Lyndon Johnson

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.

The New York Times shamelessly shoehorned gun control into Martin Luther King’s civil rights legacy by way of Richard Oppel Jr.’s tilted history lesson of the 1960s on Wednesday, “Killing Led, at Last, To Gun Restrictions,” part of the series “King’s Legacy: A Fight for Social Change.” Oppel lamented, in the paper’s alleged news section, that if only America had only been wise enough to pass…

The basic fact is in dispute. According to Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat, the President of the United States used the word (this being a family publication I will clean it up) “s-hole” to describe Haiti and Africa in a discussion about immigration. According to others present, not so

WASHINGTON — Last week the headlines should have abounded with the year's good news. It was the economy: gross domestic product was up some 3 percent and, for the last quarter, nearly 4 percent; unemployment was down to a 17-year low, with black unemployment at the lowest level since such statistics were compiled. The stock market was soaring, up some 40 percent since Donald Trump was elected,…

"The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher plain." -- Sen. George McGovern (D-SD) Filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have performed a vital public service in making their documentary "The Vietnam War" for PBS. Given the division that war caused in America, it is a pretty fair chronicling of the way things…

According to Leah Finnegan in her Thursday piece for The New Republic, when Steve Bannon cast the mainstream media as full-fledged opponents of the Trump White House, it wasn’t an accurate statement, but it may have been the next best thing: a self-fulfilling prophecy. “What if, rather than reflexively assuming its defensive posture of ‘objectivity,’ the press embraced this opportunity to go full…

At the National Prayer Breakfast last week, President Trump promised to "totally destroy" the so-called "Johnson Amendment," a law that prohibits churches from endorsing or opposing political candidates at the risk of losing their tax-exempt status.

Next Tuesday, three days before the current POTUS becomes an ex-POTUS, Jonathan Chait’s Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail will be published. On Tuesday, New York magazine, where Chait is the chief political pundit, ran an excerpt from the book in which he claimed, “The truth is that Obama enacted careful, deep, and mostly popular solutions to a…

Appearing as a panel member on Tuesday's CNN Tonight, CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley repeated as if were fact the claim that Ronald Reagan's campaign in 1980 pressed the Iranian government to delay the release of the Americans held hostage to hurt President Jimmy Carter's reelection chances. Neither host Don Lemon nor fellow CNN presidential historian Timothy Naftali noted that a…

On Tuesday, NBC’s Today eagerly touted the latest nasty attack ad from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, with correspondent Hallie Jackson proclaiming: “With just seven days to go, Hillary Clinton’s trying to hammer home her argument that Donald Trump is simply too dangerous to be commander-in-chief by referencing one of the most famous and scariest political ads ever.”

Tuesday’s Hardball on MSNBC featured textbook Chris Matthews with liberal spin (fretting over Donald Trump bringing up Clinton scandals in the debates), a decent segment (a touching tribute to the late John McLaughlin), and creepiness (uttering “what’s new, pussycat” to a female guest), but it also included a struggle with the facts as Matthews claimed that 2016 marks a chance for Democrats to…

George H. W. Bush pooh-poohed “the vision thing.” Bernie Sanders wouldn’t have a presidential campaign without it. True, the Vermont senator is not known for his grasp of policy minutiae, to which Daily Kos founder and publisher Markos Moulitsas says, in effect, so what? Kos implied that Sanders has caught a lot more flak for his vague answers than Republicans do when they routinely “promis[e] …

Moments after President Obama’s final State of the Union on Tuesday night, liberal historian Michael Beschloss was a panelist on PBS and fawned over how the President was “so poignant” in lamenting during his speech that he hasn’t “been able to bridge the divide” while in office.

Speaking as part of a panel about presidential books during Sunday’s Face the Nation, author Doris Kearns Goodwin couldn’t help but devote a few moments of her time to heaping praise on the “ambitious” man who she first worked for in politics in then-President Lyndon B. Johnson from the 1960's.