Brendan Nyhan

Month: June 2005

  • Walter Dellinger on another barrier to John McCain winning in 2008

    Continuing my series debunking fantasies about third parties, Walter Dellinger raises yet another major obstacle facing any third party candidate in an email to Mickey Kaus: Walter Dellinger emails about the possibility of a McCain third-party presidential run (should McCain fail to get the GOP nomination): There is one final barrier to a third party

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  • Howard Dean and the tin ear of left-of-center bloggers

    Immediate reactions to Howard Dean’s latest ill-advised statements and the firestorm they’ve created: 1) I told you so (for past outbursts from Mr. Straight Talk, see here, here, here, here, here and here). 2) Once again, let me thank the Democratic caucus-goers of Iowa for preventing that man from becoming president. On a more substantive

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  • Allen’s anti-lynching resolution coming to the floor

    I’ve been wondering why more people have been hitting my post about the ugly racial history of Senator George Allen (R-VA). The reason, it seems, is that the resolution Allen is sponsoring to apologize for the Senate’s failure to pass anti-lynching legislation is about to reach the floor. Unlike other media outlets, the Washington Post

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  • John Harwood and David Broder close ranks on MTP

    The second half of today’s “Meet the Press” featured a typically inane pundit “roundtable.” The lowlight came when Tim Russert asked John Harwood of the Wall Street Journal and David Broder of the Washington Post about Hillary Clinton’s criticism of press coverage of the Bush administration. Let’s start with Russert’s first question and Harwood’s response:

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  • Liberal spin watch: Rangel, Kuttner, Dubner

    Here’s a roundup of the latest liberal nonsense in the news. First, James Taranto notes that Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) compared the US war in Iraq to the Holocaust: Powerful lawmaker Charlie Rangel has provoked the ire of the Anti-Defamation League by likening U.S. military action in Iraq to the Holocaust of World War II.

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  • The chutzpah of Condoleezza Rice: “This war came to us”

    A MoveOn PAC email referenced an unbelievable quote from Condoleezza Rice’s speech at the American Embassy in Baghdad on May 15: You see, this war came to us, not the other way around. The United States of America, when it was attacked on September 11th, realized that we lived in a world where (inaudible) gather

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  • What NYT editorials and runaway brides have in common

    Writing in the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson revisits the news media’s addiction to missing white women: Someday historians will look back at America in the decade bracketing the turn of the 21st century and identify the era’s major themes: Religious fundamentalism. Terrorism. War in Iraq. Economic dislocation. Bioengineering. Information technology. Nuclear proliferation. Globalization. The rise

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  • Matt Taibbi on Thomas Friedman

    Matt Taibbi has written an astonishingly scathing review of Thomas Friedman’s new book The World is Flat — here’s an excerpt: Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up.

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  • Media screwup watch: David Bianculli

    David Bianculli, the New York Daily News TV critic who served as the substitute “Fresh Air” host today, gave this introduction today to the re-broadcast of an old interview with Dave Chapelle: The third season of his Comedy Central series, called “Chapelle Show,” was scheduled to start last month. But Chapelle pulled a vanishing act,

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  • Brian Wilson of Fox News is one classy reporter

    Here’s what passes for journalism at Fox News — from a Washington Post account of a Howard Dean press conference on Capitol Hill yesterday: After several seconds, a booming voice cut through the noise. It belonged to Brian Wilson, a Fox News correspondent who was standing in the middle of the crowd. He asked Dean

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