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.
Vox
By P.J. Gladnick | December 14, 2015 | 1:15 PM EST
Last Friday your humble correspondent noted the absence of Sarah Kliff on the topic of ObamaCare and now he is unhumble enough to believe that this put pressure on her to return to that painful topic today at Vox after nearly a month of avoiding it. As you can read, poor Sarah seems to have gone from acting like a cheerleader aboard a sinking Titanic to taking on the role of radio reporter Herbert Morrison breathlessly reporting on the crashing Hindenburg:
Vox Writer: Conservatives’ Belief In Conspiracy Theories Turning GOP Presidential Contest Into a ‘Horror Comedy’
By Tom Johnson | December 12, 2015 | 12:25 PM EST According to David Roberts, activist conservatives are “bending the political system to their will” not by scoring policy victories but by taking their cues from “fever dreams” (i.e., conspiracy theories).
In a Thursday article, Roberts suggested two reasons why conservatives generally are more inclined than liberals to buy into CTs. One is that for conservatives, not trusting “the political system [is] built into the ideology.” The other is that even though right-wingers are “politically engaged and intense,” their sources of information tend to be, in Roberts’s estimation, unreliable.
By P.J. Gladnick | December 11, 2015 | 8:48 PM EST
For years, first at the Washington Post's Wonkblog and now at Vox, Sarah Kliff has been happily chirping away about the wonders of Obamacare. She has been perhaps its biggest cheerleader by far. And then the predictable collapse of its cooperatives hit and now poor Sarah has gone silent on the whole topic of Obamacare since November 19 when she sadly delivered apocalyptic news about the nation's largest health insurer, UnitedHealth:
By Tom Johnson | December 3, 2015 | 12:41 AM EST
Though a great many on the right don’t consider Donald Trump one of their own, he’s the Republican presidential frontrunner in large part because he’s exploited an ideological and media environment designed to increase the power of movement conservatives, contended Roberts in a Tuesday piece.
According to Roberts, Trump appeals to “a faction of the electorate that has been primed to respond to someone like him…Republican billionaires and political operators have spent decades building a self-contained epistemic bubble in which they could pump up the right-wing base with fear and paranoia. Now the Frankenstein's monster has lumbered off the table and crashed into the cocktail party. It no longer heeds the GOP establishment, and it utterly disdains the media. All Trump does is give it voice. He is what happens when conservatives stop being polite and start getting real.”
Vox Writer: When GOP Candidates Talk About ISIS, They Sound Like ‘Status-Obsessed, Chest-Beating Adolescents’
By Tom Johnson | November 17, 2015 | 9:27 PM EST Last week, ex-Bill Clinton adviser Paul Begala snarked on CNN that during the most recent Republican presidential debate, the candidates mentioned Hillary Clinton so often that they came off as “creepy…in a stalker sort of way…Maybe it's affectionate…Maybe they’re like junior high schoolboys.”
Vox's David Roberts has joined Begala in likening the GOP contenders to middle- or high-schoolers, but his concern is aggression, not affection. In a Monday series of sixteen tweets later collated and posted on the magazine’s site, Roberts argued that when the candidates talk about how they’d deal with ISIS, they sound like “insecure, hormone-ridden teenage boy[s]” and “status-obsessed, chest-beating adolescents.”
Bloggers Blast GOP Presidential Candidates' Media Criticism: ‘Reality Has a Bias Toward Journalists’
By Tom Johnson | October 29, 2015 | 5:38 PM EDT Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio put media bias on the front burner at CNBC’s Republican presidential debate, but conservatives and liberals differed sharply on whether what was in the pot smelled appetizing. Several lefty bloggers turned up their noses at the idea that in last night’s event and in general, the media favor Democrats.
By P.J. Gladnick | October 19, 2015 | 7:51 PM EDT
How inflated is Venezuelan currency? So inflated that even thieves in Venezuela are refusing to steal it.
This has been reported in several media outlets such as the New York Times and Vox but a certain word is very noticebably absent in both reports. It is the S-word that dare not speak its name. One big reason it is taboo in liberal circles to associate that word with economic failure is that one Democrat candidate for president is openly an advocate of the unspoken system and most of the rest of the other candidates silently support it. We start with the New York Times story which avoids you-know-what word:
Vox’s Matthew Yglesias: Hillary Does ‘What She Can Get Away With,’ and That’s the Kind of President Democrats Need
By Tom Johnson | October 6, 2015 | 9:28 PM EDT The antics of the former major-league baseball player Manny Ramirez were frequently described as “just Manny being Manny.” Yglesias suggests that Hillary Clinton’s ill-advised use of a private email server was just Hillary being Hillary, and that that’s a good thing.
In a Tuesday article, Yglesias wrote that “from her adventures in cattle trading to chairing a policymaking committee in her husband's White House to running for Senate in a state she'd never lived in…to her email servers, Clinton is clearly more comfortable than the average person with violating norms and operating in legal gray areas.” That modus operandi, he argued, is what liberals will need in the post-Obama years: “Democrats have almost no chance of securing a majority in the US Senate and even worse odds of securing a majority in the House. So if there is a future for making progressive policy, that future is executive action."
By P.J. Gladnick | September 30, 2015 | 3:15 PM EDT
How many times have we heard that Donald Trump has peaked since he declared his candidacy for president in June? A half dozen times? More? And each time Peak Trump was announced by pundits, it was inevitably followed by yet another surge in the polls. This is probably why in recent weeks, media prognosticators seem to have shied from declaring Peak Trump since it is always followed by you-know-what. However enter Ezra Klein of Vox. Throwing caution to the winds, Klein went where few now dare to go by predicting that we have indeed finally reached Peak Trump. Klein consulted charts and graphs before tuning up his horn to play taps on Trump's candidacy. Of course, the inevitable quickly happened to leave Klein's face covered with egg. But first let us join Klein's bold assertion of Peak Trump posted at 8:20 this morning:
Lefty Pundits On the Debate: Fiorina’s a Misogynist, the GOP Is ‘Rabid,’ and the Evening’s Big Winner Was a Democrat
By Tom Johnson | September 17, 2015 | 10:21 PM EDT Among the insights: Fiorina "has a notable facility for delivering answers that thrill conservatives but fall apart under close examination"; a discussion of childhood vaccines showed that the party is "fervid, claustrophobic, recklessly insinuating, and, at the same time, utterly timid when it comes to extremism in its own ranks”; and the GOP as a whole is "wedded to the tenets of [George W.] Bushism — rabid, debt-financed, regressive tax-cutting, reflexive hostility to regulation, and a pervasive anti-intellectualism."
By Tom Johnson | September 1, 2015 | 9:42 PM EDT
In a Tuesday post, David Roberts opined that “nativist conservatives” won’t accept that America shares responsibility for climate change, or for any other “ills in the world,” because they believe that the very idea is “unpatriotic.”
“Conservative psychology is averse to ambiguity and nuance,” asserted Roberts, “so for ideological conservatives America is either God's chosen country, a force for good, or not. Any discussion of American culpability or responsibility is interpreted as an argument for the latter.”