Month: September 2006
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George Allen smeared Gulf War dissent
The Weekly Standard’s Matthew Continetti has written a new George Allen profile that includes this disturbing anecdote about his first run for Congress: The Democrats nominated Kay Slaughter, a cousin of the retiring congressman. The most contentious issue in the special election was the Persian Gulf war, which Allen supported and Slaughter opposed. Allen ran
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NYT on NY’s town and village court system
Today’s New York Times features an investigation of the state’s bizarre system of town and village courts: Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many — truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers — have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went
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Hillary’s awful Iowa poll numbers
Via Power Line, the Des Moines Register’s David Yepsen reports just how unpopular Hillary Clinton is in Iowa: This survey is a further measure of just how unelectable Clinton may be. She loses Iowa, albeit by tiny margins, to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, two relatively unknown guys who lose
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The “Clinton is crazed” talking point
FoxNews.com got caught promoting President Clinton as “crazed” in his interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday,” which aired today (text, video). And now others are picking up the talking point. Here’s National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez on its blog The Corner: It was Bill Clinton’s Tom Cruise moment, though Cruise sounded saner talking
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Luckovich’s Cheney devil cartoon
Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial cartoonist Mike Luckovich published this charming cartoon on Thursday: It’s a nasty, unfunny cliche, but the New York Times still decided to republish it in the “Laugh Lines” section of today’s Week in Review. (I didn’t laugh.) Will they run Rush Limbaugh’s “El Diablo” routine about Tom Daschle next?
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Jennifer Senor slams Lewis Lapham
New York magazine’s Jennifer Senor has written a devastating review of Lewis Lapham’s new book, a name-calling screed in which he engages in the popular post-9/11 tactic of comparing one’s opponents to the Taliban: Now, just in time for the midterm elections, the collected columns of two passionate Bush critics, Lewis H. Lapham and Sidney
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Man bites dog: TNR anti-counterintuitive
The New Republic and Slate have many talented writers, but they’re also responsible for taking the cult of the “counterintuitive” to dysfunctional extremes. That’s why I was shocked to see TNR’s Bradford Plumer slamming the latest everything-you-know-is-wrong piece from Slate: Yes, yes, people who live in glass houses and all that, but Slate‘s Jacob Weisberg
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Is Tony Snow responsible for Bush surge?
It’s unclear why President Bush’s approval ratings have risen, but the Washington Times offers a suggestion we can safely rule out — the masterful PR work of Tony Snow: Former talk show host Tony Snow took over as President Bush’s communications point man four months ago, beefing up the press office staff, honing internal operations
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Ken Mehlman’s verb choice
RNC chair Ken Mehlman has repeatedly suggested that Democrats don’t want to fight the war on terror since 9/11. So it’s quite a coincidence when he happened to use the verb “surrender” (rather than “renounce” or other synonyms) to describe Democrats’ desire to shut down various anti-terrorism measures in a Wall Street Journal op-ed yesterday
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Parsing World Magazine on Allen
Wonkette flags this passage from a World Magazine profile of George Allen: 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 in any language. But in northern Italy, where Allen’s mother