Brendan Nyhan

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  • New Iraq doc: No End in Sight

    James Fallows, who wrote Blind Into Baghdad, is recommending No End In Sight, a new documentary on the war in Iraq: Next week Charles Ferguson’s documentary No End in Sight opens in DC and New York, followed in August by “select other cities.” It is worth making time to see this film. …My deeper bias

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  • Decline of civilization watch: Robin Givhan

    Yes, Robin Givhan wrote an entire Washington Post article on Hillary Clinton’s cleavage.

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  • The Pentagon smears Hillary

    In the latest post-9/11 attack on dissent, a Pentagon undersecretary has accused Hillary Clinton of reinforcing enemy propaganda for requesting information about US plans for eventual withdrawal from Iraq. Here’s the AP account (see also the letter itself): The Pentagon told Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton that her questions about how the U.S. plans

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  • Why Bush will drag down the GOP

    Ron Brownstein provides the most convincing argument I’ve seen for why Bush is likely to devastate the GOP’s fortunes in 2008: when a departing president has been as unpopular as Bush is now, his party has usually lost the White House in the next election. There’s no guarantee that history will repeat itself. But the

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  • Susan Collins: Best no comment ever

    Dana Milbank captures a classic no-comment by Susan Collins on the plight of her colleague David Vitter: Though they ultimately rewarded his contrition with a standing ovation, some colleagues weren’t sure they liked the smell of things, either. “I don’t have any thoughts,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said of Vitter as she arrived. She reconsidered.

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  • Conference blog hiatus

    I’m currently attending the summer meeting of the Society for Political Methodology in lovely State College, PA so blogging may be light through Sunday…

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  • Yglesias: Bush “wants” sick kids to die

    I’m sick of pundits flippantly accusing their opponents of wanting some potential bad outcome that could result from a policy position, as Matthew Yglesias does in this post (and yes, I recognize that it’s supposed to be funny or ironic): George Bush Wants Kids to Get Sick and Die Just kidding. He’d like kids to

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  • John McCain’s glamorous (losing) campaign

    Predictably, the wheels are falling off of John McCain’s campaign (Intrade currently puts his probability of winning the GOP nomination at 4.3%), but at least he’s going out in style: In April, McCainiacs gathered at the Tabú Ultra Lounge in the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. His finance reports say that he paid the club

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  • Return of the Obama inexperience meme

    The meme that Barack Obama is inexperienced has come back with a vengeance. Writing in The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch asserted recently that Obama “has a record of inexperience no other serious contender could match”: Consider a candidate like Barack Obama, who—well, there is no candidate like Barack Obama, who entered the race with a record

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  • Bush’s misleading Al Qaeda/Iraq rhetoric

    Slowly, press outlets are starting to push back against President Bush’s frequent misleading references to Al Qaeda as the enemy in Iraq. The critical coverage began with McClatchy reporter Jonathan Landay, who wrote this on June 28: Facing eroding support for his Iraq policy, even among Republicans, President Bush on Thursday called al Qaida “the

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