Month: February 2007
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Accusing D’Souza of treason
Andrew Sullivan, who warned that “[t]he decadent Left … may well mount what amounts to a fifth column” after 9/11, approvingly quotes Bruce Bawer in The Stranger calling Dinesh D’Souza’s new book treasonous: For those who cherish freedom, 9/11 was intensely clarifying. Presumably it, and its aftermath, have been just as clarifying for D’Souza, whose
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The strange Libby defense
Scooter Libby’s defense strategy is, um, unusual: Lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr. opened their case Monday with a parade of prominent Washington reporters who testified that Mr. Libby never mentioned the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency operative when they interviewed him during the period the officer’s identity was leaked to the news media.
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NYT says VP has “awesome authority”
Before it was known Vice President Cheney wouldn’t testify in the Scooter Libby trial, the New York Times made a bizarre reference to “the awesome authority of his office”: If he testifies, Mr. Cheney will bring to the jurors the awesome authority of his office and could attest to Mr. Libby’s character as policy adviser
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Frontline’s “News War” series
Tonight PBS will be airing the first of a four-part series on the state of the news media titled “Newswar” — here’s the New York Times review: It’s fair to say that the relationship between the press and the Bush White House has often been one of mutual suspicion and sometimes outright hostility. And the
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The barbarity of prison rape
If you asked me what issue Americans will see in retrospect as the greatest unacknowledged barbarity of our time, I would nominate prison rape, which is not only tolerated but frequently encouraged within our prisons and is still the subject of jokes in popular culture and politics. Ezra Klein has more here, here, and here.
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Eric Alterman’s David Duke reference
Eric Alterman opened his Media Matters column with this passage, which takes a cheap shot at Time magazine: William E. Odom, a retired Army lieutenant general, was head of Army intelligence and director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan, has the best short explanation of where we stand in Iraq today, read it
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Joe Lieberman is a cheeseball
I don’t know what’s more embarrassing about this passage from Jeffrey Goldberg’s New Yorker article — the fact that Goldberg and Lieberman independently paid to see Behind Enemy Lines or the fact that Lieberman actually cheers during crappy Hollywood blockbusters: Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was in a movie
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White House press challenges Snow
Chris Mooney and Brad DeLong report that the White House press corps is finally challenging Tony Snow aggressively on the administration’s dissembling about global warming and the revenue effects of tax cuts, respectively. It’s amazing what a 33% approval rating will do for their backbone. (Compare and contrast, for instance, to all the cases documented
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William Kristol smears Barack Obama
Isaac Chotiner flags a disturbing statement by William Kristol from Fox News Sunday in which he suggests that Barack Obama would have backed Stephen Douglas over Abraham Lincoln: We’re electing a war president in 2008. If I can go back to Obama and Lincoln for just one second, Lincoln’s “house divided” speech in 1858 was
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Conservatives question the Reagan myth
The near-godlike status of Ronald Reagan among conservatives is