The Week

Pundit Damon Linker: Conservative Intellectuals Should Denounce GOP Presidential Field As ‘Ignorant, Insulting, and Dangerous’
By Tom Johnson | November 15, 2015 | 10:26 PM EST

Over the past several years, many former or reformist conservatives have wondered how the Republican party might be reclaimed from its volcanically angry, Fox-News-and-talk-radio-driven base. One ex-conservative, The Week columnist Linker, suggests that righty intellectuals ought to catalyze the process.

In a Friday column, Linker wrote that he couldn’t understand “how an intelligent, well-read” person of any political stripe could have watched last week’s GOP presidential debate “and not come away disgusted.” He issued a challenge to “conservative intellectuals...to speak up and call the GOP field what it is: ignorant, insulting, and dangerous.”

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."

Blogger: During Obama Years, Conservatives Have Pretended to ‘Care About and Understand’ Health-Care Reform
By Tom Johnson | August 20, 2015 | 10:48 AM EDT

It’s a matter of political record that since at least 2009, Republicans have talked at length about health-care reform, especially alternatives to Obamacare. Apparently almost all of them were, as Jon Lovitz’s Master Thespian would put it, “Acting!” That’s essentially what The Week's Paul Waldman alleged in a Wednesday post.

“Republicans have faced a real health care problem for many years now, which is that health care just isn't their thing,” asserted Waldman. “It's one of those ‘mommy’ issues that liberals care about, while conservatives are much more likely to be interested in topics like tax policy or national defense. Yet throughout the Obama years, they've had to act like they both care about and understand the substance of this issue.”

Lefty Blogger: Planned Parenthood Videos Part of Conservatives’ War on Female ‘Autonomy’
By Tom Johnson | August 15, 2015 | 4:04 PM EDT

The Week’s Paul Waldman agrees with conservatives that the undercover Planned Parenthood videos raise a profound moral issue, but disagrees sharply with them over what that issue is. In a Friday post, Waldman asserted that “this controversy simply has nothing to do with fetal tissue” and claimed that it’s really about the right’s disgust with women’s sexual “autonomy.”

“Republicans have always hated Planned Parenthood, not only because it provides abortions but because it's a forthright advocate on behalf of women's rights to control their own reproductive lives,” wrote Waldman. “Nothing is more horrifying to a certain kind of conservative than a woman who has sex because she wants to, and does so without being punished for her sin.”

Pundit Damon Linker: GOP Base Sees the World ‘Through a Fog of Paranoia and Conspiracy’
By Tom Johnson | July 10, 2015 | 4:12 PM EDT

The late NFL head coach George Allen had a favorite saying: “The future is now.” Conversely, The Week's Linker believes the Republican party’s future “will be delayed so long as [its] candidates remain beholden to voters who view politics primarily as a megaphone for broadcasting an ignorant, garbled howl of anger, fear, alienation, and resentment.”

In a Friday piece, Linker remarked that conservative activists, who tend to view events “through a fog of paranoia and conspiracy,” have gradually dragged down the party as they’ve become a larger and larger share of it. In Linker’s words, “They’ve grown and spread like a fungus (thanks to the fertilization efforts of Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes).” One recent consequence: the popularity among GOPers of the “vulgar blowhard” Donald Trump.

Lefty Blogger: Donald Trump Even ‘Dumber and More Extreme’ Than Typical Republican Politician
By Tom Johnson | June 19, 2015 | 9:48 PM EDT

Pundits occasionally opine that someone or other is the face of a given political party. Paul Waldman of The Week implies that Donald Trump would be a fitting choice as the Republican party’s face, presumably drawn by a cartoonist, since Trump is “a walking caricature…created from everything Republicans believe” about matters such as money and patriotism. “Trump is the essence of contemporary Republicanism,” wrote Waldman. “From his jingoism to his willingness to present all kinds of weird ideas as facts…to his relentless oversimplification of complex issues…[it's] what you get when you take a typical Republican politician and make him a little dumber and more extreme — but just a little.”

Lefty Bloggers: ‘Our Voting System Sucks,’ and GOP Has a ‘Mania For Suppression’ of Dem-Leaning Groups
By Tom Johnson | June 5, 2015 | 6:03 PM EDT

Hillary Clinton’s call in a Thursday speech for federally mandated automatic voter registration and a minimum of twenty days for early voting won widespread applause in the lefty blogosphere. So did Clinton’s blasts in the same speech at alleged Republican efforts to throw a wrench into the ballot works for certain Democratic-leaning groups.

Two ringing endorsements of Hillary’s proposals and rhetoric came from The Week’s Paul Waldman and New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait.

Columnist: 'Reform'-Minded Conservatives Will Rise After ‘Loony’ GOP Nominee Gets Trounced in 2016
By Tom Johnson | August 5, 2014 | 6:10 AM EDT

Damon Linker, who opines for the newsmagazine The Week, thinks the so-called reform conservatives have a chance to pull the Republican party back towards the center, but predicts it won’t happen until after the GOP base -- currently “gripped by a form of political psychosis, doing furious battle with ideological phantoms of its own creation” -- nominates for president a “genuine right-wing radical” who's crushed at the polls a la Barry Goldwater. “Only that kind of blowout,” wrote Linker, “will exorcize the demons that have taken hold of the Republican soul in recent years.”

From Linker’s piece last Wednesday (emphasis added):