Conservatives & Republicans

Grasping for straws in the early going of the vote tallying for Monday night’s Iowa caucuses, CNN correspondent Brian Todd exclaimed to viewers about the seemingly simple sorting and counting of votes at one Republican caucus site that he hyped as being beamed “live on international television.”

In his return to CBS since retiring from hosting Face the Nation at the end of May 2015, Bob Schieffer chimed in on the 2016 election during Monday’s CBS Evening News and trashed the “nasty, illogical” election as similar to a dysfunctional wedding that’s “half-way through the weird uncle's long, unfunny and embarrassing rehearsal dinner toast.”

On Monday, CNN's New Day put ABC and NBC's morning newscasts to shame by actually raising the ongoing e-mail scandal during their interview of Hillary Clinton. Alisyn Camerota pointed out "the issue that has bedeviled your campaign," and noted that "your opponents have said that this is...a big deal." She asked, "How do you convince voters today not to be concerned about this?" When Mrs Clinton…

The kids in The Family Circus blame their misbehavior on gremlins with names like Ida Know and Not Me. The Week’s Damon Linker believes grown-up conservatives do something similar when they deny what Linker sees as the plain truth: that they run the Republican party. In a Tuesday column, Linker contended that the right-wing “counter-establishment” that first gained a share of power in 1981 now “…

All three cable networks had extensive coverage on Sunday night for the eve of the 2016 Iowa caucuses and with Hardball host Chris Matthews among the cast of characters on MSNBC, there was no shortage of notable comments ranging Matthews admitting that he has “butterflies out there in the locker room” ahead of the vote to gushing that he “like[s] Hillary personally and politically.”

On Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher, GOP presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were both on the receiving end of HBO comedian Bill Maher's latest anti-conservative vitriol as he called Cruz a "creep" and a "practiced liar" while comparing Rubio's religious beliefs to those of the terrorist group ISIS.

A Sunday morning report by Associated Press political writer John O'Connor acts as if the the sordid history of fiscal irresponsibility in the State of Illinois is a new development brought on by a stubborn Republican governor in just the past seven months. What hogwash. The state has had a large backlog of delinquent unpaid bills for a decade, if not longer. Five years ago, a Democratic…

On the Iowa caucus eve edition of ABC’s World News Tonight, Republican campaign correspondent Tom Llamas had another lead story that focused heavily on frontrunner Donald Trump, but also featured a bizarre question to Republican Senator Ted Cruz (Tex.) as he was leaving an Iowa church about praying for his opponents like Donald Trump and fellow Senator Marco Rubio (Fl.).

On a special hour-long Sunday edition of CNN’s Inside Politics, panelist and National Journal writer Ron Fournier resumed his strong disdain for Republican frontrunner Donald Trump by lambasting him as having “bigoted” and “sexist rhetoric” for a man who makes “irresponsible comments” which exhibit “his shallowness on policy.”

Once upon a time, Martin Longman didn’t think Republicans were so bad, but that was before the Tea Party, before the Iraq war, before Fox News became a major force. The Washington Monthly blogger detailed his decades of disillusionment in a Tuesday post. According to Longman, events which eroded his belief that Republicans were “decent people” included the “excesses of the Gingrich Revolution”;…

Amid all the sound and fury over the Trump/Fox showdown, an interesting side bar to the story developed.  On a Breitbart radio show, I heard one caller, a Trump or Cruz supporter (I forget which) began by saying that he no longer watched Fox News or Fox Business either. The gist of his call was that he believed they were no longer conservative. Interestingly, the Breitbart caller was saying…

E.J. Dionne, the liberal Washington Post columnist, and Garry Wills, the author, scholar, and ex-conservative, disagree on whether the “hard right” has more or less permanent control of the Republican party. Dionne believes that so-called reform conservatives such as Ross Douthat, Ramesh Ponnuru, and David Frum might, in Wills’ words, “ride to the rescue.” On the other hand, Wills, assessing…

Appearing as a guest on Friday's Morning Joe on MSNBC, former ABC This Week co-host Cokie Roberts -- currently a political commentator with the network -- made an unusually blunt slam against opponents of amnesty for illegal immigrants as she suggested that conservatives who opposed the left-leaning George W. Bush plan were not among those who "had a brain." She also provocatively warned that the…

After devoting nearly ten minutes of air time to Donald Trump’s boycott of the Republican debate on Thursday’s evening newscasts (rather than preview the debate itself), on Friday morning, the three broadcast networks offered over 21 minutes of political coverage continuing to hype Trump’s absence while only managing 7 minutes for the GOP contenders who participated in the event.