Month: September 2006
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Bush and Rove’s fart jokes
Maureen Dowd highlights the maturity of the Bush White House in an anecdote drawn from Bob Woodward’s new book State of Denial: W. and Karl Rove “shared an array of fart jokes,” Mr. Woodward writes. A White House aide put a toy that made a flatulence sound under Karl’s chair for a morning meeting on
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Bush claims he “sees the world the way it is”
During a speech in Alabama yesterday, President Bush made what has to be his most unintentionally ironic statement ever: We are a nation at war. I wish I could report differently, but you need to have a President who sees the world the way it is, not the way somebody would hope it would be.
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The anti-democratic logic of Rudy Giuliani
I hate statements like this one from Rudy Giuliani, who was reacting to the “Fox News Sunday” interview with President Clinton: “The idea of trying to cast blame on President Clinton is just wrong for many, many reasons, not the least of which is I don’t think he deserves it,” Giuliani said in response to
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Fred Barnes claims Allen viable for ’08
Writing on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page today, the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes makes the bizarre claim that George Allen remains a viable 2008 presidential contender: The curdled conventional wisdom on the race is twofold: Mr. Allen is still favored to win re-election, but he should give up any thought of seeking the presidency
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CFIF gets religion on AIDS
Maybe Hillary Clinton’s decision to run for president has some advantages. The Center for Individual Freedom, a conservative group whose main contribution to the AIDS debate has been to oppose efforts to reduce patent protections for anti-retroviral drugs in the developing world, recently sent out an email (PDF) lobbying for the passage of the Ryan
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Quoted on Fox/Clinton controversy
Eric Pfeiffer of the Washington Times interviewed me yesterday for a story on the continuing controversy over President Clinton’s “Fox News Sunday” interview with Chris Wallace: “I do think this is helpful to Democrats for Clinton to go after Fox directly. It’s a smart play,” said Brendan Nyhan, former co-editor of the nonpartisan online watchdog
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Democracy for America’s Lakoff training
In the conclusion to All the President’s Spin, we discussed how the Center for American Progress, George Lakoff’s Rockridge Institute, and the Frameworks Institute represented the vanguard of a group of liberals attempting to match the sophistication of the White House’s PR tactics. Sadly, the prominence of Lakoff and CAP has grown substantially since the
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NYT finally covers Bush straw man rhetoric
The political reporters of the New York Times have consistenly failed to challenge the dissembling of the White House. Today, the Times finally ran a piece on President Bush’s constant use of straw man arguments, which the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank covered in 2004 and the Associated Press reported back in March. And if you
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Grover Norquist is a charming fellow
Grover Norquist, the influential conservative insider who runs Americans for Tax Reform, has never been one to take the high road. He’s compared bipartisanship to date rape, wants to make government small enough “to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub,” and likened taxation of the rich to
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World fails to clarify Allen story
On Friday, I questioned the prevailing interpretation of this passage from a World Magazine profile of George Allen by founder Joel Belz: Allen actually had a pretty credible defense for what he said. No one—including The Washington Post, which featured the story repeatedly for several weeks—ever demonstrated that “macaca” really has such murky racial connotations