsense and febrile fear.”
By Tom Johnson | November 11, 2015 | 5:29 PM EST
Robin Williams’s first album was called Reality…What a Concept. More than one lefty blogger implied that Unreality…What a Concept would have been a fitting title for Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate.
Bloggers On Hillary Benghazi Hearing: Republicans ‘Stuck in Their Own Bubble’ Produce ‘Soft Porn For Conservative Activists’
By Tom Johnson | October 23, 2015 | 2:50 PM EDT Since even some conservatives thought that Hillary Clinton won Thursday’s Benghazi hearing, it stands to reason that lefty bloggers would be happy with the way things turned out.
In fact, not all of them waited until the hearing was over. Early in the afternoon, when Clinton still had several hours of testimony before her, Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall observed that “Hillary…looks poised; [Republicans are] radiating spittle.” As the hearings rounded third and headed for home, Esquire’s Charles Pierce sniped, “This was a performance piece for the people residing within the conservative media bubble…who already are too smart to be fooled by the Hildebeast and her alleged facts because Mark Levin has told them that they are too smart to be so fooled."
Lefty Blogger Josh Marshall: ‘We Really Do Want to Take Your Guns. Maybe Not All of Them. But a Lot of Them’
By Tom Johnson | October 10, 2015 | 12:22 PM EDT “Keep your eyes on the prize” is a phrase widely associated with the civil-rights movement, but Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall implies that it’d be a good one for liberals to keep in mind regarding gun control. In this case, the prize would be, in Marshall’s words, “a society where there were radically fewer guns, where buying a gun meant getting a license…where you had to carry insurance to own a weapon (like you do with a car and most everything else), etc.”
By Tom Johnson | August 3, 2015 | 8:52 PM EDT
Almost a quarter-century ago, Seal sang, “We're never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy.” These days, suggests Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, it’s awfully hard to survive in the Republican presidential race if you’re only a little crazy, now that Donald Trump “has flooded the market with a new, purer brand of Crazy that has left the other candidates scrambling and basically unable to compete.”
“Trump is in many ways the logical end result of seven years -- really two-plus decades -- of Republican cultivation of anger and grievance as a method of conducting politics,” asserted Marshall in a Monday post, adding that Trump “has managed to boil modern Republicanism down to a hard precipitate form, shorn of the final vestiges of interest in actual governing.”
Lefty Blogger Josh Marshall: Scott Walker Frightened By ‘Things Like Empirical Thinking and New Ideas’
By Tom Johnson | June 14, 2015 | 12:33 PM EDT The Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature may soon weaken protections for tenured professors in the state’s university system. Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Marshall believes that Gov. Scott Walker’s enthusiastic support for tenure reform is “driven in part by right-wing ideology and in part by the palpable animus Walker himself holds to people who managed to get an education.”
Marshall asserted that Walker sees tenure reform as an attack on the philosophical strain of liberalism that undergirds “empirical thinking and new ideas,” especially in the scientific realm, and opined that as regards the system’s flagship university in Madison, the effect of the reforms would be “pretty much like just lighting [the campus] on fire.”
By Tom Johnson | May 20, 2015 | 5:56 PM EDT
Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall sees a pattern of self-deception among Clinton-loathing conservatives. Marshall acknowledges that Bill and Hillary Clinton routinely “play close to the line” and “refus[e] to play by rules tighter than those applied to anyone else,” but argues that right-wingers fool themselves when they insist that behind those tendencies lies criminality.
“It's never enough for the Clintons' perennial critics to be satisfied with potential conflicts of interest or arguably unseemly behavior,” wrote Marshall in a Tuesday post. “It always has to be more. There have to be high crimes, dead people, corrupt schemes. And if they don't materialize, they need to be made up. Both because there is an organized partisan apparatus aimed at perpetuating them and because there is a right-wing audience that requires a constant diet of hyperventilating outrage from which to find nourishment.”
Marshall commented that “freak show conspiracy theories…inevitably bubble up around [the Clintons], a symbiotic embrace of grievance, aggression and derp. It's painful to admit, but the two sides feed on each other.”
By Tom Johnson | December 10, 2014 | 6:03 PM EST
The Talking Points Memo editor and publisher contends that no matter what right-wingers say, Obamacare is “almost certainly the most deeply scrutinized, discussed and argued over piece of legislation of the entire 20th century and early 21st century.”
Blogger Josh Marshall: ‘Inherent Silliness’ in Idea That Obama Immigration Plan Oppresses or Injures Anyone
By Tom Johnson | November 23, 2014 | 4:40 PM EST The Talking Points Memo editor and publisher claims that illegal immigration is similar to same-sex marriage in the sense that “even if you think those things are terrible it's very hard to find a victim. And it's even harder to explain why that victim is you.” He writes that it doesn’t make sense to argue that “anti-immigration Americans -- and let's be honest, mainly white people -- are oppressed in some way by having undocumented immigrants be able to walk around in the open and be able to work in the open.”
By Tom Johnson | October 27, 2014 | 9:48 PM EDT
Josh Marshall writes that back in the day, right-wingers distorted the extent of media bias against them, and created FNC to balance the scales.
By Tom Johnson | October 8, 2014 | 11:08 AM EDT
Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall says Ernst’s ideas about localism and the ACA are “insane” and remind him of something you’d hear from “militia types.”