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.
Talking Points Memo
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.”
Amanda Marcotte: Iran Deal Has Republicans ‘Trying to Get Attention By Screaming’ That ‘We’re All Going to Die Now’
By Tom Johnson | September 14, 2015 | 4:45 PM EDT Lefty pundit Amanda Marcotte grants that so-called political theater usually dovetails with the beliefs of the politicians and activists who perform it. Among the exceptions: some Republicans’ insincere, “comically overwrought meltdowns” over the Iran nuclear deal.
Those histrionics, Marcotte declared in a Wednesday Talking Points Memo column, are meant “to stir up irrational fears to be harped on for the rest of the election season…Pointless obstructionism for the sole purpose of sticking it to the Democrats and mindless demagoguery about the nefarious Middle Eastern threat to convince voters of your manhood…are joining together to create a massive, misshapen beast that represents everything that’s gone wrong with politics in the 21st century.”
Amanda Marcotte: Fox News Sexism Inspires Conservatives to ‘Scream…at Bitches Who Don’t Know Their Place’
By Tom Johnson | August 27, 2015 | 10:46 AM EDT A great many Fox News hosts and contributors publicly criticized Donald Trump’s latest Twitter swipes at Megyn Kelly. This raises a major pot-kettle issue, claims lefty writer Marcotte, in that these high-profile personalities who objected to Trump’s sexism work for a channel that disseminates one sexist message after another.
“The position at Fox News and elsewhere in the conservative media on women who talk back to men, or even just have the power to talk back to men,” wrote Marcotte in a Wednesday column for Talking Points Memo, is that “they are to be put in their place, with a vengeance. Any woman who has been targeted [by] the right wing flying monkeys of Twitter can attest to how well the audiences have absorbed this lesson. Screaming at bitches who don’t know their place is both a sacred cause and just a rowdy good time, in right wing circles…No one should understand this better than the people at Fox News. After all, this is the monster they created.”
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.”
By Tom Johnson | July 18, 2015 | 2:26 PM EDT
Historian Rick Perlstein, the author of three books (so far) on American movement conservatism from the mid-‘50s through the mid-‘70s, believes, in essence, that conservatives are tribalists whose central task is to promote hatred against other tribes. According to Perlstein, two recent news stories serve to illuminate that process, which, he suggests, involves an almost scientific-sounding conservation of the right wing’s bigoted energy.
“Conservatism is like bigotry whack-a-mole,” wrote Perlstein. “The quantity of hatred, best I can tell from 17 years of close study of 60 years of right-wing history, remains the same. Removing the flag of the Confederacy, [Donald Trump] raising the flag of immigrant hating: the former doesn’t spell some new Jerusalem of tolerance; the latter doesn’t mean that conservatism’s racism has finally been revealed for all to see. The push-me-pull-me of private sentiment and public profession will always remain in motion, and in tension.”
By Tom Johnson | July 1, 2015 | 11:19 AM EDT
Though both Jonathan Chait and Amanda Marcotte approve of same-sex marriage, they differed on Monday in their assessment of the case against it. Chait, of New York magazine, claimed that anti-gay-marriage arguments have been pitiful and consequently were doomed from the get-go. He declared that “preventing gay people from marrying each other serves no coherent purpose. Allowing them to marry harms nobody.”
Meanwhile, Marcotte argued in a Talking Points Memo column that same-sex marriage helps to “redefine…marriage as an institution of love instead of oppression,” and that the anti-gay-marriage forces are clinging to the idea that marriage is “about dutiful procreation and female submission.”
By Tom Johnson | June 20, 2015 | 9:35 PM EDT
Group loyalty is a big part of politics on both sides of the fence, but as far as lefty pundit Marcotte is concerned, it’s become so inflated on the right that it often crowds out crucial things like “basic common sense.”
In a Friday Talking Points Memo column, Marcotte asserted that “conservatives are going way too far with this knee-jerk tendency to believe ‘their’ people can do no wrong and to assume ‘liberals’ are some subversive force out to destroy everything. It’s mildly amusing when Republican voters are mindlessly preferring religious nutcases” -- the Duggars -- “to a centrist liberal who probably gave them health care."
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.”