The wizards of modern brand management have nothing on the obstreperous group of warrior intellectuals known as the neoconservatives. After all, the neocon movement is closing in on its fifth decade (its precise date of origin, like Read More
As the bromides and bunkum of primary season lurch into caucus-eve overdrive in Iowa, the rest of the world has upstaged the election-addled news cycle. A new Osama bin Laden video, a Colombian hostage crisis and—most of all—the assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto have made weary onlookers newly aware that there will Read More
Gullible voters keen to treat the onset of the 2008 primary season as a hale sign of life in the American democratic system had best avert their gaze from Capitol Hill this week. For as Congress winds down the year’s business with earmark-laden appropriations bills and unsightly cave-ins to Bush prerogative after Bush prerogative, the Read More
You’d make coy campaign overtures to religious denominations that couldn’t officially endorse you. Point at the lurid God-baiting work of a liberal pop culture, a liberal media and a liberal university scene. Hotly Read More
For George W. Bush, “the speech was the thing,” writes Michael Gerson. “He used major speeches to push his own policy processes for new ideas; to clarify his thinking as Read More
The Democratic primary field seems to operate under a hidden dictum of reverse momentum, not unlike some new strain of antimatter: Anytime the battle for early advantage in the race tightens, the actual content of the struggle goes slack. The process seemed to veer dangerously toward a final decomposing event horizon with the recent report Read More
The fallout from last week’s Read More
Ever since George W. Bush’s narrow reelection in 2004, American evangelicals have bulked up in the country’s political imagination into a near-mystical source of wonder-working power, to quote the old Methodist hymn. And Read More
Toward the end of Fair Game, Valerie Plame Wilson recounts how, in the midst of the furor over Washington journalists Matt Cooper of Time and Judith Miller refusing to cooperate with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation into the White House-orchestrated leak of Wilson’s identity to the press, she and her husband ran into Cooper and Read More
It was like watching a mechanical rabbit spring onto the rail of a greyhound track: Over the weekend, the Des Moines Register reported the results of an October poll showing Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton pulling away from her two main competitors for the Hawkeye State’s January caucus vote. And the nation’s pundit corps rallied to Read More
It’s certainly no news to New Yorkers that former Mayor Rudy Giuliani has a taste for the theatrical. Long before the World Trade Center towers fell, the mayor had a penchant for making morbid cameos at accidents and crime scenes, usually just as 11 p.m. news crews arrived, as though Mr. Giuliani were both Commissioner Read More
With Monday cable coverage caroming back and forth from the resignation of US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to the plea agreement for disgraced NFL quarterback Michael Vick, viewers could be forgiven for thinking that a White House now run by one of the world’s more ineffectual Major League Baseball franchise owners could benefit from a Read More
It’s true that August is a bad time for a product launch, as Andy Card famously said of the American invasion of Iraq. But it’s an ideal time for a product dump—which is no doubt why Karl Rove waited until Congress had adjourned for August recess and elite media apparatchiks in metro D.C. had repaired Read More
All the conspicuous alarm over the first-ever YouTube presidential debate becoming terminally inane now seems quite overblown. Trivializing presidential runs is clearly still the specialty of the campaign press—which has devoted a week’s worth of coverage to taking one of the most substantive questions raised in the Charleston, S.C., Democratic forum and reducing it to Read More
