Month: October 2005
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Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism
Writing on The New Republic blog The Plank, Jason Zengerle slams Jonah Golberg’s new book: I’d been thinking about doing a parody of conservatives’ race to the bottom when it comes to turning out hysterical books on Hillary Clinton, but I see that some prankster has beaten me to it. Check out this brilliant parody.
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Defend Harriet Miers… or run!
According to the New York Times, a majority of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee question the choice of Harriet Miers. A number of prominent conservative pundits are up in arms. And Jeff Sessions, at least, appears to be pressing the panic button on the nomination: Asked if the debate had become “one-sided,” with
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Jumping the gun on Fitzgerald
With apologies to Chris Rock, the problem with the Fitzgerald investigation is simple: liberals are too happy, conservatives are too mad. Liberals are thrilled that the Bush administration is under the gun, to the point of celebrating the expected indictments that the special prosecutor may issue as soon as next week as “Fitzmas”. The phrase
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The ugliness of College Republicans, part 2
Benjamin Wallace-Wells has written a devastating profile of Patrick McHenry, a young Republican Congressman who is the prototypical foot soldier of the Rove-DeLay-Norquist machine. It’s all worth reading, but this paragraph below is yet another window into the ugly training in smear politics that College Republicans gives future party elites: The College Republicans have legendarily
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Harriet Miers: Negative on a 1-100 scale!
Via Kevin Drum, Byron York quotes an anonymous conservative strategist slamming Harriet Miers: The meetings with the senators are going terribly. On a scale of one to 100, they are in negative territory. The thought now is that they have to end….Obviously the smart thing to do would be to withdraw the nomination and have
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Jon Chait on the irony of conservative outrage over sexism charges
Jon Chait is saying what needs to be said about conservative outrage over the sexism/elitism charges the White House is directing at critics of Harriet Miers: Conservatives certainly have a right to be outraged. After all, they oppose Miers on the basis of her lack of qualifications and suspect ideology, not her sex. But there
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Bush misinformation on Medicare RX benefit
Jason Reifler points me to some fishy-sounding Bush administration “errors”, which just happen to make the Medicare prescription drug benefit sound more appealing: Information issued by the government, while generally accurate, tends to give an upbeat assessment of the new benefit, emphasizing the advantages. But the new program is so complex that the government, by
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Cameron Diaz and Marshall Sella reinvent the celebrity profile
Marshall Sella has a fascinating profile of Cameron Diaz in this month’s issue of GQ. To counter the pathological nature of celebrity journalism, Diaz insisted that the story allow her to respond midstream: The reason Cameron Diaz is here at all is that (she says) she will never again sit for a standard profile-interview. Near
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The New Republic on Harriet Miers’ qualifications
George W. Bush on Harriet Miers: Asked point-blank whether she was the most qualified person in the country to serve on the high court, Bush said, “Yes. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have put her on.” The New Republic on Harriet Miers: Let’s take as the standard, then, arguably the least qualified justice currently on the Court:
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Washington Times omits key Boxer quotation from story
On Sunday, the New York Times printed an interview with Barbara Boxer that included this passage about her forthcoming novel on Washington politics: Q: But how can you say that “A Time to Run,” your first novel, represents the world of Washington politics when the Democratic characters are portrayed as saints, the Republicans as snakes?