david brooks has an assigned role as well: to be a charming face for right-wing stupidity.

every so often, though, he forgets to apply the charm, and his underlying dishonesty comes through.

why it is that the ny times thinks that opinion columnists shouldn't be fact-checked is beyond me, but it's part of why the pundit as we know him or her is a dying breed....

Posted at July 6, 2007 7:46 AM in response to Letter to a Neighbor

the utter inability of the liberal hawks to understand is not, in any significant way, different from the utter inability of the bush administration to understand.

which is why slate is no longer worth reading.

Posted at January 4, 2007 7:22 AM in response to Lunacy, Not Blunders

i don't deny for a moment that bush is still a powerful figure in many respects: that's how the american system is designed.

but i am tired of reading observers as sharp as steve write pieces that essentially assume that just because delay ran a parliamentary system for a few years, we now have parliamentary style parties.

it has never been true that the opposition party in the absence of a presidential candidate can itself forcefully articulate an opposition policy; the most that can happen is that individuals in the opposition party can do the spadework to prepare for the moment when there is a presidential candidate.

the test, in short, of the continuing power of the right wing and/or the dems ability to do something about it will not be whether the dems can somehow collectively come up with an alternative policy: it will be the presidential election of 2008.

and i think when we look ahead to that election, i'd rather be the dem candidate than the gop candidate.

now, will individual dems do enough spadework to marginalize right-wing opinion as we know it today? that's a fair question to which i don't begin to have an answer. but since republicans are asking it themselves (not all republicans, after all, are jumping up and down with joy at the escalation in iraq), i think we have some indication.

republicans weren't asking questions about supporting bush for fear of being marginalized in 2003, after all....

Posted at December 28, 2006 7:39 AM in response to End of the Bush Era? Political Blinders on the Left

there are very few conservatives in the republican party: there are loads of crazy right-wingers. it's not that conservatism has failed: it's that crazy right-wingers are unfit to govern anything.

it's up to the honest conservatives left in the republican party to retake their party. it's up to the dems to lambaste the crazy right-wingers.

it's up to the new republic to fold.

Posted at October 2, 2006 3:09 PM in response to Demonizing Conservatism

long ago and far away, when 60 minutes served as the forum in which clinton's womanizing was addressed in 1992, i came away impressed with what turned out to be an incredibly significant aspect of clinton's personality: unlike mcgovern, or carter, or mondale, or dukakis, he had iron in his belly. he was not afraid.

i've often wondered whether, had clinton not needed his heart bypass in 2004, his active support for kerry might not have made a difference.

regardless, in this shameful week for american politics, where torture is now being legitimated, the best news i've seen is that clinton wants to get into it. he was great on npr on thursday a.m. for instance on torture, and he was great to wallace. i'm inclined to agree with BettyCrow that the phoniness of the path to 9/11 may well have been the straw, but whatever it was (hell, it could be ambition for hillary for all i know), it's good to see him out there.

An aggressively involved clinton over the next 6 weeks could make a major difference....

Posted at September 24, 2006 6:33 PM in response to Facing the Bullies in their Pulpits

to clarify, i do believe the dems should try as hard as possible (and, frankly, harder than they have been trying with their semi-stallball approach) to win. As cynical as Rove has made me, i want to play to win.

but i fear that winning may be quite hollow, and if a gop low-road onslaught means that we end up with a 218-217 gop house and a 50-50 senate broken by cheney, the bush administration will still be hemmed in quite a bit, and i'm not going to set myself up to believe that the world ends if the dems don't win at least a house in 2006.

the world does end if the dems can't sweep everything in 2008.

Posted at September 12, 2006 1:51 PM in response to The Last Refuge

i suppose this is my chance to note, yet again, that as satisfying as it would be to investigate the hell out of the bastards, and as useful as it would be to end the days of the rubber-stamp republican congress, so many chickens are going to come home to roost in the next 2.5 years that i believe the ultimate beneficiary of a dem victory in one or both houses of congress is st. john mccain, who will run as a reformer to clean up the bush/democratic mess in washington....

i want to sweep it all in 2008, not win a partial victory in 2006.

Posted at September 12, 2006 11:18 AM in response to The Last Refuge

Gettysburg, would it were true that it doesn't matter what the chief architects of the bush edifice of disaster think: how many troops does anyone else have?

as for olbermann, it's always worth remembering that he's a baseball guy through and through, an excellent grounding for his present work!

Posted at August 30, 2006 8:31 PM in response to Olberman Our New Murrow

golambek, we basically agree, but wrt to bush's polling numbers: if you put aside the one outlier (the AP-Ipsos) poll, the range for bush prior to the London plot announcement was 36 - 39. the range after the plot is 36-42, and i'm not ruling out the 42 as an outlier either.

the approval/disapproval gap was in the -17 to -22 range before, -12 to -21 after.

i don't see that as indicative of anything other than that bush can sometimes convince some wavering republicans that he's all right, and sometimes he can't.

that said, i agree: the dems cannot be chickenshit about iran.

Posted at August 30, 2006 11:50 AM in response to Bush's Miserable Vacation

golambek, if all this sort of stuff was "helping" bush, then we'd see it in the polls, and we'd see it in the behavior of republican candidates in 2006.

and we don't.

Posted at August 30, 2006 9:17 AM in response to Bush's Miserable Vacation