Barry Goldwater

Call it Rush Limbaugh’s media revolution. To explain? Hop in the time travel machine and come with me back to 1963 and 1964. Arizona’s Republican Senator Barry Goldwater, dubbed “Mr. Conservative” as he was the unofficial standard bearer of the aborning conservative movement, was getting ready to run for president in 1964, and finally did so.

Has the pandemic caused the liberal media to lose whatever vestigial grip on reality it ever had? The question arises in light of a surreal conversation on today's Morning Joe between Mika Brzezinski and Eugene Robinson. The pair were discussing Robinson's latest Washington Post column, the gist of which is that Democrat campaign tactics are too nice, being based on "reason and…

Ooh, how brave of Joe Scarborough, courageously speaking truth to power! On today's Morning Joe, Scarborough sneeringly addressed President Trump by his first name, saying, "Donald, Donald: you're making a fool of yourself again. This ends very badly for you." Scarborough went on to declare that in 2020, Trump would lose in a "landslide" and be "routed."…

So finally, someone stands up to remind the media that when it comes to the FBI and CIA spying on a political opponent of a president -  America has in fact been here before. Admittedly, it helps to have been around at the time of the Johnson-Goldwater election in 1964.

I have experienced defeat in presidential politics many times. Actually, I expect most Americans have. You win some, and you lose some. I first experienced defeat in 1964 when then-Sen. Barry Goldwater went down, though I was not even old enough to vote. I experienced it in 1968. I experienced it again in 1976, when my candidate was Ronald Reagan.

Over at Reason, University of Alabama professor of history David T. Beito has written a fascinating look at “Roosevelt’s War Against the Press.” The telling subtitle? “FDR Had His Own Breitbart, and Radio Was His Twitter.” Well, yes. Exactly. I have been writing for sometime that not only is the FDR and radio comparison to Trump and Twitter eerily analogous, but that…

Here we go again. Over at Business Insider, one-time Glenn Beck guy Oliver Darcy (he formerly of Beck’s The Blaze) and BI’s Pamela Engel have headlined "[t]he GOP must do something about the conservative media industrial complex if it wants to survive" in which they write that (brace yourselves) President Obama has correctly diagnosed the problem with the GOP. 

Are black Republicans Sen. Tim Scott and Reps. Mia Love and Will Hurd on the wrong side of the aisle? In a sense, they are, according to Jamelle Bouie, who argued in a Sunday piece that the conservatism central to the GOP is “fundamentally at odds with America’s people of color.” Bouie wrote that “no matter the temperamental affinities that might exist between some…

MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews was in rare from on Thursday night as he both factually tried to link the 1964 and 2016 presidential elections and appeared astonished that there could be an “intervention” (as has been reported for Donald Trump) for something other than “a dope problem or a booze problem.

Recently, both Vox’s Zack Beauchamp and New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait have argued that ideological conservatism isn’t (and never has been) the major reason for Republican electoral success, and that those who consistently vote GOP because they believe in small government and low taxes are greatly outnumbered by those who do so because they’re racists.

The debate rages on as to whether Donald Trump has remodeled or vandalized the Republican party. In any event, left-wing pundits spent the week gaping at, and writing about, what they viewed as the grotesque spectacle of the RNC. For example, Daily Kos’s Hunter opined that the convention was "was barely one step up from an internet-peddled snuff film,” and Salon’s…

In a Sunday post, The Washington Monthly’s D.R. Tucker urged Bern-feelers to follow the example of conservatives who “rebounded from Barry Goldwater’s spectacular [1964] loss [and became] a dominant force. By forming influential think tanks and media outlets, pressuring the mainstream press to focus on issues right-wingers considered important, and voting consistently in even…

MSNBC political analyst and former Democratic Vermont Governor Howard Dean attempted on two occasions during Wednesday’s Hardball to further the extremely flawed and borderline irresponsible claim that Donald Trump’s candidacy is similar to that of 1964 GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. 

Barry Goldwater was a conservative hero and pioneer.  But his presidential run was an historic flop. So when Joe Scarborough described Ted Cruz on today's Morning Joe as "Barry Goldwater's ugly stepson," it was a scalding simile. Scarborough in turn scolded the Republican establishment for backing Cruz over John Kasich as the alternative to Donald Trump.…