Month: March 2006
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Our so-called recovery
Over at TNR’s The Plank, Noam Scheiber quotes from a Fred Barnes article: One issue that needs to be developed is the economy, according to Blunt. “People take a strong economy for granted. We have to show that this didn’t just happen,” but is the result of Republican policies like tax cuts. Republican candidates will
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Rothenberg: Allen on the wane
Stuart Rothenberg explains why he thinks George Allen’s presidential prospects are in decline: [T]he Virginia Senator’s White House prospects have been steadily eroding since my first column on this topic one year ago. The reason: President Bush’s reputation has nosedived. Allen is perfectly positioned as heir to the Ronald Reagan-George W. Bush legacy. The only
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Revisiting the AP story on Bush’s straw men
This weekend, I praised the Associated Press story on how President Bush repeatedly attacks straw men. But yesterday I realized that it raises an important question — how did the AP handle those straw men attacks in real time? The answer is not encouraging. Just like newspapers that credulously report or ignore misleading claims that
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Krugman: The deficit wasn’t caused by domestic spending
In his column today, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman makes an underappreciated point — conservative moaning about Bush’s big spending ways fail to take into account the fact that the deficit is largely driven by tax cuts and defense spending, not discretionary programs: Well, it’s safe for conservatives to criticize Mr. Bush for presiding
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AP on Bush’s attacks on straw men
The Associated Press has produced one of the best rhetoric-busting stories on President Bush in a long time — an analysis of his obsession with attacking absurd straw men rather than engaging the arguments of his opponents: “Some look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude that the war is lost and not worth another
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Wash. Times: Bush’s military speeches aren’t political
Time for another entry in the history of the nation’s most hacktastic newspaper, the Washington Times, whose inspired brand of “journalism” kept us busy at Spinsanity for years. Their latest offense comes in an article disclosing a private memo distributed to Senate Democrats, which calls for senators to hold town halls at military bases. As
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New ideas and the gridlock zone
The estimable Jon Chait has a Los Angeles Times column criticizing the GOP claim that they are the party of ideas and Democrats are the party of the status quo. Here’s the key passage: All this was based on a deep confusion between cause and effect. Republicans were pushing new ideas because they had political
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Dionne suggests no attacks on Feingold’s patriotism
E.J. Dionne is clearly not reading this blog. Today, he writes the following: As one of Feingold’s colleagues pointed out, a censure proposal related to any aspect of the president’s policies on terrorism would once have unleashed an unrelenting Republican attack on the sponsor’s patriotism. Now, Republicans have to content themselves with using calls for
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NYT on conservative impeachment hype
You read it here first. Back on February 15, I flagged Paul Weyrich’s article claiming that “if Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is Speaker of the House come next year George W. Bush will be impeached.” Matthew Yglesias picked up the post on Tapped, and the impeachment meme started to go mainstream. Yesterday, as I noted, the
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Feingold resolution draws attacks on dissent, straw men
Wisconsin Democratic senator Russ Feingold’s introduction of a motion to censure President Bush for his illegal domestic wiretapping program has drawn a number of unfair attacks. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist responded that “the signal that it sends that there is in any way a lack of support for our commander in chief, who is