Conservatives & Republicans

CNN's Gloria Borger asserted on Wednesday's Wolf program that the latest revelation involving a potential conflict of interest for Hillary Clinton – her e-mail exchanges with Sidney Blumenthal on Libya when she was secretary of state – wasn't much of a scandal: "I don't think this rises to a huge level, but it does show you that when you've been in public life for decades, you do collect a lot of…

Talking Points Memo editor and publisher Josh Marshall sees a pattern of self-deception among Clinton-loathing conservatives. Marshall acknowledges that Bill and Hillary Clinton routinely “play close to the line” and “refus[e] to play by rules tighter than those applied to anyone else,” but argues that right-wingers fool themselves when they insist that behind those tendencies lies criminality…

The former Democratic governors of Michigan and Ohio are on tap to be in the same place at the same time on June 27 in the Buckeye State capital of Columbus. This is a made-for-the-media event for the record books. I certainly can't recall a time when two former governors who oversaw a combined total of over 1 million peak-to-trough job losses during their terms in office have been at the same…

On Tuesday, the Washington Post's Janell Ross spotlighted a Twitter post attacking Sarah Palin, as she forwarded the left's narrative about a supposed double standard between coverage of black violence and the recent shootings involving biker gangs in Waco, Texas. The Tweet included a photo of Palin at the 2011 Rolling Thunder event in Washington, DC, which honors America's fallen members of the…

Daniel J. McGrow, who describes himself as a "writer and recombobulator" at his Twitter account, got seriously discombobulated in public on Sunday. His headline at Politico is meant to reassure leftists who don't read on that "The GOP Is Dying Off. Literally," and that Democrats have an incredible advantage going into the 2016 elections. Those who do read his column should be able to recognize…

Demography may not always be destiny, but according to Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, the “best bet” is that over the next decade-plus, the Republican party as a whole will move towards the center-right as young, relatively moderate voters join and elderly right-wingers shuffle off this mortal coil. In a Monday article, Bouie predicted that “eventually, the GOP will find a working national majority,…

It's bad enough, as Bryan Ballas at NewsBusters noted on May 16, that the Washington Post's Philip Bump dishonestly used last week's Amtrak tragedy to rip Republican members of Congress for somehow being responsible for the (theoretically) for-profit entity's "constant struggle" for funding. As Sean Davis at the Federalist explained, Amtrak has really had no funding struggles. Bump had to make…

Over the past decade or so, David Letterman has become outspokenly liberal, but according to cultural critic Scott Timberg, the seemingly apolitical comedy that Dave did in the 1980s actually hurt the left. Specifically, it served as a sort of opiate which left his audience disinclined to push back against Reaganism. “For those on the progressive or liberal side of the aisle,” wrote Timberg last…

CNN's Chris Cuomo asserted that Jeb Bush "doesn't seem to be the new Republican" on Monday's New Day, after the former Florida governor voiced his support of traditional marriage during a recent interview on CBN. Cuomo later underlined that Bush is "going to have to figure out how to please the plurality" on the marriage issue, and added that "this is not a well-calculated move on that front."

On Monday, both CBS This Morning and NBC's Today seized on the same talking point that 2016 Republican candidates were "struggling" with questions about the Iraq war and that the issue "keeps tripping everybody up."

On May 5, PolitiFact's Louis Jacobson kept with the alleged "fact-checking" web site's actual role as pack of leftist hacks by issuing a fundamentally dishonest "Half True" ruling on a statement made by CarlyFiorina.org's cybersquatter. I raise the matter now because the web site's critics, while raising most of the relevant points, haven't gone far enough in tearing apart Jacobson's work. As…

In the wake of the furor over his gifts to the Clinton Foundation, George Stephanopoulos has taken himself out of the running to moderate a Republican presidential debate set to air on ABC next February. That development gave Salon’s Jim Newell a peg for his Friday argument that GOPers are off-base in their recent push for conservatives (or at least non-liberals) to moderate their party’s debates…

Friday's NBC Nightly News picked up where Today left off earlier in the day by hyping former Florida Governor Jeb Bush's "long week," after his Monday remark that he would have authorized an invasion of Iraq if he had been president in 2003. Lester Holt echoed Savannah Guthrie in underling that Bush has "struggled since then to put daylight between him and his brother's legacy on Iraq." He also…