Month: November 2005
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Deborah Solomon is harsh, part 2
Deborah Solomon’s harsh questions in her New York Times Magazine interview column continue to make me uncomfortable, but sometimes, like this week, she says what needs to be said: SOLOMON: But you can’t possibly blame President Bush for fear and paranoia in northern Italy. LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: It’s the same with Silvio Berlusconi in Italy. Is
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What is John Hinderaker talking about?
Via Andrew Sullivan, Powerline’s John Hinderaker is throwing around an absurd metaphor: Why Doesn’t the Administration Fight Back? I don’t understand it, and neither does Bill Kristol. The Democrats are mounting the most scurrilous political campaign that has been seen in American politics since the Civil War. The administration can easily win the argument over
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The postmodern Republican Party
Here’s a disturbing sign of the GOP’s turn toward postmodernism under President Bush — a “close” ally of the White House “admiringly” describing the administration’s talent for “making their own reality”: But the Bush White House has always been good at what one close Republican ally refers to admiringly as “making their own reality,” meaning
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Rich Galen confuses cause and effect
In today’s New York Times, GOP consultant Rich Galen offers an analysis of the Bush administration’s predicament that is precisely backward: “A White House that is aggressively on message is an unstoppable political tool,” said Rich Galen, a Republican consultant. “Just as the Clinton White House got itself back together in ’95 and after impeachment,
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Why I’m a loser in the textbook market
The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki explains: [I]f students resell their books, in effect the price they pay comes down; the textbook companies may be charging more partly to take account of the higher resale value. The real losers in this game are those who buy textbooks and hold on to them: graduate students, bookworms, and
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An elusively sourced Michael Jordan quote
In this week’s Sports Illustrated, Jack McCallum is the latest media figure to quote Michael Jordan as saying that he didn’t endorse Harvey Gantt’s 1990 challenge to North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms because “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” I thought I had remembered the accuracy of that quote being challenged, so I tried to trace it
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Theodore Wells: Most obvious legal soundbite ever?
Driving to the North Carolina mountains on Thursday night, my wife and I heard this illuminating soundbite from Scooter Libby attorney Theodore V. Wells, Jr about five times: In pleading not guilty, [Libby] has declared to the world that he is innocent. Uh, yeah. In fairness, here’s the full quote, which is less cringe-inducing: In
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Rush Limbaugh accuses Wilson of treason
You can’t make this s— up: RUSH: The more the left talks about Libby’s alleged perjury, the more you have to ask did Joseph Wilson commit treason.
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An attack on Brent Scowcroft?
Joe Klein’s source alleges a retaliatory campaign against George H.W. Bush’s adviser and friend for speaking out about the current administration: It seems a fair indication of the West Wing’s whigged-out desperation that Libby even attempted the oblique argument that Wilson was not to be trusted because his wife, a CIA analyst, had sent him
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New political science of interest
Here are some new political science papers that bring scholarly rigor to important substantive questions about American democracy. 1) Southern Illinois’ Jennifer Jerit and Jason Barabas on misleading rhetoric in the Social Security debate (PDF): Scholars often attribute political ignorance to individual-level factors, but we concentrate on the quality of the information environment. Employing a