Politics
-
Obama and Eisenhower (Updated)
I suspect that for most liberals, any real sense of progress has now been lost. Yes, the left got a good-but-not-great health care bill, a good-but-not-great stimulus package, a good-but-not-great financial reform plan: these are a formidable bounty, and Obama and the Democratic Congress worked hard for them. But they now read as a basically
-
Greenwald’s Anti-Gibbs Rant
The Left's Rodney Dangerfield's schtick is just plain tiresome. I agree with everything Greenwald says, but so what? As he quotes David Frum regarding Gibbs's comments in his Hill interview: "More proof of my longtime thesis, Repub pols fear the GOP base; Dem pols hate the Dem base." The problem isn't that Obama and company
-
The Historical Norm
I think that one of the key differences that distinguish Americans on the right from moderates and liberals lies in that the mentality of the right is closer to the way most people throughout history have thought. They think tribally, and they believe that it's either kill or be killed, that either you're with us
-
Will Dems Learn to Change the Game?
Krugman this morning has an interesting piece on the difference between getting results and being perceived to get results. The former matters to the electorate; the latter to the Beltway courtiers whose thinking is muddled because captured by what he calls the "pundit delusion." His point is that "winning the news cycle" is an insider's
-
At the Movies with Spencer Tracy
I love TCM. In the past week they’ve had some Spencer Tracy movies, and the two I watched were Judgment at Nurmeberg and Pat & Mike. There’s something about Tracy, a kind of magnetism that he has that has hardly anything to do with his lumpy looks. He’s a mensch. He’s the Walter Cronkite of
-
Quote of the Day: Chris Hayes
Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the selling of the Iraq War was its false pretext. It never really was about weapons of mass destruction, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted. WMDs were just "what everyone could agree on." So it is with deficits. Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don't really care about deficits; they care about
-
Eric Alterman & the Progressive Future
The American political system is nothing if not complicated and so too are the reasons for its myriad points of democratic dysfunction. Some are endemic to our constitutional regime and all but impossible to address save by the extremely cumbersome (and profoundly unlikely) prospect of amending the Constitution. Others are the result of a corrupt
-
Good and Bad Arguments
To argue with myself for a moment, this is one of the difficulties with analysis. Fairly few political commentators know enough to decide which research papers are methodologically convincing and which aren't. So we often end up touting the papers that sound right, and the papers that sound right are, unsurprisingly, the ones that accord
-
Quote of the Day: Robert Kuttner (Updated)
We in the progressive community have projected our own visions onto Barack Obama ever since we first noticed him as a remarkable political novice. It was clear from the 2008 campaign that he was a basically a centrist and seeker of common ground. But sometimes a crisis makes a presidency. And history has seldom delivered