A few years ago, I wrote an extended piece bearing the title The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?. Recently, in response to a couple of engaging (relatively) meas culpas—Matthew Continetti’s The Right The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism and Tim Miller’s Why We Did It—I began preparing an update. I originally planned to…
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Misinformation at the Washington Post, Jonathan Capehart edition
Misinformation courtesy of the Washington Post? It does happen! Just last year I fact checked Fact Checker Glenn Kessler for his mis/disinformation regarding the godawful Donald Trump/Paul Ryan/Mitch McConnell tax bill rammed through Congress back in 2017, and now I’m on the trail of WashPost columnist Jonathan Capehart for his seriously uncritical take on Al…
Okay, I guess that 1996 Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform bill wasn’t perfect after all
In the unlikely event that you are an assiduous reader of this blog, you know that I’m a big fan of the 1996 welfare reform legislation that drastically reduced welfare dependency in the U.S.—and welfare dependency really is a thing—or it really was—regardless of what “passionate” liberals want you to think.1 But, as it turns…
CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally.
OCTOBER 6, 2022 UPDATE: In the course of this report—somewhere in the middle—I discuss crime data from the FBI. I should have pointed out that these data are estimates rather than complete tallies. We don’t know, for example, that there were 10,440 homicides in the U.S. in 2020, although the FBI says we do. I…
Is Charlie Sykes the new Dick Morris?
Well, I hope so, and I hope Joe Biden or his “people” will take the hint, if not from Charlie himself then the myriad of excellent sources Charlie collects in his recent piece for “The Bulwark”, Joe Biden Needs Four Sister Souljah Moments, explaining why Joe needs to “get tough” with the Democratic Party’s newly…
Please, Mr. Beinart, try harder
Over at the New York Times, Peter Beinart has a column, “Why Are There So Few Courageous Senators?”, which takes as its text—well, in its first half, anyway—John F. Kennedy’s “famous” book, Profiles in Courage, citing two profiles, “two legendary Southerners, Thomas Hart Benton and Sam Houston, who a century earlier had become pariahs for…
Some “conservatives” are whistling past the graveyard of American democracy; others are busy swinging a shovel
I like to keep track of what the “responsible right”, as I like to call them, is up to, a task that I perform by rounding up the usual suspects—Ross Douthat, Jay Nordlinger, Kevin Williamson, Ramesh Ponnuru, David French, and Jonah Goldberg, among others—finding most of them at either the National Review or the American…
Mike does Stuart: Michael Grunwald holds Stuart Stevens’ turncoat Republican feet to the fire, with interesting results
In a recent—well, “tirade” is probably too strong a word, but “riff” is a bit cute—in a recent post on “conscience Republican” Ross Douthat’s semi-snarky take on Republican with a different conscience Stuart Stevens’ mea culpa It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, I noted that Stu, unintentionally, I’m sure,…
Of course we’re in denial! We’re REPUBLICANS!
Over at the anti-Trumpy Dispatch, Christian Schneider explains why even anti-Trump conservatives like himself would be cawazzy to wish for Republicans to lose the Senate as well as the presidency in 2020: “Why Are Some Conservatives Rooting for the GOP to Lose the Senate? Yes, many Republican politicians have behaved badly. But a Biden presidency…
The Republicans: WTF Happened to this Party?
We’re in such a mess these days, one can either bemoan that mess, or wonder how we got here. I feel a little helpless to be just bemoaning, and, as the situation changes from day to day, one is compelled to constantly update one’s bemoans, which in retrospect can begin to sound both repetitive and…