On Friday, I mentioned that The New Republic was profiling two articles about Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, one which concluded Dean would lose to Bush miserably, the other which said the opposite. I’ve gone over Jonathan’s Chait’s piece on the anti-Dean approach, so today I wanted to mention Jonathan Cohn’s opposite conclusion. Cohn and Chait […]
In the ongoing debate over school vouchers, I frequently hear use of the word “experiment.” We should try, voucher advocates argue, voucher “experiments” to see if they work. The Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne, whom I generally like, had a column about vouchers on Friday that suggested that somehow there was a “middle ground” between […]
Be sure to take a look at yesterday’s Doonesbury on Trudeau’s take on one of my favorite topics: the Fox News Channel. I don’t like to give away the ending, but I love the spin on the network’s former motto: We Decide, You Concur.
The vice president is a firm believer in the idea that the best defense is a strong offense. With this in mind, Dick Cheney went to a friendly audience, a gathering at a conservative think tank called the American Enterprise Institute where his wife is a “scholar in residence,” to give the nation an update […]
The White House isn’t in the best of positions right now. You know things are bad when economic growth is weak, unemployment is at its highest level in years, the trade deficit is at all-time highs, the budget deficit is at a record $455 billion — and Bush is so anxious to stop talking about […]
I’ll admit it: I have no idea what makes political reporters jump on a story. Occasionally what appears like a scandal-in-the-waiting will pop up and I’ll expect journalists hungry for a Pulitzer (or hoping to be the next Woodward & Bernstein) to pounce on it. Then, much to my chagrin, nothing happens. Niger-gate seemed to […]
I distinctly remember the Democratic Party’s attitude — at both the leadership and grassroots level — in advance of the 1992 presidential election. At the time, the party faithful wanted, more than anything else, to find a “winner.” We had suffered too many embarrassing defeats to look at the ’92 field and think about ideology; […]
I saw on ABC News’ The Note that Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Ten Kennedy (D-Mass.) held a pretty important press conference on Capitol Hill yesterday about the Bush administration’s claims regarding the Iraqi threat before the war. Levin and Kennedy released a copy, The Note explained, of “the formal report that President Bush sent […]
The incessant efforts of the Bush White House to connect Iraq and Al Queda have been suspect since the accusations first started flying. Now, however, the joint congressional inquiry into terrorist attacks of 9/11 will reveal, according to a UPI report, that the administration had “no evidence” of Iraq’s involvement with 9/11 and that there […]
It now seems clear that “two senior administration officials” did, indeed, identify undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame to newspaper columnist Robert Novak. The question now turns to figuring out which two senior administration officials are responsible. As I mentioned yesterday, there’s little doubt as to why Plame was identified. The administration was doing its best […]