Conservatives & Republicans

If you’re a conservative brainiac, contends New York magazine’s Chait, something’s been nagging at you, especially since Donald Trump started riding high in the polls: the realization that so many of your fellow right-wingers are dumb. “The conservative movement’s tightening grip over the Republican Party has coincided with its elevation of leaders incapable of explaining their policies cogently…

As Don Imus might say, there was a "tension convention" on the set of today''s Morning Joe. Joe Scarborough and Nicolle Wallace got into it over Marco Rubio's future. Scarborough repeatedly argued that Rubio should get out before the Florida primary, or risk ruining his political future. Wallace made the case that Rubio has the right to remain in as much as Kasich, both their strategies being to…

For the second week in a row, TBS’s Full Frontal host Samantha Bee resorted to childish toilet humor to attack conservatives and Republicans with Monday night’s installment featuring Bee predicting that Mitt Romney “soil[ed] his temple garments at the thought of brokered convention” before his anti-Trump speech on Thursday.

Less than an hour after CNN published an article by special correspondent Jamie Gangel alleging that top Marco Rubio advisers are pushing for him to drop out before the March 15 Florida primary, Rubio communications director Alex Conant took to CNN’s The Situation Room to excoriate the outlet for its “utter nonsense” and “fiction” that didn’t even seek public comment from the campaign. 

Vox editor-in-chief Klein doesn’t often look back fondly at the good old days of the conservative movement, but he did so in a Sunday post inspired by the death of Nancy Reagan. Klein thinks conservatism was at its best in the 1980s, for which he gives considerable credit to the First Couple of the era. Klein wrote that the “political genius” of the Reagans “was to shape the pessimistic, angry…

Offering her memories of the late Nancy Reagan on Monday’s CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes correspondent and former White House reporter Lesley Stahl voiced her approval for how the late First Lady often pushed husband and President Ronald Reagan “to stop talking as much as he was on the social issues” like the abortion and the Second Amendment.

On Monday’s NBC Today, a look back at Nancy Reagan’s various appearances on the morning show over the years showed her repeatedly combating liberal media bias demonstrated by the hosts with whom she sat down.

While remembering the legacy of Nancy Reagan on Monday, all three network morning shows made sure to highlight an issue in which she broke with much of the Republican Party – embryonic stem cell research. On NBC’s Today, Peter Alexander touted: “With Alzheimer's Disease robbing her husband's memory, Mrs. Reagan was again cast into a supporting role, with a new cause, a champion of stem cell…

On Monday’s CBS This Morning former Secretary of State Colin Powell came on the program to discuss the recently passed former First Lady Nancy Reagan, and her relationship with her late husband. Powell to took the opportunity to contrast Ronald Reagan’s “optimistic” presidency with the current GOP’s “nastiness,” that was “running us into the ground.” Unexpectedly, co-anchor Gayle King then called…

On his Sunday program, CNN's Fareed Zakaria asserted that the relationship between conservative/Republican leaders and the grassroots was "similar" to the "dynamic" between moderate Muslims and Islamists: "A main cause of the rise of extremism in the world of Islam has been the cowardice of Muslim moderates...It is now clear that a similar dynamic has been at play in the world of conservatism."…

Calling in to an NBC special report about the death of Nancy Reagan on Sunday, correspondent Andrea Mitchell was eager to use the former First Lady’s passing to attack the current crop of Republican presidential candidates: “...we know that she did not believe in extremes. That she believed in compromise. That she believed, as did her husband, in walking – in working across party lines....So I…

On Friday's Real Time show on HBO, host Bill Maher repeatedly accused Republicans of exploiting racism for political advantage as he asserted that the GOP "made a Faustian deal with the racist devil" and went on to repeat an old debunked claim that Ronald Reagan began his 1980 presidential campaign at the site of a racially motivated murder. He went on to compare the GOP to a house which has…

Members of the Morning Joe panel got a good laugh today as Al Hunt reported on anguish in establishment GOP ranks. Hunt said that he "was at an event Saturday night with a lot of establishment Republicans and some Rubio people and despair so understates the case. [ Laughter ] I -- really, I've never seen anything like it. There was a lot of heavy drinking" after that. A bit later, Hunt imagined…

Former First Lady Nancy Reagan died today. The Associated Press's Christopher Weber, in an otherwise predictably passive-aggressive obituary, got one thing right: "The Reagans' mutual devotion over 52 years of marriage was legendary." How nice of him to acknowledge that now. The fact is that while it was visible during Ronald Reagan's presidency, everyone with eyes to see could recognize the…