Uncategorized
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Bill Kristol: McCain responsible for surge
Bill Kristol — who backed McCain strongly in 1999-2000 — overplays his hand, claiming “no McCain, no surge”: One might add a special reason that conservatives — and the nation — owe John McCain at least a respectful hearing. Only a year ago, we were headed toward defeat in Iraq. Without McCain’s public advocacy and
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John McCain: Old
This is like a “yo mama” joke: John McCain is so old that his campaign had to take out a special life insurance policy on him to secure a loan from a bank last November.
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Another dynastic Obama endorsement
Following in Caroline Kennedy’s footsteps, Susan Eisenhower has endorsed Barack Obama in a Washington Post op-ed. Fascinating! Who’s going to find out what Tricia Nixon and Amy Carter think? Or maybe Harry Truman has a great-grandson who wants to share his views…
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New myths about Obama and Clinton
1. Barack Obama is the most liberal senator according to National Journal. However, the far more sophisticated ranking produced by Keith Poole and Jeff Lewis, which takes into account all the votes in a given Congress, places him as the tenth most liberal — see here, here, here, and here for more. (We wrote about
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The WSJ’s postmodern scare quotes
Wall Street Journal editorial page fans such as myself have come to love their use of scare quotes, which is as incoherent as their ideas about economics. Their two favorite subjects for scare quoting are, naturally, tax cuts and torture. As I wrote last year, drawing on the seminal work of TNR’s Jon Chait and
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The jargon of “Juan McCain”
A commenter on an old post of mine just referred to John McCain as “Juan McCain.” The nickname, a nasty reference to his previous support for comprehensive immigration reform, turns out be all over conservative message boards. (It’s the McCain equivalent of “Barack Osama/Barack Hussein Osama”, which is still circulating — it was just used
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David Rohde on Fresh Air
One of my faculty mentors at Duke, David Rohde, is interviewed on today’s edition of Fresh Air: Delegates, superdelegates, penalized states with half their delegates — or none. This year’s political primaries are putting renewed focus on the delegate system, but what does it all mean? Political scientist David Rohde joins us to unravel the
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Giuliani on formatting McCain adjectives
Rudy Giuliani forgets the old writer’s adage “show, don’t tell” in his McCain endorsement speech: He’s a man of honor and integrity, and you can underline both ‘honor’ and ‘integrity.’ Can I italicize them too? Maybe put them in bold?
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The search for Giuliani defeat narratives
In the same way that journalists attribute general election defeats to various quirks of the candidates rather than, say, the state of the economy (see Dole, Bob), there’s currently a rush to “explain” Rudy Giuliani’s collapse. The New York Times offers this litany: As Mr. Giuliani ponders his political mortality, many advisers and political observers
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Will liberals embrace dishonesty post-Bush?
It makes me sad to see Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein — two of the best young liberal pundits out there — soft-pedaling the dishonesty of Hillary Clinton’s recent attacks on Barack Obama. On January 14, Yglesias wrote that “the idea that Clinton would use dishonest political tactics to beat the GOP is, in my