Month: June 2008
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McCain waffles on GOP abortion plank
In a New York Review of Books essay on John McCain, Michael Tomasky points out something I missed — McCain is backing off his previous support for changing the GOP platform to allow legalized abortion in the case of rape, incest, or risk to the mother’s life. As Tomasky writes, “This is as extreme a
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Why Hillary 2008 is like George W. Bush 2000
On WashingtonPost.com, Chris Cillizza reports that the Clinton campaign is denying an AP story stating that Hillary will concede tonight. More importantly, though, notice how Cillizza describes her rationale for continuing: The Clinton campaign, in fact, released a statement insisting that the Associated Press story that fueled this maelstrom was not correct; “Senator Clinton will
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Clark Hoyt on the Luttwak op-ed
New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt, who has already outshone his ineffectual predecessor, devoted his entire column Sunday to debunking a controversial Edward Luttwak op-ed published in the Times several weeks ago (via Matthew Yglesias): ON May 12, The Times published an Op-Ed article by Edward N. Luttwak, a military historian, who argued that
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Impeaching Bush for being unpopular?
Brad DeLong, who frequently cites reasons he believes George W. Bush should be impeached on his weblog, has now called for Bush to be impeached because he is unpopular: For a president to be so unpopular that congressman who represent highly rural parts of the prarie would rather spend time with their families than go
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Scott McClellan: Late to the party
I don’t have much to say about Scott McClellan’s new book except to note the close similarities between the analysis of the selling of the war in Iraq in my favorite book on the subject and his description of it — in particular, the shared emphasis on (1) an elaborately planned PR campaign and (2)
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How to think like Maureen Dowd
On the May 25 edition of Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked Maureen Dowd about the contrast between a sharp exchange between Barack Obama and John McCain and a less cutting joke he told about Obama at a different event. Dowd’s answer, which again demonstrates her amazing ability to read minds, is revealing of the
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Protecting the Clinton brand at all costs
Todd Purdum’s long inquiry into the various questionable aspects of Bill Clinton’s post-presidency in Vanity Fair shows how wrong Hillary Clinton is to claim that she (unlike Barack Obama) had been “vetted.” But to me, the most outrageous part of the article is this response to Purdum from Clinton spokesman Jay Carson, who suggests Democrats