Uncategorized
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The Paul Begala myth
James Taranto of Opinion Journal’s Best of the Web Today is the latest figure to tout the myth that Paul Begala accused Republicans of wanting to kill him. But as August J. Pollak showed, while Begala did switch between using the imprecise pronoun “they” to refer to Republicans and using it to refer to terrorists,
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Manuel Miranda peddles the moral issues myth
Manuel Miranda, a conservative legal activist who was forced to resign from his position in the Senate after improperly accessing Democratic staff memos, repeats the myth that “moral issues” voters were the key factor in 2004: Then came 2003 and 2004, and another 10 judicial filibusters. Last November, Republican Senate candidates swept the South, ousted
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Richard Posner vs. Richard Posner
First Alan Sokal, now Richard Posner? A few years ago, the judge — a prolific writer — published a book criticizing so-called “public intellectuals” for pontificating about issues outside their areas of expertise. Several reviewers pointed out that the poorly constructed book itself seemed to illustrate the problems that Posner purported to diagnose. But it
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What is Brendan Miniter talking about?
Giving Brendans everywhere a bad name, OpinionJournal.com’s Brendan Miniter takes us to the land of conservative postmodernism: One trap Ms. [Maxine] Waters, Mr. Kerry and quite a few Democrats fell into was the idea that the war in Iraq was somehow separate from the war on terror. The American people never really believed that, as
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Is Bill Frist like Steve Forbes?
Jason Reifler, one of my colleagues at Duke (and an assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago in the fall), offers a telling analogy for who most resembles Bill Frist among past presidential contenders: I think you missed the real reason behind Frists’s change of heart on stem cells. It’s not a break in his pandering
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The Hotline on Frist and Hillary
Here’s a nice point from yesterday’s edition of The Hotline, the subscription-only insider political newsletter, about Bill Frist and Hillary Clinton making gestures toward the center in the period before the 2008 primaries (though I think that Hillary hasn’t actually moved very far). They’re right that Frist is taking a much greater risk — he
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Harry Reid asserts a John Bolton coverup
In an interview that was quoted by the Washington Post, Senator Harry Reid claims that the administration’s refusal to turn over classified documents on John Bolton requested by Democrats prove that “[t]here must be something he’s trying to hide”: BuzzFlash: Reading between the lines, we speculate that the Democrats in the Senate know of a
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Why John McCain won’t win the GOP nomination in 2008
As I’ve argued before, there’s no way John McCain is going to win the Republican nomination in 2008. Establishment conservatives dislike him too much. Grover Norquist, the influential head of Americans for Tax Reform, called McCain a “gun-grabbing, tax-increasing Bolshevik.” And in a recent profile of Norquist in The New Yorker, David Keene, the president
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Grover Norquist’s Communist obsession
Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, has a disturbing obsession with Communist metaphors and tactics. According to David Brock, Norquist keeps a portrait of Lenin and frequently quotes Lenin’s saying “Probe with bayonets, looking for weaknesses.” And in a New Yorker profile this week, Norquist compares his efforts to take over the
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The Americans for Tax Reform pledge protects special interests
John Cassidy’s New Yorker story on Grover Norquist includes the text of the Americans for Tax Reform pledge, which I had never seen before: I ,____________, pledge to the taxpayers of the _____ district of the State of _________ and to the American People that I will: ONE, oppose any and all efforts to increase