The Carpetbagger Report

Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers: * Former Sen. Fred Thompson’s staffing trouble got worse yesterday when his lead political advance operative resigned unexpectedly. The staffer, Sam LeBlond, who is George W. Bush’s nephew, joined Thompson’s campaign committee less […]

For months, media figures — some conservative, some not — have criticized Democratic presidential candidates for balking at a scheduled debate hosted and sponsored by Fox News. The Dems’ reasoning is fairly obvious — there’s no point in legitimizing a partisan news outlet — but they’ve been blasted anyway. Some have suggested they’re cowardly, others […]

I noticed this morning that Oliver Willis wrote that “National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez has a Rick Santorum moment and says the reason a bestiality case happened in Massachusetts is because of gay marriage.” I thought he was kidding. He wasn’t — The Corner had this post, under a headline that read, “Slippery Slope?” Just […]

As I noted a couple of weeks ago, the story of Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan has gone from being tragic to suspicious to scandalous. To quickly recap, Tillman, a former NFL star who retired from football to become an Army Ranger, was killed in Afghanistan in 2004 and his death was quickly seized upon […]

Considering CNN’s Glenn Beck’s record of lunacy, I more or less assumed he was no longer able to surprise me. I stand corrected. Cable news viewers can be forgiven if, like us, they happened to turn on Glenn Beck’s show on CNN Headline News Wednesday night and were surprised to see a spokesman for the […]

Today’s edition of quick hits. * The Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama quarrel is still going strong in its fourth day, with Obama goings so far today as to suggest that Clinton may be “Bush-Cheney Lite.” Clinton responded, “You know, I have been called a lot of things in my life, but I have never been called […]

When it comes to Alberto Gonzales’ precarious future, it’s important to remember that we’re not just dealing with one lie, we’re dealing with several. He lied about DoJ divisions over domestic surveillance. He lied about coaching witnesses before congressional testimony. He lied about violations of the Patriot Act. In each instance, he lied in sworn […]

When history looks back at the disgrace of the Bush presidency, the one celebrated quote that will help capture much of what went wrong will be John DiIulio’s. It was DiIulio, the first director of the president’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who told Ron Suskind, “What you’ve got is everything — […]

If you read conservative blogs, you’ve probably heard quite a bit about “Scott Thomas,” a pseudonym a U.S. soldier in Iraq has used while writing a series of pieces about the war for The New Republic. The controversy that erupted over the last couple of weeks has been startling. For those of you who don’t […]

I hear the occasional grumbling that congressional Dems aren’t aggressive enough. They don’t fight the White House as hard as the White House fights them. They’re too quick to back down in the face of the Bush gang’s obstinacy. I don’t think anyone’s saying that this week. Around the same time four Senate Dems were […]