Category Archives: Current Events

Daniel Larison on a central lie of the Romney campaign: The claim that Barack Obama doesn't love America and goes around apologizing for it. This is one of the slimier lines of attack that infect our national dialogue.

Five reasons why the Republican party will never nominate Chris Christie as President.

Paul Waldman on how Herman Cain is saying things about the Affordable Care Act that are absolutely, utterly untrue…and a large part of the voting population believes him.

Dr. Bob Crittenden discusses (i.e., eviscerates) the views of Dr. Ron Paul about how medicine worked in "the good old days."

Fred Kaplan asks the musical question, "What the hell is going on in Afghanistan?" My feeling is that if Fred doesn't know, no one does.

Leonard Pitts on Michele Bachmann and that vaccination stuff. I'm starting to think that Congresswoman Bachmann may do something good for our public discourse. She may prove that it is possible — unlikely but possible — to lose an election by saying things that are not true. I'm not saying everyone who wins an election is stupid or lying but there doesn't seem to be much penalty these days in the political marketplace for saying things that just plain don't check out.

I won't be buying The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin, the new book by Joe McGinniss about you-know-who and what a dreadful person she supposedly is. I have no idea how much of it is true and insofar as my purchasing goes, it wouldn't matter either way. No interest in it if it's accurate. No interest in it if it isn't.

The portrait of Palin as hypocrite, phony and shallow opportunist is not inconsistent with what I see when I look at and listen to the actual person…but that, of course, doesn't mean any given anecdote in the book that reflects that image is true. At best, it may mean that someone who's had contact with Palin claimed to McGinniss that it was true. I read a lot of things about myself that aren't true and there's a lot less money to be made or political yardage to be scored by lying about me than there is from lying about her.

Palin, I suspect, will exploit this book for all its worth, playing the victim card as she always does with her supporters. She's really good at extracting moral and financial support from a small group of loyalists by doing that. She's even convinced a lot of them that anytime she says something stupid or inaccurate, it's not her. It's those mean ol' biased reporters who tricked her into saying that.

Her popularity is plunging. I saw a figure the other day that something like 74% of voters don't want her to enter the presidential race and I thought, "Jeez, that's a campaign killer. I wonder what the percentage is like just among Republicans." Then I looked again and saw that was the number among Republicans. So my next thought was, "Well, that's probably one of those polls the Fox News crowd will claim is biased and rigged." Then I looked again and saw it was the Fox News Poll. You know: Fox News, the company that employs Sarah Palin.

I can't wait to see how she explains that one as Liberal Treachery. She'll probably wait a few months until the timeline has blurred in folks' minds and then claim her popularity took a hit because of the lies in that Joe McGinniss book.

Anyway, my sense of fairness tells me not to believe anything's so just because it's in this book…but I have to tell you something else about my sense of fairness. It sometimes feels like a chump these days because so many politicians and political operatives either don't have a sense of fairness or don't let one stop them from repeating any story, true or not, that can be of use to them. If it harms your enemies these days, it's true enough to use. Sarah Palin, her supporters and most of the folks at Fox News wouldn't hesitate to endorse every word of a nasty, inaccurate book trashing Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. I was pleased to see Keith Olbermann saying he doesn't believe a lot of the McGinniss book about Sarah Palin. That kind of unwillingness to use every available bludgeon against your opponents is rare in the political marketplace these days. Too rare.

Dahlia Lithwick discusses the death penalty, especially in Texas. I'm linking to this partly because I think this is a good piece on a serious subject and partly because I want to quote this line from it…

Republicans like Rick Perry are skeptical of everything the government does — except when it executes people.

Yeah, and we're also apparently infallible when it comes to bombing villages overseas.

Paul Begala defends the whole concept of the U.S. government. I'm with him on this.

Tom Junod thinks Jon Stewart is slipping, at least in part because current events don't give him as much to work with as they once did. I disagree…but I think much of Junod's profile is worth a look.

Once again, Pat Robertson has said something stupid and perhaps hypocritical…or did he? William Saletan discusses the latest Robertsonism and makes me think Ol' Pat may not have been off-base on this one. It may be that Robertson has been off-base on so many things that we naturally infer the stupidest possible interpretation of his more controversial remarks.

Michele Bachmann's campaign is not being sunk by her stupid comments about the HPV vaccination. That woman was making remarks just as dumb and uninformed when she was going up in the polls. Her campaign is being sunk because Tea Party voters have someone who offers the same kind of malarkey and looks (to them) like he has a chance to get elected.

Yet another reason people like Michele Bachmann are dangerous.

Jacob Weisberg on the Republican opposition to Barack Obama's proposed stimulus package. Which ones are opposing it because they don't believe it will create jobs and which ones are opposing it because they're afraid it will?

Remember when Michael Moore won the Oscar and made that speech that ticked off so many people? In this excerpt from his new book, he discusses the reaction, the death threats and all sorts of other fun results from his acceptance remarks.