Donald Trump was right. Health care is complicated. How complicated, even I didn’t know until, by some coincidence, I started reading Steven Brill’s extensively titled though well worth reading America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System just as House Speaker Paul “Lyin’ Paulie Ryan” Ryan began…
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Why Did Hillary “Lose”?
The most important, and the ugliest, thing to happen in 2016 was the decision of 46 percent of the American electorate to vote for the worst major party presidential candidate in American history. The second most important was the decision of 48 percent to vote for Hillary Clinton. So why did Hillary “lose”? It is…
Did Obama “Create” Trump? No. Did he make his election possible? Sort of.
President Obama did not create the candidacy of Donald Trump. “Responsible” Republicans like Ross Douthat have been pushing that banal meme since the Donald first reared his ugly head back in the primaries, a falsehood that received a proper beat down from Slate’s William Saletan at the time. As Bill put it, “Obama is an…
The Republican Party: Civil War or Hostile Takeover?
Over at New York Mag, Jonathan Chait has an unfortunately challenging and well-argued piece, strongly suggesting that my cozy analysis of a Republican Party sliding inexorably into ever-increasing disarray is not, you know, accurate.1 Chait sees Trump, or, rather, Trumpism, as similar to one of those Alien critters that first infects you and then sort…
Dying Elephant, Struggling Donkey: Politics for the 21st Century
As of this writing, the odds favoring Hillary Clinton’s election stand at 92%, almost enough to allow me to breathe easily. I wish it were higher, but just think how I’d feel if it were only, say, 75%! Yes, Donald Trump’s big mouth, and his tiny, groping hands, have made life much easier for Nervous…
John Podhoretz, half right on Trump—okay, make that a quarter
Over at Commentary, definitely not one of my fave rave’s, Editor John Podhoretz has “A New Theory of Trump”, taking another crack at explaining the Donald. Podhoretz’s argument is stated rather elliptically—or perhaps obliquely—but what he’s getting at, basically, is that George W. Bush got a lot of things wrong, but Republicans were so obsessed…
Good Court, Bad Court
The U.S. Supreme Court decided, rightly, in my opinion, that the statutory construction given the Affordable Care Act by the Obama Administration is consistent with the overall intent, if not the letter, of the act. The Court also decided, wrongly, in my opinion, that homosexuals have a constitutional right to marry. Both decisions were quite…
Ross versus Ezra: No way! Your crazies are way crazier than our crazies!
Ross Douthat picks a fight with Ezra Klein over whether Obama Derangement Syndrome is more intense than Bush Derangement Syndrome.Klein links BDS to 9/11, but struggles to find comparable causality for ODS: “Bush Derangement Syndrome sought extraordinary explanations for extraordinary events; Obama Derangement Syndrome seeks extraordinary explanations for an ordinary presidency.” Sniffs Ross, “This … does…
No, Chris Christie will not solve the Republican Party’s problems
It’s amusing to see so many establishment conservatives, and establishment liberals, rushing to embrace Chris Christie for “showing Republicans how to win.” In a post written just before the election, Ramesh Ponnuru said that “Christie has also avoided taking unpopular socially conservative stands on issues that aren’t live debates, and taken the occasional opportunity to…
Ross Douthat’s false equivalencies
Ross Douthat isn’t always wrong. It’s just that I only write about him when he is. Or, more precisely, when he’s being deceitful. In a recent post, Ross tries to argue that, just because Republicans are trying to reduce the number of black voters (which, Ross admits uncomfortably, they are), that isn’t so bad, because…