Ed Kilgore contends that if the Gipper had headed the Republican ticket that year, he would have lost to Jimmy Carter and consequently would have been an also-ran if he’d sought the 1980 GOP nod.
Washington Monthly
By Tom Johnson | November 24, 2014 | 10:11 PM EST
One blogger argued that media outlets which took the story seriously should “spend the next three-plus years publishing articles [or] airing pieces” telling the public that it was “a cynical and spiteful lie from the beginning.”
Charles Pierce: If Elizabeth Warren Won’t Run For President, an Al Franken Bid Would Be the Next Best Thing
By Tom Johnson | November 8, 2014 | 3:50 PM EST The Esquire blogger says that the “populist” Franken showed in his recent re-election campaign “how you embrace the themes on which Warren has based her career.” (Also, it would “cause Bill O'Reilly's head to detonate in a gorgeous orange fireball.”)
By Tom Johnson | November 4, 2014 | 11:29 AM EST
Kevin Drum and other pundits take the press to task for misleading Iowa voters by, in Drum's words, pushing a “charade” that Republican Senate contender Joni Ernst is a “pragmatic centrist.”
Lefty Blogger: Bush 43’s ‘Theft’ of ’04 Election ‘One of the Worst Criminal Acts in United States History’
By Tom Johnson | November 2, 2014 | 9:10 PM EST The Washington Monthly’s D.R. Tucker rages that ten years ago, “George W. Bush, in essence, knocked down the towers of democracy,” and that “the right-wing interests that supported the Bush-Cheney administration still have an iron grip on our politics and media entities.”
Ex-Newsweek Writer: Conservatives ‘Exaggerat[e]’ Media Bias, But Ideology ‘Sometimes Bleed[s] Into’ Coverage
By Tom Johnson | October 30, 2014 | 12:09 AM EDT Steven Waldman, a former Newsweek reporter and Obama adviser to the FCC, concedes that liberal bias can have an effect, but says that overall it’s a “minor factor,” far less important than journalists’ interest in advancing their careers.
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.”
By Tom Johnson | September 29, 2014 | 9:29 PM EDT
A symposium addressing the question “Where Is Liberalism Going?” produced what several online pundits considered nutty and ignorant ideas about topics including sex and the supposedly growing authoritarian tendencies of the left.
By Tom Johnson | September 21, 2014 | 4:41 PM EDT
Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, contends in the just-published This Changes Everything that radical economic changes are necessary to combat global warming. The Washington Monthly’s D.R. Tucker calls the new book “one of the greatest nonfiction works of all-time.”
Washington Monthly Blogger: ‘Gun-Toting…Anti-Feminist, Anti-Modern’ ISIS Has Much in Common With Conservatives
By Tom Johnson | August 27, 2014 | 11:40 AM EDT Lumping one’s political adversaries with the vicious jihadists of ISIS seems to be the new new thing. Last Thursday, Dinesh D’Souza alleged that “the common thread between ISIS and [the looters] in Ferguson is you have these people who basically believe that to correct a perceived injustice, it's perfectly OK to inflict all kinds of new injustices...And all of this is then licensed by the left and licensed to some degree by the media.”
On Saturday, Washington Monthly blogger David Atkins responded to D’Souza, asserting that ISIS is not at all left-wing; rather, the terrorist group stands for “bedrock principles of political conservatism wherever it appears in the world,” such as “eschew[ing] ‘foreign’ western impulses, roll[ing] back the clock on progressive social reforms, and aggressively institut[ing] a more traditional religious approach to society.”
By Tom Johnson | August 17, 2014 | 10:20 PM EDT
The Washington Monthly’s Martin Longman sees the Republican party on the horns of a dilemma regarding its 2016 presidential nomination. In a Sunday post, Longman asserted that any candidate who strongly appeals to the GOP base couldn’t win the general election, but acknowledged that it’s understandable that the rank and file would point to several recent losses by center-right nominees and ask, in effect, “This time, why not a real conservative?”
Republican righties, Longman remarked, “are more inclined to test the idea of nominating a fire-breathing conservative who won’t trim their sails. Better to go down swinging tha[n] to unilaterally disarm by caving on principles within your own party.”
By Tom Johnson | August 16, 2014 | 7:01 AM EDT
This week, three of the most prominent liberal bloggers agreed that when it comes to criticizing presidents of either party about their vacations, people really need to, as one of the bloggers put it, “STFU.”
Do they have a point, or should the appropriateness of presidential vacations be evaluated on a POTUS-by-POTUS basis? Check out their thoughts and comment if you’d like.