Michael Tomasky

Republican politicians, more than their Democratic counterparts, tend to campaign on anti-Washington themes. That’s kind of odd, suggests Michael Tomasky, given that one of Washington’s quintessential institutions, Congress, helps the GOP by playing a crucial role in obscuring the American people’s fondness for liberal socioeconomic policies. “If Congress is what you see when you see America,”…

Scatology has typically been out of bounds in mainstream-media political commentary. (Not in all political commentary, of course. For example, actor John Cusack once called former actor Ronald Reagan “a criminal who used the Constitution as toilet paper.”) Nonetheless, Michael Tomasky went there in a Wednesday column trashing Senate Republicans for refusing to consider any Supreme Court…

Sunday’s MediaBuzz on the Fox News Channel (FNC) had a slew of media storylines to discuss from the past week and in one segment, host Howard Kurtz teamed with GOP strategist Mercedes Schalpp and the Daily Beast’s Betsy Woodruff to lambaste MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews for his fawning interview with Hillary Clinton on Tuesday that featured droves of softballs.

Several weeks ago, there was an Internet meme about whether it would have been ethical to kill the infant Adolf Hitler. Michael Tomasky poses a (somewhat) less-weighty back-in-time question: Could the Republican party’s current Donald Trump problem have been avoided? Tomasky suggests that it could have been, but instead, during Bill Clinton’s first term in the White House, GOPers “played footsie…

If frontrunner Donald Trump or currently surging Ted Cruz gets the 2016 Republican presidential nod, it may have a strange sort of bipartisan effect, according to Tomasky, who in a Wednesday column asserted that GOP bigwigs “despise” both Cruz and Trump to the extent that they’d “actually prefer” presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to win the general election. “No one’s ever going to…

It’s often noted that Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, just as Democrats had lost five of six before that. Dems snapped out of it thanks to a Bill Clinton-led tack towards the center, but Michael Tomasky predicts that the GOP will stay to the right in 2016, thereby extending its slump. After Michael Dukakis’s defeat in 1988, observed Tomasky…

Though Michael Tomasky is not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, he has a (liberal) layman’s curiosity about the workings of the human brain and mind which causes him to wonder how Ben Carson can be a “brilliant” surgeon but “an across-the-board nincompoop” when it comes to politics. In a Monday column, Tomasky wrote, “Usually, if a man (or woman) is a good and knowledgeable and sure-footed…

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 “…

Speaking with fill-in host Alex Wagner on the Friday edition of MSNBC’s All In, Hardball host Chris Matthews and Daily Beast columnist Michael Tomasky continued the liberal media’s narrative of sudden respect for the soon-to-be resigning House Speaker John Boehner, lamenting that the “revolutionary” wing of the Republican Party had carried out a “mutiny” against “a rock-ribbed conservative.”

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.]…

The debate rages on as to whether Donald Trump represents the essence of the Republican party. Very broadly speaking, conservatives say he doesn’t and liberals say he does. One liberal, Michael Tomasky, claims that Trump, despite his left-of-center positions on several fiscal and economic issues, nonetheless embodies the “two qualities more than any others [that] have driven conservatism in our…

In his standup-comedy days, Steve Martin did a joke about imposing the death penalty for parking violations. Michael Tomasky suggests that the House Benghazi committee has a similarly disproportionate penalty in mind for Hillary Clinton over Emailgate: wrecking her presidential campaign. Tomasky acknowledged in a Wednesday column that Hillary “screwed up this email business,” but asserted that…

Conservatives are accustomed to admiring the work and deploring the politics of artists like Bruce Springsteen and Stephen King. Michael Tomasky wrote Thursday that some liberals have had roughly similar feelings about Antonin Scalia, but that’s over now because of Scalia’s dissent in King v. Burwell, which was devoid of the justice’s usual “writerly flair and intellectual acumen.” “It long ago…

In a Wednesday column, Tomasky alleged that the “real job” of the House select committee looking into the September 2012 Benghazi attack is “to get [Hillary] Clinton” and declared that “this ‘investigation’ now constitutes openly and defiantly urinating on the grave of Amb. [Chris] Stevens.” Tomasky commented that Trey “Gowdy’s investigators have come up empty on the consular attack itself, but…