Culture/Society

One of the latest in a seemingly endless stream of missives from the perpetually aggrieved comes from Ruth Graham at the Politico, which seems to have become an especially fertile repository for such ridiculous items. Mr. Graham is completely unimpressed that Obama administration Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has announced that the image of a famous woman to be named later will soon grace the $10…

Several years ago, an episode of The Simpsons featured a Fox News helicopter emblazoned with a fictional slogan for the channel: “Not Racist, But #1 With Racists.” Washington Monthly blogger Ed Kilgore seems to think that those words fit the modern Republican party. Kilgore acknowledged in a Wednesday post that “if you go back far enough the Democratic and Republican parties were very different…

Vox's David Roberts, who describes himself at his "drvox" Twitter page as a "Seattleite transplanted from Tennessee," clearly does not have a lot of love for his region of origin. Tuesday afternoon, in the wake of Dylann Roof's racially motivated massacre in Charleston, South Carolina, Roberts tweeted his belief that "The American South has always been the most barbaric, backward region in any…

The New York Post's Lou Lumenick likened Gone with the Wind to the Confederate flag in a Wednesday item: "If the Confederate flag is finally going to be consigned to museums as an ugly symbol of racism, what about the beloved film offering the most iconic glimpse of that flag in American culture?" The film critic contended that the classic movie goes to "great lengths to enshrine the myth that…

Since the Charleston shooting, media outlets have used the violent act to agitate for gun control, banish Confederate flags and smear conservatives. The New York Times did this last week and again this morning with Scott Shane’s article, “Homegrown Radicals More Deadly Than Jihadis in U.S.” While Shane primarily avoided using the term “right-wing,” he linked to the New American foundation study…

On Wednesday's New Day, CNN's Chris Cuomo repeatedly tried to get Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson to attack conservatives, as well as his competitors, on the Confederate flag controversy. Cuomo asked, "Isn't it a part of leadership saying to people who don't want to call what happened in this Charleston church a hate crime – calling them out on that, and showing them that that is…

Bill Kristol has supported the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds for 15 years. But when he took to Twitter yesterday to criticize the left's "frenzy of self-righteousness" in the wake of Charleston, he brought down on his head a deluge of ugly criticism. On today's Morning Joe, Jonathan Capehart and John Heilemann eschewed the kind of scatalogical…

Racial issues, not gun issues, understandably have been at the forefront of most media coverage of the Charleston massacre, but Adam Gopnik suggests that in any such mass shooting, the firearm is the salient factor. “Mental health, the enduring structures of racism—these are issues that we have to deal with, too,” wrote Gopnik in a Tuesday column. “But they are not at the heart of the tragedy.…

CNN's Chris Cuomo zeroed in on five state flags that have supposed "strong Confederate references" on Monday's New Day. Cuomo cited unnamed experts on flags and symbols who claim that the state flags of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, and Tennessee – along with that of Mississippi and Georgia (which incorporate two different Confederate flags) have such "references." He later wondered, "Do all of…

In a Tuesday piece for Salon, Stanford comparative-literature professor David Palumbo-Liu alleged that Fox News “surely planned to furnish [accused Charleston mass-murderer Dylann] Roof with an alibi regarding the exact nature of his heinous crime,” and declared that “if Roof is convicted I suggest we regard Fox as an accessory after the fact.” Palumbo-Liu also claimed that Fox News “provides a…

On Monday, the Washington Post's Express tabloid ran a blatantly anti-Catholic ad on its front page. The full-page advertisement from the far-left "Catholics For Choice" group spoofed the famous World War I-era "I Want You" military recruiting poster, and evoked the worst of 19th century Know-Nothingism. Instead of Uncle Sam, a caricature of a Catholic bishop with a miter on his head points at…

In a bizarre move, Angel Soft toilet paper ran an ad this past Sunday wishing moms a “Happy Father’s Day.” The ad featured men and women telling their stories, through tears, of how their moms had to be “both parents” while raising their family by themselves. It’s hard to fault the sweet stories told in the commercial of single moms raising their kids, but surely this ad could’ve been run on…

Group loyalty is a big part of politics on both sides of the fence, but as far as lefty pundit Marcotte is concerned, it’s become so inflated on the right that it often crowds out crucial things like “basic common sense.” In a Friday Talking Points Memo column, Marcotte asserted that “conservatives are going way too far with this knee-jerk tendency to believe ‘their’ people can do no wrong and…

In 1968, ABC News tried to improve on its lowly third-rank status by bringing on some rock-em, sock-em commentary around the two party conventions  from two intellectual heavyweights: William F. Buckley Jr. On the right, and author Gore Vidal on the left. A new documentary – from the left, considering it carries a tag from Independent Lens, a leftist documentary series for PBS – explores the…