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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
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WSJ correct on waterboarding
A week ago, I questioned a Wall Street Journal editorial claim that “Last year ABC News reported that 11 top al Qaeda figures broke only after ‘waterboarding,’ which induces a feeling of suffocation and is the most controversial of the known techniques employed.” I cited a Media Matters report stating that no such ABC News
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Making up a new Brendan
I went through a number of flame wars at Spinsanity, but two aspects of the TAP controversy have been especially interesting: 1. The invention of a fictitious Brendan. Atrios and a number of readers have created a bizarre caricature of me as some sort of aspiring David Broder who kowtows to the center and constantly
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USA Today hypes gas price-approval link
A USA Today article yesterday made some exaggerated claims about the effect of gasoline prices on President Bush’s approval ratings: When it comes to President Bush’s approval rating — the number that measures his political health — one factor seems more powerful than any Oval Office address or legislative initiative. It’s the price of a
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Bush dissembles on taxes and revenue
Reuters reports that President Bush claimed Democrats will raise taxes if they take control of the House: President George W. Bush charged on Thursday that Democrats would raise taxes if put in control of the U.S. Congress, turning to a familiar campaign theme as he seeks to stave off Republican losses in November. “If they