If McCain were black he would be running in the primary against Obama - the Republicans would not have him.

Posted at May 21, 2008 12:46 PM in response to Obama Does It!

It is hard for me to reconcile Clinton's former role in a union busting law firm and her long-time association with Mark Penn - a current member of one of the nation's biggest union busting firms - with a future for Clinton as labor's lion.

Maybe there is reason to think it will happen.... but I hope I am not too cynical in waiting to see it to believe it.

Posted at May 21, 2008 12:41 PM in response to What If Hillary Clinton Returns to the Senate as Labor's Voice?

I know we are not supposed to feed the trolls... but man, I needed the laugh this morning. Thanks!

Posted at May 19, 2008 12:08 PM in response to Poll: Obama Way Behind In Kentucky, Narrowly Ahead In Oregon

And surely the paternalism of Clinton supporters to continually deride those in a competing campaign who out-worked, out-planned, out-raised, and out-thought their campaign as Obamanoids and Kidz, among others, is the height of maturity.

I understand the temptation to declare that everyone who does not see things they way you do to be under the influence of some cult - how could any rational person ever decide that Obama is a candidate that better encompasses our hopes and dreams for this country?

This just needs to stop.

Posted at May 12, 2008 9:01 AM in response to Why is Hillary

How have they fought against it? I must have missed that... can you provide links/evidence to this?

Posted at March 19, 2008 1:24 PM in response to Even If Hillary Got Michigan Revote, It Probably Wouldn't Affect Overall Contest Much

I don't think he was going for a scientific explanation of why certain communities develop shared ideologies.... as a metaphor it is pretty damn effective.

Posted at March 18, 2008 11:16 AM in response to Full Text Of Obama's Big Race Speech: A Big Break With Political Precedent

If his point is we should not be worrying about the individual beliefs of the founders, then why spend two days on it in such a bizarre fashion that only serves to cast himself as a neutral observer by trying to equate his so-called 'myths'?

Oleeb above and here you are trying to re-write Waldman's posts to save him from what he actually wrote and you both may be right that his intent is to make a much better point than what he has actually produced over the past few days, but perhaps not.

I agree with you that sorting through the inner lives of the founders is a fools game and that getting caught up in minutiae is not the point here. But if our friends in the legal trade are taught not to debate the small points, they are surely advised to frame their arguments in such a way that they determine the outcome from the start.

Posted at March 12, 2008 3:03 PM in response to Militant Unitarians

I don't think Mr. Waldman is intending to either set up straw men or make an argument for equivalency between the two viewpoints."

I appreciate your post oleeb, and I agree with much of it until I get to this point. Waldman is a professional writer who seems to be very much in control of his words. As you show quite nicely, if he wanted to write that the misunderstandings on the left and right when it comes to the founders religion are of a completely different tenor, scope and significance, he could have done so.

The fact that he does so can not be accidental and is most likely an attempt to mollify conservatives who hate nothing more than the liberal bias of facts. If they hear that progressives got it equally wrong - reality be damned - they might listen a bit more.

Maybe his intentions are all for the good and he is really just using a lazy framing from his arguments that tends to prop up the right wing self-delusion that is common on the website he oversees. Heck, maybe that is the right thing to do for him in certain settings. Over here, I like facts and honest argumentation and this is not it.

Posted at March 12, 2008 12:24 PM in response to Militant Unitarians

Waldman sets the bar pretty low for himself in debunking the idea that anyone who thinks "all" the founders were Deists are mistaken. Of course this is true.

But the way he uses this idea to balance the position that conservatives who are trying to erect an American theocratic state misuse the founders is the definition of an inherently stupid centrism that has been the hallmark of recent journalistic framing.

Perhaps Waldman feels he has to bend over backward to accommodate segments of his audience at beliefnet that could not bear to hear that their tendentious reading of the founders is both wrong and inherently un-American and that by trying to gin up an equal criticism of the left makes them feel better. But all in all, nothing from what I have seen from the past few days makes me think that Waldman's efforts here are anything other than a journalist with a 'provocative' premise who wants to sell books.

Despite Boys's comments, this does not indicate that progressives can't talk about religion, but rather the degree to which elements of the Christian right have polluted our history to where facts don't seem to matter at all on this issue.

If we are looking for a serious and informed discussion of this topic it looks like we will have to go elsewhere.

Posted at March 12, 2008 12:15 PM in response to Militant Unitarians

Is false equivalency something they beat into everyone attending the nation's journalism schools or is it something those in the corporate media pick up along the way?

Waldman, predictably after yesterday's post, has tried to set up a situation were we can criticize both the left and the right and position himself as a neutral observer.

Strangely, as it always seems to happen, he somehow has missed the fact that those on the right who wish to claim that the founders of this country really would support their dream of an American theocracy are somehow equivalent to those who have overlooked the fact that the soft deists among that generation were not so absolute in their beliefs as not to use words like "God" and "Providence".

But my real question here to Andrew Golis is why are you sending a journalist to do a historian's job? Surely there are any number of historians who write about these topics and would be able to provide some insight into these issues without this kind of amateurish approach. I am sure many historians would do a horrible job editing major magazines, so why does Waldman think he can jump in and write history?

Posted at March 11, 2008 10:28 AM in response to Fallacy #2 The Founders Weren't Conservative Christians